Food for thought

Just read George Monbiot's column in today's Guardian - "The Pleasures of the Flesh".

In it he states
"Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession which is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch...There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people."

But this is not a rant about biofuels - 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, but760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). In Monbiot's reading of the statistics, this could cover the global food deficit 14 times. His premise is "If you care about hunger, eat less meat."

Government figures give a total meat purchase figure of 1042g/person/week for 2006. This is 40% above the global average, though less than half the amount consumed in the United States.

We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogramme of flesh they produce; a kilogramme of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.

But what t level of meat-eating would be sustainable? On analysing the figures, Monbiot thinks that means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.
For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept.

The article offers a solution. Monbiot suggests that he would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal (FAO "Livestock's Long Shadow" ). At present, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.

Monbiot concludes:
"Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other."