午夜福利1000集合

I HAVE been writing a lot about food recently, from the perspective of both human and planetary health and longevity. Happily, those two goals are often in harmony 鈥� in a nutshell, eat less meat and other animal products 鈥� which gives me a healthy inner glow topped with a green halo. I stopped eating the flesh of mammals and birds a few years ago and largely stick to a Mediterranean-style diet, which involves eating more fruit, vegetables and whole grains.

But as I found out recently to my dismay, I may have to relinquish that halo. Like many environmentally conscious eaters, I have only been looking at one side of the menu: climate change. My dietary choices have almost certainly reduced my carbon footprint. But what about biodiversity? On that front, my diet may need a radical rethink.

As has been well documented, the industrialised food system is one of the principal drivers of climate change. It takes land to grow crops and rear animals, and fields and pasture are often carbon sources rather than carbon sinks. Agricultural machinery belches out greenhouse gases, as do cows and other ruminants. The staggering quantities of food that are wasted at every stage from farm to fork mean that much of this climate damage doesn鈥檛 even contribute to human well-being.

This is , usually by eating more plants, cutting down on waste and buying locally produced food. All are commendable and meaningful choices. But there is more to life than climate change. Biodiversity loss is as much of a threat to planetary habitability, but up to now has barely figured in our dietary calculations.

Which is why a recent analysis deserves much wider attention. In it, a team at the University of Maryland鈥檚 National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center makes a start on introducing biodiversity into the conversation. The researchers analysed the biodiversity impact of five diets widely consumed in the US, from the red meat of the country鈥檚 traditional fare to the distinctly green Planetary 午夜福利1000集合 Diet recommended by in 2019. The other regimes were . They also considered the impact of reducing food waste by 50 per cent on all five diets.

For each of these 10 scenarios, the team modelled how adoption by everyone in the US would alter land use, and how that would change the extinction risk of land animals and plants worldwide.

To no one鈥檚 great surprise, the meat-heavy US diet, rich in processed food, would be catastrophic, condemning around 200 species to extinction, 40 per cent of them outside the US. These irreversible losses 鈥� mostly of plants 鈥� would be driven in the main by the conversion of natural habitats to pastureland. A 50 per cent reduction in food waste would still doom more than 175 species to extinction.

Again, to no great surprise, the diets least harmful to biodiversity are the vegetarian and planetary health ones with reduction in food waste. But neither is squeaky green: both still commit around 100 species, again mostly plants, to extinction. Much of this damage is caused by imported fruits and commodity crops grown in biodiversity hotspots, especially Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and Indonesia.

Now here鈥檚 the sickener. The worst diet of all is the Mediterranean-style one, which, if universally adopted across the US, would cause 240 extinctions, mostly outside the country鈥檚 borders. The main driver of these would be increased demand for seafood, which the authors assume would have to be met by aquaculture (probably correct, given the state of wild fish stocks), requiring natural land to be given over to grain to feed the fish. Reducing food waste would cut this carnage a bit, but still leaves the Mediterranean diet worse than the meat-heavy US one with current levels of food waste.

In my defence, the Mediterranean diet in the analysis includes meat, which I don鈥檛 eat, and quite a bit of dairy, which I limit. But the result leaves little doubt that eating well for the planet requires sacrifices that I am currently not prepared to make. And even then, it can鈥檛 be done. To participate in the agro-industrial complex is to be complicit in the extinction of dozens of species.

There is, thankfully, a genuine alternative on the horizon: cultured meat and precision fermentation. Both are in their infancy, but, once mature, promise to meet our demand for meat, dairy and fish while leaving space for nature. Environmentalists may be wary of such 鈥渦nnatural鈥� methods, but anyone who cares about the environment should be licking their lips at the prospect.