Covid-19 is what is known as a zoonotic disease, that is one which is passed on to humans from animals. As such, it is merely the latest in a growing number of zoonotic diseases that have – quite literally – plagued us in recent years. Others include HIV, ebola, zika virus, SARS and bird flu. It is simply too easy, as President Trump is trying to do, to lay the […]
During the 1970s and 1980s, Costa Rica was being cynically exploited by multinational burger companies. These companies, most prominently Burger King and Wendy’s, incentivised native farmers to burn down rainforest in order to create grazing land for beef cattle destined to end up in fast food burgers. Similar exploitative forces are continuously at play elsewhere across the world, most recently in the Brazilian rainforest, as the rapacious beef industry continues […]
For several decades following the end of the Second World War we really believed that the challenge of feeding a growing population would be solved by chemicals and technology. Now a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has laid bare how catastrophic this belief has proved to be. The IPCC is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, and in the […]
The meat industry is a staggeringly inefficient vehicle for producing enough food to feed a growing world population. An astonishing 83% of all agricultural land is now devoted to livestock, yet meat produces only 18% of the world’s supply of calories. The imbalance is growing: as nations become richer – in monetary terms – they tend to increase their meat consumption, placing even more strain on finite agricultural land. The […]
This week’s recipe is for parsnip, cranberry and nut roast, a delicious vegan alternative Christmas dinner. An enormous amount of meat will be consumed, and discarded over the Christmas period this year. Aside from ethical considerations about the slaughter of other sentient life, there is no doubt at all that our current levels of meat consumption are contributing directly to climate change. The government’s own Committee on Climate Change is […]
Today marks Earth Overshoot Day, the day in the calendar when humankind has used up the equivalent of a whole year’s worth of the Earth’s natural resources. When I began writing this blog five years ago, Earth Overshoot day fell on 20 August. Each year since then it has moved to an earlier date in the calendar, marking our continued failure to live a sustainable existence on this planet. The […]
Humankind’s relatively recent obsession with the beef burger and with fried chicken has had a huge impact on the world around us. This extent of that impact has been laid bare by a recently published study by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. The study, uniquely, set out to look at the distribution of all living things on Earth – plants and animals – by mass rather than population. Using this […]
Since 2010, initially under the guise of “austerity”, the British government has decimated funding for safety inspections within the food industry. Nowhere has the result of these cuts been felt as devastatingly as in the meat industry. 40% of meat hygiene inspector posts have disappeared in the last eight years, along with similar proportions of environmental health officer and trading standard officer posts. Little wonder, then, that we again face […]
When I began this modest little blog four years ago I had two aims in mind. Firstly, I wanted to show that vegetarian food can be delicious, exciting and nutritious. Secondly, the blog would give me a platform for sounding off about those aspects of the food industry that I don’t like – which is pretty much all of it. I had previously decided to become a vegetarian not because […]
Occasionally I am told that one of the “problems” of a vegetarian or vegan diet is that we humans can only obtain “complete protein” from eating meat and fish (a “complete protein” being one which contains the nine “essential” amino acids). This claim is wrong on two counts. Firstly, it is factually inaccurate: there are several plant-based foods that not only contain traces of the nine essential amino acids but […]