Henry Dimbleby, the UK government food tsar, has warned that England must reduce its meat and dairy consumption to meet climate goals and avoid ecological breakdown.
Dimbleby is the lead non-executive board member for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra). He also co-founded the Leon restaurant chain, as well as the Sustainable Restaurant Association.
The latter is a nonprofit trying to accelerate change towards a more environmentally “restorative” hospitality sector.
Dimbleby acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that impressing the importance of eating less meat onto the general public will be “politically toxic.” He iterated, however, that it is the only route to meeting biodiversity and climate targets set by the government.
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At the base of his observation is the issue of sustainable land use. Currently, 85 percent of agricultural space is used to graze animals or grow crops for livestock feed.
“It’s an incredibly inefficient use of land to grow crops, feed them to a ruminant or pig or chicken which then over its lifecycle converts them into a very small amount of protein for us to eat,” Dimbleby said.
He proposed a 30 percent drop in meat consumption over the next decade to bring about more efficient land use.
Others have gone further, however. A University of Oxford report from 2018 stated that we need to reduce beef consumption by 90 percent and milk by 60 percent to avoid climate catastrophe.
