This past Monday, I went to a table talk about eco-anxiety and a proposed method to help combat it. The discussion was based off an article that suggested that by substituting eating beans instead of beef we could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
We talked about how culture is deeply tied to our food consumption patterns, the economics of making the choice to switch on both a personal and large scale level, the ethics behind different diets, and even some compromises such as meat grown in a lab and other ways to reduce eco-anxiety and/or emissions for people who didn’t want to give up beef entirely.
One interesting thing we talked about is how it is easier to make a change to one’s lifestyle when they have support from other people in their lives and how to see a large number of people take up this initiative support from groups and in one example universities would be necessary. Another was how big industry helps keep us consuming meat and dairy products and how that impacts not only us, but the animals who end up being food.
To add to your point of realistic solutions for people who are not ready to give up eating beef entirely, I think it is pertinent to address that the entire population eating half as much beef is just as environmentally efficient as the half the population cutting out beef entirely. In some ways, I feel it is more important for us to emphasize eating chicken or beans in place of beef sometimes rather than to cut beef out entirely. It is a more realistic goal for the global community, and it will have an equally strong effect.