THURSDAY 12 NOVEMBER 2009 • NOT A STERN VEGETARIAN
Why is it that not only the red-top newspapers, but sometimes even the Guardian, Times and Telegraph news reporters and leader writers behave like overgrown schoolboys, when it comes to writing about food issues? Take the latest fuss about Lord Stern and vegetarianism. They’ve all had a field day misrepresenting the author of the most serious, important document yet published on the subject of climate change. They claim that Lord Stern has urged us all to turn vegetarian. Of course, he’s said nothing of the sort, but it makes a good headline.
What Lord Stern of Brentford actually said was that we need to start addressing climate change now, rather than wait for the results of global climate change to wreak havoc on our environments and economies. To this end he recommended a modest change in the diet of the developed nations, namely that we should make a start by reducing our meat consumption – not remove meat from our tables, but eat a bit less of it. (Lord Stern told the same papers that he was not a vegetarian himself.)
The reasons are the familiar ones. The UN has said that livestock production causes 18 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions: animals reared for food release (to put it politely) methane gas, which is environmentally worse than carbon dioxide; deforestation is a consequence of increased demand for meat; growing feed for meat animals involves fertilisers that pollute with nitrous oxides; and, of course, there is a certain amount of fossil fuel consumption by the livestock sector. Lord Stern was making the elementary point that we can reduce this by eating a bit less meat.
Worse, producing meat is wasteful. As Tristram Stuart has pointed out, “about 40 per cent of the world’s cereals are used to feed farm animals, mainly for the satisfaction of the world’s richest customers… In the US, livestock give back only 20 per cent of the food they consume”. And about a third of meat and dairy foods produced there is actually not eaten by people, but thrown away.
This is not much of a problem for restaurants such as Le Manoir, where what counts for our guests is the quality of the meat they are served, rather than its quantity. I don’t think many of our guests get up from the table hungry, but we do not serve steaks the size of Argentina. 20 ounce steaks are still common in many good American restaurants, but nobody actually needs to eat this much meat at a sitting. Indeed, I’d imagine most people would find it difficult to finish a pound-and-a-quarter sirloin or rump steak.
So let’s lay off sniping at the good Lord Stern, and eat a vegetable curry, a big salad, a meat-free pasta dish, or a meal of sustainably caught fish two or three nights a week. Delicious, good for you, good for the planet.
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