A COP28 proposal to eat less meat comes amid a right-wing backlash against alternatives.
from thefreeonline on 8th Dec 2023 main text by Max Graham at Grist (some inserts in italics added, with thanks)
Fossil fuels usually suck up everyone’s attention at the annual United Nations’ climate summit. But at this year’s gathering in Dubai, COP28, another topic is generating headlines: food.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Friday saying that the world must transform its food systems, the source of one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, “to respond to the imperatives of climate change.”
And on December 10, the U.N. is expected to call on countries that consume a lot of meat to eat less of it.
The problem is that meat consumption is as politically polarizing in the rich West as ever. Fox Business recently ran a headline saying world leaders planned to “declare a war on meat” at COP28.
The problem is how many powerful men love to dominate, mistreat, torture, kill and eat their fellow animals
However in the world’s most populous country, in India, 81% limit meat in diet and 39% say they are vegetarian. And in most other developing countries eating meat is likely once a week and at festivals.
When I was a child eating meat was a special treat. Now you’re considered weird if you don’t eat it every day. Customs change, and they could change again.
Abattoir Truth: Animals Boiled Alive, Abused & Slaughtered … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBy30LDTUlo
For example it’s now possible to create cheap, identical animal feed by fermenting hydrogen with no land, animal or agriculture necessary, just a modest amount of water and renewable electricity. Expanding that technology could free up huge areas of land, save the collapsing biosphere, and still allow the ‘barbarian carnivores’ to eat their steaks.
In the US meat eating is nowadays tied into the national psyche of privilege and over wild over consumption, and US world media domination still assumes all must follow.
The Meat Culture War comes after years of prodding from scientists and environmental advocates who say the only path to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is to do things like limit how much meat people eat in the U.S. and its satellite countries (Livestock alone are responsible for about 15 percent of global climate pollution.)
“They don’t want solutions, they want a sick, depressed populace,” television chef Andrew Gruel said on the social media platform X. But of course he would also have a vested interest.
The political right is also taking aim at climate-friendly alternatives to meat, like cultivated chicken and beef, made from cells grown in labs.
State legislators in Florida recently proposed a bill that would make selling cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor.
In Europe the issue has been just as partisan. Italy’s right-wing government just banned the production and sale of cultivated meat, ostensibly to protect the country’s culinary heritage.
Continue reading “What would it take to end the meat Vculture wars? Just Go Vegan?”
The Free 