David Cameron needs to address the meat issue

The Camden Council all-party Sustainability Task Force recommended reducing the amount of meat on menus in canteens, schools and care homes as part of our 2008 Food Report. We did not suggest that staff should go vegetarian as The Guardian claimed on Saturday. Our view was and is that we all need to eat less meat for environmental and health reasons and that when we do eat meat it should be better quality meat.

The proposal was blocked by the Camden Conservative group on the grounds that informed choice was a better policy than restricted choice.

Since then the NHS has announced that it is reducing the amount of meat on hospital menus for environmental and health reasons. The first report of the UK’s new Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on bringing down carbon emissions, said we needed to eat less carbon-intensive meat like beef. The Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was quoted as saying: “meat production accounts for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse emissions so among options for mitigating climate change changing diets is something one should consider.” And the Belgian city of Ghent has gone largely meat-free on Thursdays.

In 2008 David Cameron gave a thoughtful speech to the National Farmers’ Union on farming and food security. He touched on the issue of meat, pointing out that rising incomes in China and India meant increasingly unsustainable demand for livestock feed, but he failed to take the argument to its logical conclusion. At an individual level eating meat is probably the second biggest impact we can have on climate change after flying.

David Cameron made the right decision on Heathrow’s third runway – he understood that it would be an environmental disaster. Now the man who is increasingly likely to be the UK’s next Prime Minister needs to grasp the thorny nettle of meat consumption as he has done airport expansion.