Why We Should Eat Less Meat (Part 1 of 4)

There is no way the world will avoid climate catastrophe unless something changes in the way we eat.

Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur on Unsplash

I am, like all of you, impatient to live in a “net zero” world, where we no longer pollute the atmosphere and destroy biodiversity with every passing day. I want to get there much faster than 2050, which is the official target of most international efforts.

We know that in order to get there, in order to keep the planet liveable for humans, we need to reduce by 80% the negative impacts of agriculture. 

We know that the significant majority of the problem comes from animal agriculture that produces meat and dairy, which uses between 70%-80% of all agricultural land.

And we know that even with major changes to the way we raise animals, we will still need to eat a lot less meat and dairy overall.

Today, mainstream studies show that becoming vegan is the #1 thing most individuals can do to reduce their participation in planet-destruction – even more than trading your car for a bicycle, or stopping airplane travel.

So I think a lot about this question: in the imagined sustainable-future, what will we eat instead of meat? And what kind of agriculture will produce that food?

Without a clear answer to this question, it’s hard to accelerate the process of getting there.

We need an alternative to meat, quickly. It is not obvious or clear what the solution is, and there is little consensus among scientists and societal leaders. 

For a while, “fake meat” (and “plant-based” everything) was widely considered to be the #1 solution to reducing meat eating. But one of the big surprises of the past 12 months has been the stagnation, and decline, of fake meat sales. Meanwhile, meat consumption per-capita has continued to go up these past few years. 

It seems likely that plant-based “fake meat” was overhyped and will actually turn into a small niche, as I’ll explain here. I bet that the coming wave of “cell-based” meat cultures will also disappoint expectations, as I’ll discuss.

It seems unlikely that masses of people will become vegans out of climate concern in the coming years, even with lots of publicity and education campaigns.

What are the other ideas we can get behind? At Imagination Machine we have been actively looking for an answer. 

In this essay I attempt to break down the problem, I share some in-depth research we’ve done that gives some insight into the problem (and helps explain what went wrong with fake meat), and I propose some ideas about how this might play out in the next 5-10 years.

This is a complex subject and there is a lot to say about it. (It’s a meaty subject? Sorry, sorry.) 

So I’m going to publish this as a four-part series over the coming days:

• Part 1, this essay you’re reading now: Why We Should Eat Less Meat

• Part 2: Why Fake Meat is Failing

• Part 3: Startup Ideas to Eat Less Meat

• Part 4: The Big Idea that is Almost Certainly Necessary to Eat Less Meat

* * *

The problem with eating animals

The first thing I want to convince you about is this: there is no way the world will avoid climate catastrophe unless something changes in the way we eat. There are others reasons to argue against eating meat, like animal welfare, ethics, and health concerns – but I’m focused here on the environmental impact.

Many great writers, scientists and media outlets have documented the issue, so I won’t repeat all their analysis here. I will show you two graphs which seem to summarize the problem.

This first graph shows the massive growth in the number of animals we’re raising to feed ourselves:

And here’s one dimension of the impact all this agriculture has:

In fact, the problem with raising animals for food is more than just greenhouse gas emissions from the animals themselves, via their burps, farts and manure. There’s also…

• The impact of growing just ridiculously-massive amounts of soy and corn for animal feed, which uses large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer (= lots of planet-warming gas emissions). 

• The vast amount of land needed for all this feed and animal grazing, which is the #1 leading cause of deforestation in the world and consequently the #1 leading cause of biodiversity loss.

• There’s the fresh groundwater all this uses at a rate too fast to replenish (as highlighted in this terrifying report yesterday about US groundwater levels). 

• There's eutrophication, which is the pollution of our rivers and oceans from all the fertilizer used. 

The net impact is extremely negative.

Here is what the experts say:

• I have already linked to the thorough, data-driven “Speed and Scale” project that suggests we need to reduce annual consumption of meat and dairy by 50%. 

• Project Drawdown, another great resource backed up by lots of science, says it is essential that 50-75% of all people in the world transition to a “Plant-Rich Diet”. 

• The CarbonBrief project has some great data about the environmental impact of animals, showing that beef and lamb agriculture are clearly the worst offenders. 

• In France, the Shift Project, an initiative created by the climate activist Jean-Marc Jancovici, claims that 75% of the negative climate impact of agriculture in Europe comes from animal agriculture, and calls for 10 million hectares (about 25 million acres) of animal agriculture to be converted to vegetable farming.

All of these studies also assume that we can succeed at reducing methane emissions from the animal agriculture that remains (via nutrition supplements for animals or other techniques), that we widely diffuse the most efficient animal breeds and best practices from the global north to the global south, that animal farmers adopt regenerative practices like rotational grazing and agroforestry, that we start growing feed with nitrogen-free fertilizer, that we capture methane via wide-scale adoption of methanisers on farms, and that we enforce laws on deforestation. 

All of these studies also assume that we transition to renewable energy, that everyone drives electric cars, and that we produce steel and concrete with green hydrogen gas.

In addition to all of that, we will still need to massively reduce consumption of meat and dairy if we want the planet to stay habitable. Even if we do everything else right, we probably need to cut our per-capita consumption of meat & dairy in half.

Politicians around the world, including the climate-friendly Biden administration, like to insist that we can make some tweaks to farming, keep on eating what we want, and that will be enough. But the math doesn't add up on emissions: without a massive decrease in meat-eating, the planet cannot support humanity.

Reforming agriculture without reducing meat consumption also does nothing to reduce deforestation, which is perhaps the biggest problem of all for our future. 

• • • 

The uncomfortable truth: People love meat, but something needs to change

Meat consumption per-capita is going up in the US, France, and most other countries around the world. 

This summer, a study made headlines in France showing that meat-consumption per person has gone up 3% between 2013 and 2022, despite all of the momentum around “plant-based” everything, despite the climate activism and growing awareness of the problem, and despite the fact that one-third of French people claim that they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Yet the actual sales numbers do not lie: meat consumption is actually going up. (The numbers from the US are similar). There is a shift from beef to poultry, which is good news for the environment, but beef consumption remains very high.

As I mentioned at the beginning here, becoming vegan, or vegetarian, or even 90% vegan is the #1 thing most individuals can do to be climate-friendly. But we know that just trying to convince massive numbers of people to become vegan is a losing strategy, at least right now. Most people don’t want to stop eating meat and dairy, or find it too difficult. Most people who try becoming vegan end up relapsing (apparently about 80% of the time). 

I believe it’s a virtuous thing to do to eat vegan, and a virtuous thing to try and convince others to do the same. It is certainly part of the answer. But it is not sufficient as a pragmatic solution to the worldwide emergency. It won’t work fast enough, if at all.

In my own thinking about the problem, I try to break it down into categories. 

To achieve 50% reduction in overall meat and dairy consumption, we would need:

1. +10% of the population to become fully vegan (in addition to 1-3% today)

2. +30% of the population to reduce their meat & dairy consumption by 80% (by, for example, becoming mostly vegan but continuing to eat meat on special occasions, or becoming vegetarian but continuing to eat cheese and eggs)

3. +40% of the population to reduce their meat & dairy consumption by 40%

4. Which leaves ~20% of the population who can resist any change, which must be factored into any model (and considering only 20% is awfully optimistic)

These numbers are just guesses, but the idea is to come up with an equation that can realistically reduce consumption by 50% overall. I modeled my equation on a technology adoption curve, but there are surely other hypotheses.

Fake Meat seemed like the answer for groups #1 and #2, but alas, the reality is disappointing. In the next essay, I will share some original research we did at Imagination Machine that helps explain how consumers think about Fake Meat.

In the essays after that, I’ll propose some ideas that could pragmatically get the four groups above to eat less meat, and quickly.