A global commission of more than 30 world-leading scientists has issued a report on what constitutes a healthy and sustainable diet. The report, entitled “Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems” urges a “Great Food Transformation” that will make it possible to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and to keep greenhouse-gas emissions from rising beyond the targets set by the Paris Agreement.
Today, more than 820 million people do not get enough to eat. At the same time, obesity is increasing. Unhealthy diets, the commission tells us, do more harm to human health than tobacco, drug and alcohol use and unsafe sex, combined. The commission recommends a diet of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated oils, with a low to moderate amount of seafood and poultry, and little or no red meat, processed meat, added sugar, refined grains and starchy vegetables. Among the commission’s recommendations is a call for a 50% reduction in global consumption of unhealthy foods such as red meat and sugar.
Replacing red meat (a term in which the commission includes beef, pork and lamb) and other unhealthy foods with plant-based foods would improve our health, enable poor people to buy grains and pulses less expensively, and slow climate change.
What the commission’s report leaves out, however, is the impact of its recommendations on animals. Once we take animal welfare into account, however, we need to ask: What food is likely to replace the red meat that people will not be eating, if they follow the commission’s recommendations on meat consumption?
On present trends, one replacement is likely to be chicken. In the Unted States, Europe and most industrialized nations, the consumption of poultry surpassed that of beef long ago, and is increasing. Chicken production contributes less than beef production to climate change, and chicken may be less harmful to human health than red meat. Chickens are also more efficient than cattle at converting grain to flesh. But the intensive farming of chickens is, in the words of John Webster, an authority on farm animal welfare: “in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”
Why does Webster so strongly condemn the chicken industry? First, the size of industrial chicken production is difficult to comprehend. More than 66 billion chickens were raised and killed in 2017 — almost nine times the entire human population. These birds are bred to gain weight as quickly as possible — and that means that they are bred to suffer. As the young birds gain weight, their immature legs can collapse, leaving them immobile and unable to get to food or water.
With typical chicken farms housing 20,000 birds in a single shed, there is no individual attention for sick or lame chickens — to provide such care simply does not pay — and birds can die of thirst or starve to death. Chickens who avoid this fate spend their final weeks in pain because of the excessive weight that their weak legs must bear. Nor can they sit down, for they are standing on litter that is so full of chicken droppings that contact with their skin can give them ammonia burns. Webster likens what we do to chickens to forcing someone with arthritis to stand all the time.
Next, think about the parents of these birds. They have, of course, the same genetically selected voracious appetite as their offspring, and the same tendency to gain weight rapidly. Unlike their offspring, who are slaughtered when only 6 or 7 weeks old. But the working lives of the parents begin only when they reach sexual maturity. If they were allowed to satisfy their appetites, they would become so obese that they would most likely die before they are old enough to reproduce. The producers’ solution is to keep them hungry for their entire lives.
The commission does not encourage a switch from red meat to chicken. On the contrary, it states that healthy diets consist of “a diversity of plant-based foods” and “low amounts of animal-source foods.” The commission also approvingly cites studies showing that vegan and vegetarian diets are associated with the greatest reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and land use.
Nevertheless, given present global trends in food consumption, there is a danger that urging people to reduce red meat consumption might simply increase the consumption of chicken. For a diet to be healthy, sustainable, and ethical, it must avoid all factory farmed animal products. To do that and feed the present world population, it must be substantially plant-based.
Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of “Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save.”
