January is the season for strident mainstream and social media debates contrasting all the supposed ills of animal food production with the health, environmental and animal welfare virtues of exclusively plant-based diets. The Veganuary campaign, which encourages people to eat no animal products for the 31 days of January each year, claims 1 million participants since its 2014 start, and suggests 500,000m have signed up to participate this year – 100,000 more than in 2020.
Catherine Lascurettes, Director, Cúl Dara Consultancy +353(86)269-1197.Subscribe
Dietary veganism is a minority pursuit. Between 2% and 3.5% of the UK population self report as vegan according respectively to the AHDB/YouGov consumer Tracker – May 2018 and the Bord Bia Dietary Lifestyle Report – November 2018, and 4.1% in Ireland according to the latter. It is hard to say whether that number has increased in the last 2 years, as this lifestyle is difficult to sustain long term.
A smaller proportion would be more hard-line lifestyle or ethical vegans, who also refuse to wear or use leather, silk, wool, bees’ wax, and even false eyelashes (some made of mink fur).
To better understand the philosophy, check out the British Vegan Society, founded in 1944.
Veganism is hard to sustain without a solid understanding of nutrition, supplementation and food preparation ability; it can be expensive to maintain, and not necessarily healthy if reliant on shop-bought, highly processed products – many of which are high in fat, sugar and/or salt.
However, it fits within broader consumer trends for healthier, environmentally conscious lifestyle choices. The spectrum of plant-based diets is well-illustrated in the infographic below. Beyond hardcore vegans, there are vegetarians and semi-vegetarians who shun red meat, but eat fish (pescatarians), poultry (pollotarians) or eggs (ovotarians).
Beyond those again, there are concerned omnivorous consumers who try to rebalance their diets, for health and/or environmental reasons. Those are “flexitarians” whose diets are less dogmatic. More and more of the middle of the road consumers are taking an interest in this latter approach.
Source: (Bord Bia Dietary Lifestyle Report – November 2018)
More consumers will dip in and out than rigidly commit to a challenging full vegan lifestyle. Food processors are well clued into this trend, and all have come forward with new vegan offerings. According to the UK’s Grocer’s Magazine, every fourth food product launched in 2019 was in the vegan category. Starbucks, Subway, Wagamama and many more high street chains offer vegan menus.
In the retail trade, vegan food offerings are now promoted as part of the seasonal post-Christmas health kick of January. Aldi, Lidl, and Tesco all promote their vegan food offerings, with Tesco UK even encouraging customers to sign up for the Veganuary campaign.
The real contribution of animal agriculture to climate change
As well as the human health aspect of the debate on plant versus animal-based foods, there are also many simplistic statements on the supposed damaging impact on the planet of animal agriculture.
Two years ago, An Taisce promoted their new Green School programme, encouraging secondary school kids to pledge to eat less meat and dairy to mitigate climate change.
RTE1 Television’ series What Planet Are You On, broadcast in 2020, also firmly encouraged Irish families to reduce their meat and dairy consumption.
Quoted GHG emission statistics don’t always compare apples with apples. In the “cars versus cattle” debate, you will hear that 14 to 18% of global GHG are attributable to livestock farming, while transport accounts for 14%. What we know from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculations, is that using direct emissions only, yes, transport accounts for 14%, but using the same methodology, livestock emits 5%. If using the full lifecycle emissions, then, yes, livestock emits over 14%, but there is no full, directly comparable lifecycle assessment of transport emissions available. A useful explainer on this can be found here.
There are also differences between long-lived GHG, like carbon dioxide emitted by energy generation, industry and transport, and shorter-lived ones, like methane emitted by cattle. They are both damaging greenhouse gases, but the first survives for hundreds of years in the atmosphere, while the other dissipates in 10 to 12 years.
The prevalent “cattle bad for the environment” narrative also lacks the nuances relating to production systems. Beef produced in countries where land is deforested to graze or grow resource hungry fodder crops has a far greater carbon footprint than beef produced in permanent pastureland. It is a fact that in some areas where vegetable or cereal crops cannot be grown, livestock is the most environmentally appropriate way to transform the inedible (for humans) pasture into valuable, and necessary food sources for humanity.
The real message for Irish animal agriculture?
If you get away from the extremes of veganism, if you are honest about the real relative impact on climate of livestock agriculture, and if you realise that not all production systems are environmentally equal, you come back to more soundly based dietary/planetary health advice.
Summarised, it says something like “eat more fruit and vegetables and less, but better produced, animal food products”.
There is a real opportunity in this for Irish livestock agriculture to promote its milk and meat output as better, sustainably produced food which more global consumers will choose over meat or milk produced less sustainably, or with lower animal welfare standards.
Grass-fed standards and wholehearted embracing of more sustainable farming practices are things we can promote and trade on to position our produce at the top of consumers’ priority shopping list. Farmers are already engaging with changes in farming practices and have proven their willingness to do more through schemes like the IFA Smart Farming initiative, ASSAP, Group Water Schemes environmental programmes, EIPs such as the Bride Project and many more. They need to be encouraged, supported and recognised for doing so.
