Higher food prices and a radical transformation in human diets away from meats and toward vegetables like lentils, beans, and peas are necessary to address global warming, A UK government-sanctioned commission claims in a new report. The report calls for “radically shifting the whole system” away from consumer-driven freedom of consumer food choices and toward a “strong and escalating regulatory baseline” that will make it “increasingly difficult (or expensive) to do the wrong things,” like eating meat.
According to the report – “Our Future in the Land,” by the RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission – “Decades of policy to produce ever cheaper food has created perverse and detrimental consequences.”
“Whilst food in the supermarkets is getting cheaper, the true cost of that policy is simply passed off elsewhere in society,” the report claims.
The UK Guardian summarized the report this way, “True cost of cheap food is health and climate crises, says commission.”
“The commission criticized decades of government policy aimed at making food cheaper,” the Guardian noted.
“The climate emergency makes urgent, radical action on the environment essential,” Ian Cheshire, chair of the RSA commission and a UK government advisor, told the Guardian.
The report not only criticizes inexpensive food and the consumption of meat, it also criticizes farmers for not decarbonizing agricultural processes.
“This monumental report is a powerful and profound account of the ecological transformation of our food and farming system that we urgently need,” said British Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas in the Guardian.
Coal power plants and SUVs may be the first targets of climate activists, but affordable food prices and meat in your diets are next to be eliminated.