to see if they were vegan or not (more on this later) meant we also became more aware of other ingredients we might want to avoid – the additives and preservatives and colourings that we all know aren’t doing us any good. Of course, we sometimes choose things that we know aren’t very healthy – it’s all about balance after all, and we both have a MASSIVE sweet tooth! – but we’re now a bit more aware of our choices.
But don’t just take our word for it, there’s plenty of science to back it up too.
A diet rich in fruit and veg is higher in vitamins, nutrients and fibre. And since it’s much harder to overeat if you’re mainly eating veg, it’s harder to gain a lot of excess weight. In fact, a growing body of doctors, dieticians and athletes now say that a plant-based diet is the best way to fuel and protect our bodies. There is increasing evidence that eating a well-planned plant-based diet is linked with lower body weight,[28] lower rates of obesity,[29] diabetes[30] and heart disease.[31] For more on why you’ll feel AMAZING on a plant-based diet, see here.
SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
Climate change is a complicated problem (err … understatement!) with lots of different perspectives to consider. There are so many contributing factors to climate change that there’s no one clear way out of the mess. When you’re faced with such a multitude of facts and figures, arguments and opinions, we know how easy it can be to feel analysis paralysis! We’re so overwhelmed by the complexity of the problem, we never decide how best to tackle it. Perhaps that’s why historically, as a global community, we’ve not done an awful lot about it so far.
Leading bodies say we need to embark on a World War 2 level effort to combat climate change,[32] and yet it’s definitely a more abstract problem to get to grips with – harder to picture, harder to explain, harder to solve. This can leave us frozen in indecision, right down to the smallest of everyday choices. There are so many people with different answers to the problem that it’s hard to know what to believe. We’re blocked by confusion and doubt.
Are plastic straws to blame? Should we all buy electric cars? Stop taking flights and start going on holiday by train? Where does food waste fit into the problem? Do we have to go veggie? But surely eating local meat and eggs is better than eating avocados and quinoa from South America?
On a personal level, the main barrier we think we all face is a feeling of helplessness.
What can we really achieve, as individuals? How can we change what’s being done by billions of people, if even governments and big businesses are not able to stop it? While some people are unwilling to make changes to help the greater good, surely the vast majority of humanity would want to help, if only they knew how?
Ian went through a phase of using bamboo toothbrushes and tried to live as close to zero waste as he could. But in our job – developing recipes every day – it’s almost impossible to live like this. We made a decision that we could have more impact if we concentrated on our main message of making delicious plant-based food available to everyone. We use sustainable ingredients as much as we can, but we can’t do everything all at the same time. And that’s OK – we do what we can.
We held our love for steak and roast dinners on a proverbial weighing scale and compared it with our love for the world and the future we wanted for the next generation. We loved food, had our favourite meals, and didn’t want to give them up. Henry’s obsession with fish and chips, swimming in tartare sauce, held him back for a while. But as we looked deeper into the facts, we were unable to resist the reality of the situation.
THE MAIN CAUSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
There are two main causes of climate change which far outweigh any others: animal agriculture and transport.
Let’s start with transport. A return flight from London to New York costs the Arctic three square metres of ice per person.[33] One thing we can all do to reduce our carbon footprint is to consider flying less and avoiding air-freighted goods. Following the rule of supply and demand, if we fly less, fewer flights will take place and air travel will cause fewer carbon dioxide emissions in the future. The same goes for choosing to drive electric cars instead of standard diesel or petrol vehicles.
Animal agriculture, however, has much further reaching consequences. Cutting down your transport emissions reduces your greenhouse gas output. This is a simple equation.
Using the same rule of supply and demand, cutting down on animal products reduces carbon dioxide and methane emissions, land and water use, rainforest deforestation and destruction of wildlife.
If going vegan seems a stretch too far, then even just eating one more plant-based meal per week is a powerful action. If everyone in the UK dropped meat from one meal a week, we could slash emissions by more than 8%, equivalent to taking 16 million cars off the road. It would also mean a 23% reduction in the UK’s domestic and international farmland use and a 2% reduction in our water use.[35] And in the US, if everyone replaced chicken with plant-based foods in one meal per week, the carbon dioxide savings would be equivalent to taking half a million cars off the roads. [36]
The international committee for climate change has said that in order for the UK to reach their emissions targets of a net zero emissions economy by 2050, households will need to undergo at least a 20% reduction in their beef, lamb and dairy consumption.
Source: Climate Change – The Facts
So the science really is that clear. The single biggest thing we can all do as individuals, much bigger than changing our approach to transport, is to eat more vegan, more plant-based meals. Given the wealth of experts across all fields of research telling us to eat fewer animal products, it’s time to act. We now know we can fight climate change with diet change. We are now aware of the consequences of our actions. Past this point, we’re to blame if we don’t take action.
Will we rise to the challenge and save the world we live in, for ourselves and future generations? Our preferences for meat and dairy have led us to destroy the planet, turning forest and grasslands into grazing lands because we love the taste of hamburgers. Come on, guys! That’s madness!
We make enough food to feed everyone on the planet, and yet nearly a billion people starve. We feed the food that they could eat to cattle, so that we can eat steak. Eighty-two per cent of the world’s starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals, which are then killed for meat and exported; eaten by wealthier individuals in developed countries like the US, UK and mainland Europe.[37]
It’s time we stepped up to the (vegan) plate and took some positive action.
Animal farming uses up 83% of global agricultural land, but provides just 18%
