So let me get this straight, if I reduce my “carbon calories” by drastically reducing my meat intake, does that mean I can drive my car a few extra miles to buy my veggies?  

Seriously though, I’m all for living more sustainably and for reducing an unnecessary carbon footprint but me becoming a vegan isn’t going to change much. I would rather take a more sensible and balanced way of going about it. We recycle as much as we I can, especially now that many supermarkets are providing recycling facilities for food packaging. We use reusable shopping bags. We shop locally where possible, our meat is bought from a local farm, we try to grow as many vegetables as we can on our allotment and store cupboard staples we stock up on in bulk to reduce the number of trips to the supermarket. We only buy what we need by making a weekly meal plan, working out what fresh ingredients we need and shopping accordingly without forking out for a subscription to any of those meals in a box delivered to your door. Over the last few years we have managed to cut down on food waste by a considerable amount with all vegetable waste, along with shredded paper and newspaper, going into the wormery which provides me with enough potting compost and plant feed through the year for my small garden. Cardboard gets taken to the allotment as do those annoying little plastic trays used for fruit and vegetable packaging; they make cracking mini propagators for seedlings. Our allotment means the carbon footprint of our vegetables and eggs is negligible since we grow organically, transportation costs are minimal and there is no need for any packaging. Plus we know eggsactly how fresh our eggs are and that they are from our healthy, well cared for chickens. Like thousands of others we are doing what we can within our capabilities so it makes me mad when the media latches on to the latest ridiculous fad devised by a bunch of millennials to push the narrative that what we eat affects climate change.

The latest article to pop up in my inbox is offering one more rationale for following a meat free diet. The premise seems to be that we should all strive to be net zero in our dietary choices. It doesn’t immediately hit you over the head with vegetarian/veganism but it very subtly gives you a  push in that direction. Several recipes are shown which do include meat but all have recommendations for substitutions which lower the “carbon calorie” count. And guess what? The more vegan you go the lower the count! Cue the link which takes you to the web page of the group of university buddies with nothing better to do during lockdown than track their personal carbon footprints, Zoom their results to each other and come up with the idea of these “carbon calories”. They then went on to develop an app and push it into the public domain under the guise of it being good for us and the planet. Do they also have real jobs I wonder? Their website quotes all the relevant science and global legislation to confound you into thinking they are doing more than just peddling what is essentially yet another meal planner cum fitness app. It also has a list of links to very expensive supposedly ethical and eco friendly companies; all run by entitled millennials who favour those funky, cartoon style nursery poster websites that are so trendy these days; who support their approach and who probably bung them a nice affiliation fee if anyone signs up to their product via the app. However, when you look into these companies they are either foreign (Koreans peddling a hangover cure? Really?) or owned by a parent company using the brand for virtue signalling whilst continuing to go about their daily business with very little thought to the environment. But hey, if you tap on the handy link to a sustainable meal in a box company they will plant a tree every time you make a purchase through the app. Is that to replace the tree they felled to make the cardboard boxes in which they transport their meals to all corners of the country? Hardly local and hardly Net Zero and therefore high in “carbon calories”!

I know I’m no scientist or farming expert but, to me, it doesn’t matter whether we farm livestock or; if you’ll pardon the pun; go whole hog into arable farming it will still have an impact on the land in the future. Livestock can live in harmony with nature by grazing in woods and on land unsuitable for crops; heck, they can even graze between those glaring reusable energy producing solar panels taking over much of our farmland these days; not only providing us with food through meat and dairy but also nourishing the land with their manure. Now there’s a conundrum for you; how do you use the land sustainably? You can’t grow and harvest crops if the land is covered with solar panels, although you could always build giant solar greenhouses I suppose. Or has that already been done? However, if we do move to a fully plant based diet, remember all those trees they are planting on your behalf over the next few years through countless re-wilding schemes? Well they will have to be cleared to make way for the increasing demand for the arable land required for crop growing. Another question here is how are we going to harvest and transport all these crops to the consumer whilst ensuring their “carbon calories” remain low? And what happens when nothing will grow and in 80 years time future generations (neo-millenials?) are left with vast expanses of unusable wasteland because the goodness in the soil has been completely depleted and it can’t be rescued because they no longer have the manure from livestock? It’s about time we humans realised that it doesn’t matter what we do or how we do it, in one way or another everything we do has an impact not only on the planet but on the life it supports and it’s going to take a lot more than the temporary fix of eating a plant based diet and planting a couple of trees to save it.