Will branch vegetarian save the planet? Life and character

Aerial perspective of a clearcut rainforest that will turn an oil palm plantation, Sabah, Malaysia. Photograph: Frans Lanting/Corbis

"If one cares about the environment, one contingency caring about eating animals ... Someone who continually cooking factory-farmed products cannot call himself an environmentalist but divorcing that word from the meaning."Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

The numbers see flattering unarguable. So majority so that - as a senitive meat-eating, trying-hard immature - I have to ask if Safran Foer is being as well soft: can any meat-eater at all call themselves an environmentalist?Livestock cultivation produces some-more hothouse gas emissions than each train, truck, car and aeroplane put together. The resources used up by one normal omnivore in office of animal protein would uphold as majority as 10 vegetarians (there"s lots of evidence about this stat - a little would put the comparative measure higher). So, shift people"s diets and the universe can await some-more people – in fact, it will utterly simply understanding with the 9.2 billion at that race is right away foresee to climb in about 40 years" time, even with the hazard to cultivation that meridian shift poses.

If the omnivores you modify are the common guzzlers of poor industrial beef that stock the abounding world, all the better. Because prolongation of their protein is quite perfectionist on hoary fuels – for fertiliser, processing, ride and so on.

So, it"s improved for the universe if you"re a vegetarian, right? You don"t have to be a vegan fundamentalist (before the meridian shift deniers begin venting) to hold this view: Lord Stern, former arch economist at the World Bank and a flattering mainstream figure who right away advises the British supervision on meridian change, told the Times in October: "Meat is a greedy make make use of of of H2O and creates a lot of hothouse gases. It puts huge vigour on the world"s resources. A vegetarian diet is better." And what is Stern diet? "Not despotic vegetarian," apparently.

Therein are the makings of a counterclaim for beef eating. Clearly vegetarians who eat soya, chickpeas, lentils, rice and alternative alien dishes are not as immature as a Fife dieter eating locally grown turnips, kale and oats. Ask a preachy vegetarian to review their food sourcing and they competence not come out majority cleanser than what Safran Foer calls a "selective omnivore".

It is argued that the normal abounding universe vegetarian competence not devour majority less of the planet"s resources than the normal assuage omnivore: a inform last week for the Worldwide Fund for Nature (download pdf) on the stroke of food prolongation forked out that rarely processed vegetarian beef substitutes or dishes done of alien soya (as in tofu) competence essentially make make use of of some-more cultivatable land and resources than their beef or dairy equivalents. Deforestation in the building universe to grow poor soya for human and animal feed is a vital issue in meridian change.

Fish-eating - that Safran Foer settled in Tuesday"s Guardian is as, if not more, vicious than beef eating - competence not be a majority greener choice either. Already 50% of the fish and shellfish eaten globally is constructed by aquaculture, majority of it complete and ecologically mostly dodgy - for example in the pleasant prawn industry. Farming carnivores identical to salmon is sincerely catastrophic ecologically, and involves a identical rubbish of food resources to beef - it takes 3-5kg of alternative fish to furnish 1kg of salmon.

But as a committed carnivore I have to admit that if I wish my grandchildren ever to suffer a undiluted entrecôte beef I contingency residence my day to day now: all this dispassionate animal protein-munching cannot go on. Meat in the grown universe needs to be seen as some-more of a oppulance and less of a staple.

Food is obliged for 30% of the UK"s hothouse gas emissions (according to the new WWF report) and a large suit of that is from stock farming. The normal Briton cooking 50g of animal protein a day: a duck breast or a lamb chop. That"s majority less than countries identical to the United States, but it is still 25-50% some-more than the normal chairman needs for full of health nutrition. The main reason that universe food prolongation contingency climb by 50% in the subsequent 50 years (the UN FAO"s projection) is not the enlarge in population, but the enlarge in beef eating as poorer countries develop.

Which is because I am perplexing to welcome the "drop beef once a week" notion. One day off the red stuff? Not so good a hardship, really. And if you eat internal meat, sustainably produced, rather than Brazilian rainforest fed burgers, that will help. Also, I don"t wish to see stock tillage vanish - it made the panorama we know.

Or you could simply have fewer young kids - the majority planet-unfriendly thing you can presumably do is furnish some-more animal-gobbling, methane-emitting, hoary fuel squanderers. The usually alternative carnivore choice is to eat the dog and afterwards the goldfish. After that, it"s roadkill only.