What's the Tory beef? We need to eat less meat.

When the all-party Camden Council Sustainability Task Force recommended a “less meat, better meat” policy last year it was kebabed by the Tories. Their Executive Member for Health, Cllr Martin Davies reaffirmed in the Ham&High recently that the Tories remain unwilling to take action on the issue of meat. I struggle to understand what their beef is since a wide range of experts agree that cutting down on meat is one of the best ways we can help both the planet and our health.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated the carbon emissions associated with the livestock industry to be 18% of global emissions. That’s partly because cows burp methane, but also because of the fossil fuels that are used to grow grain to feed to cattle, to make feed cake for cattle to eat, to pump water for cattle to drink, to refrigerate meat, to transport refrigerated meat and, most crazy of all, to sell meat in supermarkets in open fridges and freezers.
Then there are the health implications of what’s come to be known as the Western Diet ie large amounts of meat and dairy. This is a key factor in the obesity epidemic, especially when the meat is fried. That’s partly why, in a 1990 report, the World Health Organisation recommended a change in agricultural practices away from meat and dairy and towards plant foods. And the largest ever epidemiological study of older women - the Harvard Nurses Study - concluded that women drinking two glasses of whole milk a day had 67% more risk of heart disease than those drinking no whole milk.

For most of its existence the human race has lived primarily on vegetables, fruit, seeds, nuts, grains and pulses, which provide all the protein, vitamins and nutrients we need. It’s only in the last 50 years that we’ve massively increased our consumption of meat and dairy. What’s more we now eat lots of poor quality industrial meat, containing antibiotics, growth promoters and other chemicals. Too much low grade fried meat is one of the reasons why, on present trends, half of all children in the UK will be clinically obese by 2020. So we not only need to eat less meat for environmental and health reasons, but when we do eat it we need to eat better quality meat.

The NHS recently announced that it was 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, says we need to eat less carbon-intensive meat like beef. And the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has been 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.”

“Less meat, better meat” seems a pretty sensible policy to me. So why are the Tories blocking it?