2
How the problem with food changed

In 2006, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) issued a report called Livestock’s Long Shadow about animal farming’s effect on the environment.72 Its message was a stark one. Animal farming is causing serious harm to the environment, polluting water supplies, driving deforestation and desertification and causing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 30-40% of the methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. It is not only contributing to climate change but also indirectly to hunger. The FAO did not think that animal feed is taking food directly from poor people’s mouths, but it nevertheless concluded that livestock eat more human edible food than they produce, and this competition for grain can only increase prices.⁷³

The problem seemed particularly acute because meat consumption is on the rise. There is, the report concluded, a global trend towards dietary convergence: ‘similar eating habits, such as fast and convenience food are catching hold almost everywhere’.⁷⁴ This means that meat-eating per head in the developing world has doubled since 1980, while the total meat supply has tripled.⁷⁵ In the view of the FAO, the luxury tastes of a more affluent world population were causing a serious problem which it was urgent to address. The conclusion of the report was as outspoken as it is possible for an official UN report to be:

Given the planet’s finite natural resources, and the additional demands on the environment from a growing and wealthier world population, it is imperative for the livestock sector to move rapidly towards far reaching change.⁷⁶

Since the FAO report came out, their conclusions have been reiterated and amplified in a number of other works. These have generally widened the focus from livestock farming to food production in general. So, in 2008, Greenpeace concluded that agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, including direct and indirect emissions, was somewhere between 17% and 32%;77 the Strategy Unit attributed an 18% share of greenhouse gas emissions to ‘the food chain’;⁷⁸ the Food Climate Research Network concluded that the food system was responsible for 19% of UK greenhouse gas emissions;⁷⁹ while Zero Carbon Britain went with the 18% figure for global agriculture emissions.⁸⁰

These figures put food production relatively high on the list of major contributors to climate change. The FAO argued that livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions was greater than that of transport,⁸¹ a conclusion repeated in much of the coverage of the report, with headlines like ‘Cow emissions more damaging to planet than CO² from cars’⁸² or the pithier ‘Eating meat is worse than driving a truck…for the climate’.⁸³ Other calculations still put transport slightly ahead (or should that be behind?) – George Monbiot, for example, put UK land transport emissions at 22% of the total⁸⁴ – but in either case, food’s greenhouse gas emissions are clearly significant.

If food is a climate villain, some foods are more villainous than others. Despite the shift from livestock production in the FAO report to food production more generally in later works, meat remains a particularly problematic foodstuff for all the reports. The Food Climate Action Network report, for example, cites a study of the Dutch food system which found that meat was responsible for 28% and dairy for 23% of food-related emissions.⁸⁵ These emissions have a variety of sources, but the overall conclusion is that cows are a problem for the climate. Deforestation to free up land for cattle grazing, or to grow cattle feed, contributes to climate change; cattle feed is grown using fertiliser, the production of which emits a potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide; and worst of all, cows fart methane. The 30-40% of methane emissions which can be attributed to the livestock sector largely come from the digestive tracts of ruminants.

Crucially, this identification of the existence of cows as problematic places the principal issue at a particular point in the food chain. The Food Climate Action Network report made this explicit: most emissions, according to this report, come from agriculture, the initial stage in the chain which goes from the field to the supermarket shelf. This accounts for more than transporting, processing, packaging and selling the food put together, and should therefore be seen as by the far the most important aspect of food production.86

From food miles to cows

What this means is that it is the essential characteristics of certain types of food that are problematic, not the way they are treated within the modern food system. Meat and dairy products cause emissions by their very nature, not largely because of their production methods. Recent reports differ on the extent to which these emissions could be reduced, other than by eliminating the offending animals. Greenpeace’s report, for example, took a reasonably favourable view of the possibility of mitigating emissions through changing farming practices, on which the Food Climate Action Network report was less keen.⁸⁷ However, all of these arguments see the problem with meat as arising from the nature of meat whatever production methods are used, rather than, say, from issues arising from globalisation and industrial food production.

This marks a fundamental shift from earlier thinking about food and the environment. Previous arguments about food centred on the environmental cost of industrialised food production and distribution within a global food market.⁸⁸ In this view, there is nothing existentially wrong with types of food; the problem is the introduction of an unsustainable energy source – fossil fuels – into a food system which by its nature is essentially sustainable. So, for example, a 2000 report on trade, agriculture and climate change concluded that the modernisation of food production had tied what should be a renewable source – farmland – to non-renewable oil supplies, and made it a significant contributor to climate change in the process.89 Similarly, in 2001, Sustain commented in their report on food production that the unsustainable nature of modern food supply arose from its reliance on oil: ‘Reliance on an energy source that is consumed more quickly that it can be regenerated is obviously not sustainable. The present system can only exist as long as inexpensive fossil fuels are available’.⁹⁰ The global market has turned food production into an enormously profitable and enormously damaging industry, but in this view, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with food production per se.

Fossil fuels appear at all stages of the industrialised food chain: modern international farming operations, Sustain observed, are ‘often large-scale and based on industrial techniques, requiring high levels of inputs such as feed, pesticides, fertilisers and machinery’.⁹¹ However, in this view, the key is the transport of food, and the packaging and production generated by a global supply chain which transports foods for long distances. Sustain highlighted the growth of the international food trade, which trebled between 1970 and 2000.⁹² Similarly, in the same year, the Green Party described ‘the great food swap’, where, encouraged by the Common Agricultural Policy, European countries exported and imported often remarkably similar amounts of the same foods to and from each other. The report gives examples like the UK poultry trade with the Netherlands, where in 2000 Britain imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat and exported 33,100. Overall British pork and lamb exports showed the same pattern, with 195,000 tonnes of pork and 102,000 of lamb going out, while 240,000 and 125,000 tonnes came back in.93

The problem was not restricted to import and export, as production of, particularly, processed foodstuffs was increasingly globalised, so as to involve transport at many intermediate stages as well as from farm gate and to the shop. Sustain gave the example of a Swedish tomato ketchup: it was made from tomatoes grown in Italy (production which was itself sustainable and relatively free from fossil fuel use and pollution), which were then packaged in bags made in the Netherlands, driven to Sweden to be bottled in bottles made in the UK and Sweden from materials made in Japan, Italy, Belgium, the USA and Denmark, then capped with caps which were made in Denmark and transported to Sweden by road freight.⁹⁴ While the arguments have moved on, this sort of production and distribution has clearly not: Felicity Lawrence, for example, found some later examples of similar practices, like the chives in an M&S vegetable dish which were being flown to Kenya to be tied around vegetable bundles, and then flown back to the UK.⁹⁵

The solution to this was seen as the creation of a localised, as opposed to globalised, food system. Reducing the distance food travelled would not only reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, and reliance on fossil fuels, intrinsic to long distance freight, but would also enable the creation of organic, sustainable farming practices, for which small-scale, diverse farming was key. Sustain’s recommendations for action, for example, covered actions by consumers, farmers and governments, but for all of these focused on reducing food miles.⁹⁶ By emphasising the environmental damage caused not by transporting meat and dairy products but by producing them, the recent works on food and climate change are clearly calling for different priorities. Not only that, but the argument that the most problematic aspect of food production is the existence of cows, not transport or packaging, is being made with an explicit break from the past prioritisation of food miles issues.

As noted above, there has been a tendency for the new importance of food for climate change studies to be expressed in terms of transport. In 2006, for example, an article in Earth Interactions assessed the difference in greenhouse gas emissions attributable to a vegan and a red meat diet as being equivalent to the difference in emissions from a sedan and an SUV,97 while The Independent reported that food had overtaken transport in the greenhouse gas emissions league table, to be ‘more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together’.⁹⁸ In 2012, The Independent was at it again, covering the launch of a new report on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with different foods with the claim that if the entire British population went vegetarian or vegan, this would be the equivalent of taking half the cars off the roads.⁹⁹ This is presumably at least partly an example of the journalistic trick of explaining a new concept in terms of something more familiar. Just as sizes of oil slicks are expressed in terms of the size of Wales, or dinosaurs in doubledecker buses,¹⁰⁰ it may be that transport’s contribution to climate change is so well understood that it can be used as a measure of everything else’s emissions. However, there is also a more deliberate comparison going on, one which serves to distance the new arguments about food from those about food miles.

The Food Climate Action Network are up front about how far their work entails a departure from the food miles agenda, commenting that ‘the more appropriate focus of concern might not be how far our food has travelled but the proportions of different foods on our plate’.¹⁰¹ Even when their report considers the issues of processing and packaging which are so important in reports like Sustain’s, the Food Climate Action Network sees them in terms of the nature of the foods being treated, not as processes with which food production could dispense. Refrigeration, for example, for Sustain is used more extensively in the modern food system because it is needed to keep food fresh while it is transported across the world. For the Food Climate Action Network, the question is still about the essential nature of some foods: ‘what is it about the foods we eat and the way we manage our lives that renders refrigeration necessary?’102 This approach can also be seen in other works on food and climate change in the last few years. A 2008 article in Environmental Science and Technology compared the effects of avoiding food miles or avoiding meat, and concluded that transporting food contributed only 11% of the food chain’s greenhouse gas emissions and that the ‘average US household’ could achieve the same effect as entirely eliminating food miles simply by cutting out one day’s meat consumption.¹⁰³ In this context, the titling of a 2012 report into the effects of a mass shift to a vegetarian or vegan diet as ‘the impacts of realistic dietary choices’ is interesting. The article does not make the comparison between the greenhouse gases produced from food types and food miles; indeed, its comparison between the effects of food and transport is explicitly limited to private cars. What it does, however, is couch all the diets considered in terms of what could be bought solely from supermarkets, and includes the assumption that they will include air-freighted and polytunnel produce. By the end of the article, the ‘realistic’ of the title appears to refer as much to the impossibility of changing the food production system, which was the target of the food miles campaign, as to individual food choices.¹⁰⁴ Thus the break with thinking about food’s contribution to climate change in terms of food miles is clearly also a shift from thinking about it in terms of the food system to an issue of individual lifestyle choices.

Globalisation out of the spotlight

One obvious consequence of this is that different types of food are put in the spotlight. In terms of globalisation and fossil fuel energy use, the most problematic food groups are food like cereals, chocolate and coffee, which require high levels of processing, and therefore take a lot of energy to produce. In 2000, it was estimated that breakfast cereals took 15,675 calories (kcal) to produce one kilogram of finished product, with chocolate taking 18,591kcal and coffee 18,948. Beef does not come out of these calculations particularly well, requiring 35 times more calories to produce than it provides, but overall one kilogram of meat only required 1,206kcal, less than frozen fish, baked goods, frozen fruit and vegetables and dried processed foods.105 In contrast, the argument that meat and dairy products are essentially problematic for the climate puts comparatively little emphasis on processed and highly packaged foods, as well as explicitly minimising the importance of food transportation. Locally-sourced beef, it seems, is a worse choice from a climate point of view than air-freighted strawberries.

More importantly, the different assessments of the most serious problems with food also imply different sorts of actions to solve them. If the issue is how food is traded and distributed, the solutions most obviously lie at the level at which trade policies are developed, i.e. government. It is true that the food miles arguments did give rise to calls for people to change their individual behaviour, by buying locally-sourced, in-season produce, preferably from farmers’ markets rather than from supermarkets. This is all in the Sustain report, but while individual consumers could ‘help increase real choice’ by supporting local food businesses, the longest list of recommendations for action is for governments to ‘take sustainable development seriously’: this list contains sixteen items compared to eight for individuals, three for farmers and four each for retailers and local authorities.¹⁰⁶

It is not simply that governments were seen as best placed to address the problems caused by the food system, but that the food miles issue was part of wider concerns about globalisation. That the problems of global food supply are not inherent but are a function of the market is a central point of the food miles arguments, and an intensely political one. So it is that Sustain cite the increasing importation of fresh vegetables from Kenya, which leapt by 30% between 1979 and 1999, not just in terms of the environmental effects of the transport and packaging, but also in terms of the poverty in Kenya caused by the consequent distortion of Kenyan farming. They point out that during this period, Kenyan vegetable production was centralised in the hands of just three producers, a development which was supported by UK supermarkets, and which had the effect of further impoverishing already poor farmers and driving people off the land. By 1999, consumption of vegetables actually in Kenya had gone down by 39%, because people could no longer afford to consume what they were producing for export. The report concludes: ‘where hunger exists, what is often lacking is not food but access to it – either having the money to buy it or the land to grow it on.’107

The development of this global food market was of course not an isolated one, but part of the globalisation of the world economy over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The food system criticised in reports like Sustain’s was explicitly advanced by international agreements like the Agreement on Agriculture within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), one of the main weapons in the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s drive for full trade liberalisation and globalisation. The Agreement on Agriculture aimed to create and consolidate a global agricultural economy. As Colin Hines put it in his call for localisation, in this system ‘all countries produce specialised agricultural commodities, and supply their food needs by shopping in the global marketplace. Food is grown, not by farmers for local consumers, but by corporations for global markets.’¹⁰⁸ Calls for a shift to local food production can therefore be seen as part of a wider anti-globalisation agenda, whether or not this connection is made explicitly.

This means that discussions of the problems of food in terms of food miles need to be read against the background not only of the wider criticisms of globalisation, but also of the anti-capitalist movement which came onto the streets to protest at the WTO meeting in Seattle for five days from 30^th November 1999.109 As Felicity Lawrence noted in 2004, ‘many of the ills of the current food system are ones foreseen by the anti-globalists and the anti-capitalists’¹¹⁰ and environmental issues were a central concern of the anti-capitalist movement from the start. Jeffrey St Clair remembered in his Seattle diary how the ‘direct action warriors on the front lines’ included people from Earth First, the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and from Rainforest Action Network, while the ‘robust international contingent’ on the streets was made up of ‘French farmers, Korean greens, Canadian wheat growers, Mexican environmentalists, Chinese dissidents, Ecuadorian anti-dam organizers, U’wa tribespeople from the Colombian rainforest and British campaigners against genetically-modified foods’.¹¹¹ The French farmers were led by José Bové, who famously attacked a McDonald’s under construction in Larzac, France in 1999 in protest at the US imposition of heavy import duties on Roquefort cheese. Jeffrey St Clair recounts how in Seattle, Bové handed out rounds of Roquefort to the protestors outside the Seattle McDonald’s, made a speech against GM foods and watched as the crowd then broke the McDonald’s windows and urged diners and staff to join the protests.¹¹²

It is notable from the list of international campaigners that it was not just green issues but issues of food and its effects on the environment which were high on the Seattle agenda. Food miles in fact have a significant place in anti-globalisation analyses. The environmental costs of food transport are not simply one more problem of globalisation but an important indication of how orthodox economics was unable to account for the environmental damage the ‘privatisation, commodification and rationalisation of the globe’ was causing.113 Localisation agendas are not always particularly progressive – calling for a return to local food production can come after all from a backward-looking, romantic sensibility – but in the anti-capitalist movement there is a clear link between localisation of food as an alternative to food miles and an analysis of the entire globalising system as flawed.

In a context in which concern about supermarket transport is part of the issue mobilising hundreds of thousands on the streets of Seattle, Washington DC, Genoa (where 300,000 people besieged delegates to the G8 in the centre of the city for three days) and other cities, the obvious actions for people incensed by the damage being caused by the food system, or inspired by the calls for local food production, became two-fold. They would include changing their own food choices, but would also naturally raise the question of involvement in this wider movement. The arguments about food miles were political arguments, part of a movement fighting for a complete system change.

This political nature is apparent even in the measured prose of the Sustain report. In their discussion of the UK government’s actions on food, they commented that more trade liberalisation would mean more large farms, industrialised production and transportation, the precise opposite of the required transition to sustainable production, and that the government was not helping to introduce sustainability. The passage essentially implies that the government is in hock to agribusiness, suggesting that the long list of actions needed from government would not be achieved without pressure from the anti-capitalist movement.¹¹⁴

Meat and individual choice

In contrast, if the problem with food and climate change arises from the essential nature of meat and dairy products, there is no point railing against the global food system. When it comes down to it, cows will fart methane whatever economic system they are kept in. The target of the recent arguments about food and climate change therefore becomes not the food system but individual meat-eating. It’s notable that cutting meat and dairy consumption is the key ‘high priority’ action listed by the Food Climate Action Network report,115 and is also prominent in the Greenpeace report.¹¹⁶

It may seem obvious that the main recommended solution to a problem caused by meat production would be for individuals to be persuaded to choose to eat less meat, but this isn’t the only way in which this could be addressed. A shift to a low-meat diet by much of the population in the UK would require a significant change in food supply and distribution. Food deserts – poor areas in which decent, fresh food is virtually unavailable – are a reality, and for many people, the cost of fresh, nutritious food can be prohibitive compared to ‘junk’ food. Calls for less meat-eating for the sake of the climate could address these and other such issues, recognising that people don’t choose what to eat in a vacuum, but as part of a food system in which their choices are shaped by forces beyond the individual at the point of purchase. The fact that the food and climate issue is presented largely as an issue of people’s individual choice to eat meat, and not as an issue requiring, for example, campaigns for better access to decent food, is demonstrative of how this argument marks a shift in thinking from the political food-miles campaigns to a more individual-based approach.

The aim, in fact, is sometimes explicitly presented as being action by the few, not the many. In 2004, for example, Compassion in World Farming issued a report calling for cuts in meat and dairy consumption, but without imagining that this would be widely adopted. Instead, those who were enlightened enough to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet would do the work for those who had not already seen the light: ‘One person’s 100 percent reduction can help to “subsidise” six people who haven’t yet reduced their meat consumption at all’.117

This matters particularly because the effect of a shift to a more individual-consumption approach to the problem of food is not necessarily restricted to purely this issue. The popularisation of the food arguments tends to present reducing meat consumption as a potential focus of individual activity on climate change in general. Promoting the ‘Meatless Mondays’ campaign in June 2009, for example, Paul McCartney argued ‘many of us feel helpless in the face of environmental challenges, and it can be hard to know…what we can do to make a meaningful contribution to a cleaner, more sustainable, healthier world. Having one designated meat-free day a week is a meaningful change that everyone can make.’¹¹⁸ The Soil Association repeated this in their call for ‘Positive Action to Prevent a Global Food Crisis’ in 2010: ‘Issues like climate change and peak oil can sometimes make us feel powerless; but food is different…we can all do something to change our relationship with food’.¹¹⁹ This is in effect another strand of argument for why food should be a major focus of efforts to deal with climate change – not only is food production a significant cause of emissions, but it provides an easy way for everyone to get involved. In so doing, however, it imposes a particular approach to climate issues based on individual rather than collective action.

The ‘change that everyone can make’?

One effect of the ‘change that everyone can make’ approach to food and climate change has been the simplification of complex arguments about the climate effects of different sorts of meat production into a simple ‘eat less meat’ message. This is often accompanied by an elision of the significant difference in these terms between a vegetarian and a vegan diet. In July 2010, for example, Annette Pinner, chief executive of the Vegetarian Society, told the New Scientist that ‘the most effective way to reduce the environmental impact of diet, on a personal level, is to become vegetarian or vegan’.120 This is despite the fact that the dairy products included in the vegetarian diet would largely come from cows and therefore share much of the climate contributions of beef. In order to support a vegetarian but not a vegan population, we would have to keep the cows.¹²¹

Cows, we know, are the worst climate criminals because of their methane emissions. Other meat animals are responsible for lower emissions: sheep also fart methane, but are mostly still fed on grass, so sheep farming does not have the issues of deforestation and diversion of human food crops that come with cattle feed. Pigs and chickens don’t emit methane, although there are issues with disposing of the waste from intensive pig farms, and they are also more efficient than cows in terms of feed. Ruminants are not the only food-related source of methane, as rice cultivation is also a significant source, although rarely mentioned in these arguments.¹²² A dietary shift from beef to pork and chicken would reduce greenhouse gas emissions,¹²³ but since cows are also the main source of dairy products, a shift from meat to a vegetarian (as opposed to vegan) diet would not. In 2006, two US academics, Gideon Eshel and Pamela Martin, compared the greenhouse gas implications of different styles of diet, and found that a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet would have higher CO² equivalent emissions per calorie than a diet with the same calorific total which excluded dairy but included poultry or fish.¹²⁴ This understanding is built into the recommendations of the Zero Carbon Britain report, which calls for a 90% reduction in UK beef cattle and 80% reductions each in dairy cattle and sheep, but which allows 100% of the current levels of laying poultry, 50% of table poultry and 80% of pigs. In so doing, however, the report also demonstrates how deeply engrained the idea that meat generally is problematic has become. It is difficult to think of another reason for reductions in chickens for meat, while egg-laying chickens are exempt.¹²⁵

It’s worth noting in light of this that a large part of meat consumption worldwide is actually pork or chicken consumption. Chicken in particular is the growth meat in both the developed and the developing world. Chicken consumption in the UK has increased by 20% in the last two decades, a period in which the absolute consumption of other meats has remained steady despite an increase in population,126 while the largest single share of the 200% increase in US meat consumption between 1950 and 2000 was also attributable to chicken.¹²⁷ In 2002, the UN FAO estimated that 77% of the increase in meat production in developing countries was from chicken and pork.¹²⁸ Even dividing the meat category into red and white meat doesn’t mean that all red meat consumption is the most problematic kind: 32% of the ‘average US’ diet is made up of red meat, but this consists of 61% pork, and only 38% ruminants (2% lamb and 36% beef).¹²⁹

The variance in emissions levels between the different kinds of meat aren’t of course unknown to the various meat-free campaigns, some of which point this out explicitly. The 10:10 campaign, for example, doesn’t go so far as to differentiate between beef and chicken in its recommendation to have one meat-free day a week, but does advise ‘don’t replace with just-as-bad cheese’.¹³⁰ There is plenty of literature arguing that, in trying to persuade people to change their behaviour to deal with climate change, a simple, clear message is best,¹³¹ and presumably this is why popularisations of the climate effects of beef have become messages about all meat, only patchily aware of the issue of cheese. It’s evident that giving up meat for one day a week is supposed to lead at least some participants on to further cuts in meat consumption, and it may well be assumed that once some people have adopted vegetarianism they will then be motivated to adopt a more vegan diet as well. In 2004, for example, Compassion in World Farming recommended that everyone reduce their meat consumption by at least 15%, but move on to further cuts, including reducing their milk consumption by 25%.132 This underlines, however, how far this is from a collective approach, as only the most committed and enlightened would presumably go on to make extensive changes to their diets.

Turning the arguments about meat and climate change into a punchy, persuasive message means that message has a rather distant relationship at times with the actuality of emissions from different types of meat production. This is not the only issue with understanding the problem of food and climate change in terms of individual food choices. The idea that problems caused by meat production could be addressed by individual decisions to eat less of it is based on an assumption that production is led by consumer demand: we decide what we want to buy, and the market provides it. Where the way to achieve reductions in meat consumption is addressed specifically, it tends to be market mechanisms which are invoked: Zero Carbon Britain, for example, comments that carbon-pricing would do the job, as ‘consumers too would be reorienting their food choices in response to unmistakable price signals’.¹³³ It is not said here, but it would of course be working-class people who would be the most vulnerable to these price signals; another reminder of which class of individual choices we are actually talking about.

Supply and demand

Arguments that the market is all-powerful have taken a bit of a hit since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 ushered in the economic crisis. As far as food is concerned, it is not the case that people simply decide how they want to eat and the market rushes to supply it. Production can lead consumption, and the consumer we’re presented with by the neo-liberal model, who makes consumption decisions in the free market based on rational self-interest, does not bear much relation to reality. This issue will be pursued further in the next chapter, but it is worth noting here some inconsistencies in the arguments about food consumption patterns and climate change.

Underlying much of the recent literature on food and climate change is the powerful assumption that the ‘Western’ diet – lots of red meat, dairy, fat, sugar and processed foods – is inherently the most desirable diet in the short term. Even though as usually characterised it is hardly the healthiest way for most people to eat, it seems to be viewed as the one which delivers the most immediate gratification. The assumption is that this type of diet is the one to which everyone in the world would gravitate if they were able to do so. You would think that examples of different diets only exist because poverty or lack of Westernisation have protected people from the most desirable model, or, if we are talking about residents of Western countries or affluent classes in the developing world, because they exercise virtuous self-restraint.

One demonstration of this assumption is the familiar claim that a growing middle class in countries like India and China will drive environmental destruction as they become wealthier. Their increasing wealth will lead them to adopt the ‘Western’ diet; a diet which is so resource-heavy that if everyone were to eat this way, we would need four planets to supply us.134 To be clear, I am not suggesting that consumption of meat generally, or fast food specifically, cannot be shown to be increasing among relatively prosperous Indians and Chinese, or indeed elsewhere in the developing world, although it is worth noting that demand for meat and dairy in India and China overall seems to have increased less rapidly in 2002-08 than it did in 1995-2001.¹³⁵ However, shifts to a more Western diet are usually portrayed as simply a result of that relative prosperity, assuming both that this diet is automatically more desirable than traditional ways of eating and that food production follows the desires of these groups to eat like Westerners. This is not a safe assumption.

Japan, for example, is one country which saw a marked increase in meat consumption in the 1970s and 1980s, and where there is a market for Western fast food companies like McDonald’s. However, this dietary shift was part of US influence on the Japanese economy and society after the Second World War, and was at least partly driven by both Western corporations wishing to expand their markets in Japan and by Japanese reformers who associated Westernness with national pride and success. It was argued by some Japanese, for example, in the late 1960s that the Japanese would never become physically strong enough to compete with meat-eating Westerners if they did not eat meat themselves.136 This was picked up in the marketing of fast food and other ‘Western’ products: when McDonald’s opened a restaurant in the Tokyo Milsukoshi department store in 1971, the slogan promised diners that ‘If you keep eating hamburgers, you will become blond’.¹³⁷

The shift from the Japanese diet clearly cannot be reduced to the inherent desirability of hamburgers, nor to the newfound ability of 1970s Japanese to afford them, stimulating the market to provide. While the details of the spread of US food in Japan is clearly specific to that country, there is a more general connection between the spread of multinational food brands and US imperialist interests. While it is assumed that consumers around the world adopt diets full of junk food because humans are naturally predisposed to eat that way if they can, looked at from the other direction, it is clear that shifts to a more Western-style diet are driven by the corporations who will profit from them and by foreign policy concerns. US foods have been marketed at populations as part of attempts to inculcate pro-US, pro-Western attitudes in countries in which the US had foreign policy interests.¹³⁸ When Thomas Friedman famously asserted in 1999 that ‘No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s’,¹³⁹ despite his claim that this represented merely the effects of growing middle classes across the world, it was clearly an acknowledgment of the role McDonald’s played in US foreign policy. As he remarked later in the same book, ‘in most societies, people cannot distinguish any more between American power, American exports, American cultural assaults, American cultural exports and plain vanilla globalization. They are now all wrapped into one.’140

In the same way, the ‘Western’ diet itself is not the product of the desires of its consumers unmediated by food producers, corporations or any other interests. It is clear, in fact, that many of the salient features of this diet are creations of corporate interests rather than people’s greed or self-indulgence. The relatively high beef consumption in the ‘typical US diet’, for example, is not an accidental development, but marks a shift from pork-eating encouraged by beef and grain companies. Beef producers were attracted to the mid-West plains in the US when they were left free for cattle by the extinction of the buffalo. When the grassland contracted at the end of the nineteenth century, the cattle were fed largely on grain, and grain and beef production became so integrated that they were often carried out by the same companies. Cattle feed remained such a profitable destination for grain production that from the late 1950s there was a concerted effort to increase beef consumption, often through supermarkets which were themselves owned by beef production companies. Subsequently, beef producers, specifically hamburger producers, were able to use beef fed on Latin American grasslands to undercut grain-fed beef and beef’s main competitor, pork. Beef-eating was so profitable that it was in companies’ interests to ensure that US consumption remained high. Consumers may have felt that they were making a free choice to eat hamburgers, but there was in fact a concerted effort to encourage them to do so.¹⁴¹

The use of Western food corporations to further Western interests in other parts of the world makes it evident that governments understand how populations’ diets develop as part of a complex system, of which individuals’ rational and uninfluenced decisions on what they want to eat are only a small part. However, when discussing food, the UK government at least takes the view that it is consumer decisions which drive everything else about food production. In 2008, for example, the Strategy Unit reported in Food Matters on the effect of the food chain on greenhouse gas emissions and health issues around food. Their belief in the centrality of consumer behaviour in all these issues was made clear from the first page, as the authors complained that consumers ‘expect retailers, manufacturers or the Government to act on their behalf and to “edit” problems out of the system rather than ask them to choose’.142 This was a swipe at food-miles-type criticisms of the food system as a global system, and the Strategy Unit was very clear that this approach is misguided. There is no alternative to the free market for food – the UK government’s response to the food crises of 2007-08 was to call for more free trade internationally in agricultural products and food – so the government cannot control or change the system. The only role for government, apparently, is to ‘support consumers in the choices they make’,¹⁴³ although they did accept a role in unspecified action to ‘avoid market failures’.¹⁴⁴

This neatly encapsulates both the view that food’s contribution to climate change is caused by individuals’ choices to eat some types of food rather than others, and the claim that those choices drive a free market in global food production into which governments cannot intervene. The report went on to say explicitly that ‘the environmental impacts of the food system are all, ultimately, a consequence of consumption decisions’ – food production is created by consumption decisions, which are therefore ultimately responsible for the effects of the production.¹⁴⁵ The vision of the ideal future food society therefore hinges on consumers being more informed and making ‘better’ consumption decisions, as set out in this description of this neo-liberal utopia:

It will be a system with high levels of trust, challenged and supported by civil society but with the means and the will to work through problems through informed debate rather than conflict and confusion.146

Clearly, there will be no need for antagonistic, confusion-creating campaigns about food miles.

The thinking set out in the Strategy Unit report is typical of government approaches to climate change in general. Other climate-change-related campaigns, like Act On CO², have taken a similar view that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to individual behaviour. The Act On CO² website focused on small changes to individual lifestyles; their TV ad campaign in late 2009 to early 2010, for example, was exhorting us to ‘drive 5 miles less a week’, backed up on their website by ‘helpful’ tips on how to achieve this, like ‘plan your journey in advance’ and car sharing.¹⁴⁷ This was justified by the statement that ‘around 40% of CO² emissions in the UK are caused by things we do as individuals’. It can be supposed, however, that this approach reflects not so much an assessment of the statistics on greenhouse gas emissions, but a governmental desire to push responsibility for action on climate change on to individuals and away from itself.

In promoting individual actions to the exclusion of all others, the government was not only ignoring how social systems determine those supposedly free consumer choices, but espousing a neo-liberal view of the state as nothing more than the facilitator of the market. This is clearly a very different approach from that taken by the food-miles-type arguments, which is unsurprising considering the extent to which the latter were part of the general anti-globalisation arguments of the anti-capitalist movement. However, the arguments that the problem of food and climate change arises from the production of specific types of food, rather than from the global food market, support the government’s conclusion that it’s all down to consumers. This is a significant shift in the political meaning of the food and climate change issue. With the food miles arguments, modern food production’s contribution to climate change was another reason for fighting the system. Now, the conclusions of reports like the Food Climate Action Network’s are remarkably similar to those produced by government, as they seem united in an approach which places consumer decisions in the free market at the centre of food and climate change issues.

This is not only apparent in the shift from a view of the problem as systemic to a matter of individual consumption decisions. As noted above, the change in the focus of the food arguments has also entailed a shift in the types of food seen as particularly problematic, from highly processed foods like chocolate and coffee to meat and dairy products. This is significant as it enables the refutation of not only the idea that food miles are harmful, but also that modern food-processing could be harmful, and that a switch to less processed, less ready-made food would be preferable. Alongside the food miles arguments is therefore an assumption that small scale, organic production of fresh food for people to prepare themselves at home is better than large-scale production for supermarket ready meals. Supermarkets in these earlier food arguments appear as the source of many of the food miles: up to 40% of lorries travelling in the UK in 2004 were involved in food production and distribution, and many of them would have been from supermarkets, many of which had made substantial increases to their fleets in the previous few years.148 This was however not their only contribution to food and environmental problems, as they were also seen as preventing the development of organic farming and squashing niches in which farmers’ markets and local shops could survive or develop.¹⁴⁹ However, if the processed and packaged food especially associated with supermarkets is no longer seen as the source of the problems, the supermarkets themselves can go from part of the problem for food and climate change, to part of the solution.

This is certainly the view presented in the Strategy Unit report, which argues, predictably, that supermarkets exist solely because of consumer demand: ‘expansion of multiple grocery chains is a long term phenomenon, driven by consumer demand for convenience, choice and a one-stop shopping experience.’150 The report sees government improving consumer choices through supermarkets, not in questioning corporations’ role in the environmental damage caused by the food system, and makes it explicit that processing food is no longer seem as the slightest bit problematic. In the future, we are told, ‘consumers will be able to access healthy, low-impact food that fits their lifestyles, whether cooking from basic ingredients or buying a prepared meal.’¹⁵¹ This is not restricted to governmental reports: Zero Carbon Britain, for example, see a role for food-processing and developments in food technology to satisfy consumers’ desire for beef and dairy-like foods without the need for the cows.¹⁵² Locating the problems caused by food production in the existential nature of meat and dairy products puts all food suppliers and distribution on the same level. Whereas in the food miles arguments, environmental concerns seemed a clear reason to oppose supermarkets and support small shops and farmers’ markets, the greenhouse gas emissions caused by producing a piece of beef will be the same wherever it is sold. In this way again, the shift from processed foods to meat has an effect on the political nature of the arguments about food and climate change. It could be argued that it is not deliberate, but it is nevertheless profound.

The argument that the problem with food and climate change is people eating meat represents a fundamental shift in thinking about food issues, and places individual consumer decisions at the centre of thinking about climate change. It is this that enables the identities of problematic consumers to assume the importance that they have, and for fat people – and therefore by elision working-class people – to become responsible for destroying the planet. It wasn’t the working classes’ problem when it was the structure of the food system causing greenhouse gas emissions, but now it is their decision to eat hamburgers.

One obvious objection at this point is the connection between meat-eating and obesity. Being fat is clearly identified with being working-class, with all the accompanying stigma about lazy scroungers, drains on the public purse and so on that the identification entails in arguments about the fair distribution of resources. The line from obesity to meat-eating, on the other hand, is not an obvious one, since meat, particularly red meat, is not universally acknowledged as the major dietary faux pas of the overweight. Despite this, however, it is clear that the new focus on meat-eating as a problem for the climate is talking about fat people and working-class consumption.

The equation of meat and fat

While some authors do decry the consumption of food without nutritional benefits, like alcohol and sweets, when talking about the effect food consumption has on the environment, as we have seen, the main thrust of the case for the food system’s contribution to climate change and world hunger is that certain foods, in particular meat and dairy products, have intrinsic properties which mean that they are unsustainable. This seems to be at variance with the idea of an obesegenic environment which encourages people, particularly working-class people, to eat junk food, since the production and consumption of processed food was one of the issues highlighted by the food-miles-type arguments, from which we are supposed to have moved away. While steak may be seen as diet food only in the context of Atkins, would-be dieters are more likely to be advised to avoid fizzy drinks and crisps than they are simply to eschew meat and dairy. The fit between obesity and meat-eating is not a particularly natural one, underlined by Compassion in World Farming’s admission in their recommendation for less meat-eating that ‘it is impossible to be specific about the contribution of animal products to levels of obesity’.153

And yet, that there is a connection is an assumption underlying the bulk of contemporary discussion about the effect of meat production on the climate. Partly this is because arguments about the undesirability of meat from a climate point of view can pick up on views that eating a lot of it isn’t optimal for your health either, and present them as a side-benefit which should encourage people to do the right thing by their planet and choose the vegetarian option. Thus it is that the arguments that individuals should reduce their meat consumption for the sake of the planet are often buttressed with claims about health, although these don’t necessarily involve obesity. Pimental et al, for example, argue that cutting junk food intake and eating less meat would improve Americans’ health as well as reducing fuel consumption,¹⁵⁴ while Compassion in World Farming base their recommendations for cutting meat-eating on dietary recommendations from the British Heart Foundation¹⁵⁵ and the Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health,¹⁵⁶ rather than thinking about obesity specifically.

These sorts of arguments create a connection between meat-eating and obesity without having to convince anyone that there is a causal relationship. In doing so by referring to respectable concerns about the health effects of eating a lot of meat they are the evidence-based tip of an iceberg of assumptions that meat-consumption, overconsumption and obesity are all effectively the same thing. It is noteworthy how, when diets are discussed from an environmental standpoint, meat-eating is presented as the same as over-eating. Meat-eating, it seems, causes obesity not because it is particularly fattening but because it is by its very nature unrestrained behaviour, and we all know that fat results from a lack of self-restraint.

The Meatless Mondays campaign provides a good illustration of how meat-eating and obesity are merged in thinking about overconsumption. As discussed above, the campaign was launched in June 2009 as a way of tackling the greenhouse gas emissions associated with meat,157 but it clearly identified meat eating per se with overconsumption, and a vegetarian day with more restrained behaviour. Speaking on Channel 4 News on 15^th June 2009 about the campaign, Paul McCartney explained the choice of Monday as the day for people to eschew meat not as one of alliteration but explicitly in terms of overconsumption: ‘The idea is for people to give up meat for one day a week – Monday – when they’ve overdone it over the weekend, possibly’. The campaign’s website continued with the presentation of the campaign as a way of devoting a day to ‘healthy’ behaviour, placing this even before climate change considerations: ‘Our goal is to help reduce meat consumption by 15 percent in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet’.¹⁵⁸

This mission statement did not make an explicit connection between meat-eating and obesity, but the ‘About’ page went on to list obesity among the various ‘chronic preventable conditions’ the risk of which could be reduced by going meatless for one day a week. The effect of the rest of the website was to make obesity a central, if not the central, issue for the campaign, with news feeds about dieting and obesity issues and promotion of the delights of different vegetables in terms which recall dieting advice. One recommendation of radishes, for example, highlighted not their taste, or use in different dishes, but that ‘[their] carbohydrate content fills you up fast while keeping you slim’.¹⁵⁹ The relevance of much of the site content to the central issue becomes clear only if obesity and meat-eating are seen as synonymous. What is under discussion is not really the choice of some food groups over others but the practice and recommendation of virtuous restraint: eating less than or differently from what you might wish because that is healthy and therefore morally desirable. In consumption terms, this is not entirely dissimilar to the restraint which Marx pointed out that workers were expected to practice in order to reproduce their labour at minimal cost to the capitalist, and which, as we’ll see in chapter 4, was also identified by Malthus as the only thing standing between the poor and starvation.

The obvious rejoinder here is that creating a connection between obesity and unsustainable foods, even if it doesn’t entirely stand up, is a strategy to improve public engagement. It is often argued, after all, that people have difficulty connecting climate change issues with the realities of their day-to-day lives, and that an issue which is simultaneously serious and distant is a public turn-off. Thus, the conflation of climate change and obesity in campaigns like Meatless Mondays is likely to be at least partly about providing additional motivation, in the same way that arguments about motivating cuts in consumer consumption discuss the advantages to the individual consumer, in terms of shorter working hours, improved quality of life etc. The argument that adopting a meat-free diet would be beneficial, not only to the planet but also to individual health, is clearly supposed to be a key element in persuading people to change their diets. In addition to the familiar idea that people are self-interested and need answers to the ‘how will this benefit me?’ question before they will do anything, it may also be assumed that modern Western consumers are well accustomed to messages telling them to abandon foods they like for the sake of their health, so dietary change for the sake of the climate message fits into a discourse which is already familiar.

It therefore becomes a kind of nudge theory, where small benefits to the individual are used as a way of persuading them to adopt behaviours that the government wants to see. It is possible that it may be effective with some people, although whether casting meat-eating in particular and Western diets generally as ‘naughty but nice’ is really a sensible way to approach issues of food and climate change is rather more dubious. The wider point however is that the equation of meat-eating with obesity closes the final link in the chain of reasoning that says that, while we used to think that the structure of the food system, the globalisation of food markets, the long supply chains for processed food and so on were responsible for food’s malign effects on the climate, now we know that the real criminals are working-class people in the West who are choosing to eat too much and eat the wrong things.

If being responsible for climate change isn’t enough, it doesn’t stop there. The charge that working-class people’s food choices are causing undue quantities of greenhouse gas emissions is in a sense a side issue to the greater charge: that they are simply taking much more than their share of the world’s resources and that, if the world’s population is to be fed, they will have to be restrained. That Western overconsumption is the cause of problems for the rest of the world is not a new idea, but the way in which it too became all about the working class is a relatively recent innovation, which needs to be explored.