Great Food Transition or Great Mistake?
By Pat Thomas. This article was originally printed in the Spring 2019 (Volume 4 Issue 2) of Sustainable Farming magazine. To read the full issue please visit agreenerworld.org/resources/sustainablefarmingmagazine. The authors of the EAT Lancet Commission report, Food in the Anthropocene, may not have intended their work to be a polemic, but polemic it has become. Its notion of a “great food transition” has especially outraged regenerative farmers who are working to raise healthy animals in sustainable systems. It has divided…
Climate Politics and Vegan Wars
By Frédéric Leroy and Martin Cohen. This article was originally printed in the Spring 2019 (Volume 4 Issue 2) of Sustainable Farming magazine. To read the full issue please visit agreenerworld.org/resources/sustainablefarmingmagazine. Have you noticed how arguments to ditch dairy and cut back on meat are springing up everywhere, from Twitter to the New York Times? It’s estimated there are one and a half million vegans in the U.S. Yet they are still outnumbered by livestock farmers and ranchers, who provide…
A Convenient Untruth
By Simon Fairlie. This article was originally printed in the Spring 2019 (Volume 4 Issue 2) of Sustainable Farming magazine. To read the full issue please visit agreenerworld.org/resources/sustainablefarmingmagazine. Ruminants, and particularly cattle, are habitually cast as climate villains, responsible for large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. According to a much quoted United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) figure, livestock are responsible for 14.5 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions.1 Eighty percent of these emissions come from ruminants, half being methane,…
Product of the USA?
The list of misleading and harmful labels keeps getting longer – and if you haven’t yet, you can add “Product of the USA” to the pile. At best, this label is deceiving to the consumer about the origin of the product. At worst it is destroying the livelihoods of American beef producers. A group consisting of American small-business cattle ranchers, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF), is working hard to change this by using “America First” tariffs to lobby Congress…
A Dangerous Diet?
By Dr. Zoe Harcombe. This article was originally printed in the Spring 2019 (Volume 4 Issue 2) of Sustainable Farming magazine. To read the full issue please visit agreenerworld.org/resources/sustainablefarmingmagazine. On January 17, 2019, a report was published in prestigious journal The Lancet claiming to address “the need to feed a growing global population a healthy diet while also defining sustainable food systems that will minimize damage to our planet.” The EAT Lancet Commission report was written by 37 people from 16…
