EAT Lancet is a start, and now we need to make it fit the real world.
Controversy surrounded the report but is it a good starting point?
Choosing what to eat is complicated.
Take the lunchtime decision: shall I have cheese or peanut butter on my toast? Cheese has a hefty environmental impact with all that chilling, big machinery and land to grow feed for the cows. Peanut butter comes from plants, requires less energy and land to produce, and it’s nutritious. An easy choice, surely? Yet I often go for the cheese because it’s familiar, local and traditional, I’ve met some dairy farmers and I want to support the local food system.
It’s a small thing, but when when we put together everybody’s food decisions across the world, a pattern emerges. Nitrogen pollution. Dying bees. Heart disease. Diabetes. Vanishing rainforests. Wouldn’t it be great to have a global plan for eating differently, so that we could turn this around, meal by meal?
That plan appeared earlier this year, when Norwegian think tank EAT and British medical journal The Lancet produced a joint document setting out their ideas for a new global diet. Written by 37 scientists from around the world and led by Harvard University with funding from the Wellcome Institute, it has some clear messages. One was that we must drastically cut our meat consumption — especially red meat — and start eating more plant foods. Livestock farming makes a disproportionate contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, causing climate change, and animal products, especially saturated fats, are bad for our health. So it’s obvious, isn’t it?
Many people think so (see this handy summary of responses from the FRCN). Progressive food groups such as Sustain and the Food Ethics Council gave it the thumbs up, on the whole. Others such as the UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board and the NFU were more critical, sticking up for red meat and pointing out that growing plant proteins and oils isn’t perfect either. There has been a lot of useful discussion about the ins and outs of poultry and red meat, and the need for regional variations.
What was also interesting was that a great many people really HATED the report. Abandoning all attempts at rational debate, they raged about it, especially on Twitter. It was ‘the most corrupt and disgusting attempt to control agriculture there has ever been’. And ‘the billionaire elitists can #EATLancet themselves. I’ll stick to eating real food,’ not to mention a dig at the ‘global elites who jet around the world telling us simpletons how we need to live and what we need to eat!!’
What was going on here? People didn’t like the dethroning of meat, of course, and they didn’t like clever, important people telling the masses what to do. We can of course dismiss this as populism. But maybe such strength of feeling deserves a closer look, not just so we can nderstand why meat-eating is so entrenched, but also because it is part of a bigger question. How can the human race learn to act together on global challenges, whether it’s climate change, bioengineering or the rise of artificial intelligence?
Global action is something new for humanity, and it requires a new way of looking at the world. It means looking beyond our usual concerns for our families and our nations, and feeling some kinship with people who are different from us. And not just people but also the the animals, plants and microbes with whom we share the planet. We need to recognize our part in an interconnected world, and that means a change in the values that guide our lives. We must come to see that our flourishing is intertwined with that of the greater whole.
The Common Cause Foundation describes this as a shift from values of self-enhancement to self-transcendence, or universalism, and it is working to place ‘values that prioritise community, environment and equality’ at the heart of public life. This is vital work, given a political climate which is much more about money, competitiveness and achievement. It means seeing food less as a commodity and more as something that connects people with each other and the natural world.
However, as the Common Cause work acknowledges, humans cannot exist in a continuous state of planetary consciousness. We also have bodies to feed, families to support and communities to belong to. We are members of nations too, and that gives us responsibilities, as we find out when elections and referendums come round. All of these engage different values in us, ones to do with survival, belonging and identity.
According to The World Values Survey, which tracks human values over time, whole countries can be classified according to the values which predominate in them. On their values map they identify an axis along which we move from concerns about survival to self-expression, by which they mean openness, trust, tolerance and participation — the basis for a global world view.
Distribution of values in different countries in 2010–2014, from the World Values Survey (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp)
While Protestant Europe and the English-speaking world score high for self-expression and so global awareness, large swathes of the world’s population including Russia, eastern Europe, Africa and the Islamic world are all more focused on their own survival. There is of course variation within countries, not just between them. These differences in values may show up as arguments national interests versus globalism — an aspect of the Brexit debate, incidentally — or as disagreements about food and farming.
While EAT-Lancet might appeal to such paragons of global altruism as Sweden and Canada, and liberal elites within other countries, the research suggests that a broad mass of the world’s population is too deeply locked into local concerns to see much beyond them. That doesn’t make them selfish or ignorant, except perhaps by narrow definition; it is just how things are. We would be the same, if we lived there.
Any genuine global plan for food must take account of this. There is no point being right, if you alienate people and don’t take them with you. To be fair, EAT Lancet has stressed the need for its diet to be adjusted to local conditions, and recognizes that some populations — cattle herders in sub-Saharan Africa for instance — rely on meat as a nutrient-dense food to make up for a diet that is poor in other respects. But it still means the end of bacon and eggs for most of us.
How then can we have a global food plan that is truly universal, instead of one which looks like a takeover bid by a left-wing elite? Here are a few thoughts.
- We have to start somewhere, and EAT Lancet just did. Well done.
- Top down has to be matched with bottom up, unless we want a global dictatorship.
- EAT Lancet explicitly provides for local variations based on what grows best and what people are used to eating, so let’s get creative with that.
- Food engages hearts and minds, not just bodies. Engage people in the right way, based on enjoying their food, and that’s a big force for change.
- Nobody really wants to see the Amazon turned into a cattle ranch, or to die of heart disease. We can work this out.
Back to my lunch dilemma. Eating a lot of locally produced cheese isn’t perfect. Nothing in food is perfect. But it honours several important human principles, to do with loyalty, respect and a sense of belonging, which make us who we are. We need to bring our full selves to the challenge of global food.
Some humility from those of us who pronounce on food systems wouldn’t come amiss, therefore. We may think we know the direction of travel, but we don’t know the route. Maybe the EAT Lancet refuseniks have a point, however badly put. I have a hunch that building human togetherness and happiness is the real challenge, and solving global problems flows from that. And what better way to do that than through food?
