Eating Animals Part 1: The Future of Meat

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Saladino finds out why tensions are running so high over animal vs plant based diets.

In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C this century, emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut by 45% by 2030. Coming under greater focus were sources of CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions linked to our food; cows and sheep. For some the science was enough to justify ever greater calls to reduce meat and dairy consumption and rein in the global livestock population. To others, the focus on meat has become too simplistic and driven by ideology. So, who's right and what should the future of meat look (and taste) like?

In the first of two programmes Dan asks a number of experts to explain their different points of view. Author (and vegetarian) Jonathan Safran Foer argues that saving the world starts at breakfast and we should all be avoiding meat until the last meal of the day. That way he believes we can begin to bring our consumption of meat under control. Morten Toft Bech, the founder of The Meatless Farm which makes plant based beef alternatives, explains why he set out to help replace animals in the food system.

Professor Frederic Leroy of Brussels University in Belgium has been monitoring the meat debate of recent years. He's concerned about the tendency to lump together vastly different production systems, good and bad, to create an anti-meat narrative. Dairy and meat farmer Simon Fairlie describes a possible solution, an approach he calls "default meat". In part two, the following week, it's over to the programme's listeners and their questions on the future of meat.

Presented and produced by Dan Saladino.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:45.0	We're facing a climate emergency,
0:50.0	witnessing deforestation and experiencing a collapse in biodiversity.
0:55.9	Tensions are running high, voices are becoming louder, people are taking to the streets. We're being told life as we know it in the industrialized world.
1:08.0	We're being told life as we know it in the industrialized world is no longer sustainable.
1:16.1	You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess,
1:21.7	even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.
1:26.5	And more and more voices are telling us that one of the things we need to pull the brake on
1:32.4	is our consumption of meat and more
1:35.0	specifically beef and dairy. The use of animals of food production technology
1:40.1	is by far by far the most environmentally destructive thing that humans do.
1:45.0	But there's also a counter-argument that far too much of this talk is ideological, over-simplistic and dangerous.
1:56.5	We should not approach this in a binary way where we're saying animal foods bad and plant foods good. So many things that need to be
	...

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