Fossil fuels usually suck up everyone\u2019s attention at the annual United Nations\u2019 climate summit. But at this year\u2019s gathering in Dubai, COP28, another topic is generating headlines: food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Friday saying that the world must transform its food systems, the source of one-third<\/a> of all greenhouse gas emissions, \u201cto respond to the imperatives of climate change.\u201d On Saturday at the conference, the Biden administration announced a national strategy<\/a> to reduce food waste, a huge emitter of methane. And on December 10,the U.N. is expected to call on countries that consume a lot of meat to eat less of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All this news comes after years of prodding from scientists and environmental advocates who say the only path to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement\u2019s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is to do things like limit how much meat<\/a> we eat in the U.S. and other beef-loving countries. (Livestock alone are responsible for about 15 percent of global climate pollution.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is that meat consumption is as politically polarizing as ever. Fox Business recently ran a headline<\/a> saying world leaders planned to \u201cdeclare a war on meat\u201d at COP28. \u201cThey don\u2019t want solutions, they want a sick, depressed populace,\u201d television chef Andrew Gruel said<\/a> on the social media platform X. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The political right is also taking aim at climate-friendly alternatives to meat, like cultivated chicken and beef<\/a>, made from cells grown in labs. State legislators in Florida recently proposed a bill that would make selling cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor<\/a>. In Europe the issue has been just as partisan. Italy\u2019s right-wing government just banned the production and sale of cultivated meat, ostensibly to protect the country\u2019s culinary heritage. And Germany\u2019s far-right Alternative for Deutschland party has been drumming up fears that the left is coming for their fried cutlets. \u201cThey will not take away my schnitzel,\u201d a party co-chair said<\/a> at a campaign event this fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of the backlash is likely a result of lobbying<\/a> by the meat and dairy industries and the proliferation of misinformation<\/a> on social media. But no matter how good it might be for the planet to end factory farming and to stop converting forests into pastures, researchers say meat is inherently political. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a political relationship between our species and other species,\u201d said Sparsha Saha, a political scientist who studies meat politics at Harvard University. \u201cThat\u2019s what makes it a lot different. It\u2019s not a technology.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Technological solutions tend to be more popular than lifestyle ones, even though some researchers say both may be necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. According to a survey across 23 countries<\/a>, people in every one but France showed more support for solving the climate crisis through technology and innovation than by changing how they live. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Saha\u2019s research suggests that meat is even more polarizing than gas-guzzling cars. In a recent study<\/a> published in the journal Frontiers<\/em>, she found that voters are more likely to oppose candidates who advocate for curbing emissions by eating less meat than those who talk about the need to limit emissions from transportation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s like asking us to be a different kind of human,\u201d Saha said. \u201cI think that\u2019s why people are so reticent about it. It is kind of a costly thing to bring up. Even as an academic, I have to be really thoughtful about how I\u2019m framing things.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n To Saha, the solution isn\u2019t to keep meat out of political conversation; it\u2019s to talk about it differently and focus on building consensus. Rather than avoid the issue or pretend like it doesn\u2019t have to be political, she thinks the meat-reduction movement would benefit from messaging supported by a broader coalition, including religious leaders, hunters, and even ranchers who oppose factory farming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf we had put more thought into how it could be communicated well to people ahead of time we might not be in this position,\u201d Saha said. \u201cIt feels like it was sprung on people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Saha advises against \u201cquiet meat politics,\u201d an idea articulated in a piece<\/a> published in 2021 by the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Berkeley, California. The author of the article, a researcher named Alex Smith, argued for an approach that \u201cavoids political partisanship and culture warring in favor of creating a technological and infrastructural environment that can achieve long-term sustainable change.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Smith wrote that plant-based burgers, like those made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, have a lot of potential to replace animal products, and he predicted that more people would shift their diets if those alternatives \u2014 as well as \u201cmore futuristic\u201d lab-grown meat \u2014 got cheaper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, Smith is less optimistic. He told Grist he\u2019s \u201cwary of the possibility\u201d that plant-based meat will ever meaningfully displace poultry and beef, and he noted that \u201cwe\u2019re still so far from actually knowing the scalability, the actual potential of cultivated meat.\u201d In his view, efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions from farming can\u2019t only focus on replacing beef. They have to include improving animal agriculture, like developing feed additives that reduce methane<\/a>. Smith pushed back against the idea that making meat more central in our politics would convince people to eat less of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s pleasure involved. There\u2019s culture involved,\u201d Smith said. \u201cI\u2019m relatively skeptical of the idea that we can divert people and push them ideologically, culturally talking-wise towards anything other than that.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Saha\u2019s paper offers some evidence for a different perspective. To her surprise, she found that voters were more receptive to a theoretical candidate who talked about animal rights than one who talked about the environmental costs of meat eating. That might signal that meat itself isn\u2019t as divisive as some think. Perhaps it\u2019s made more partisan through its connection to another polarizing issue: climate change.<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline What would it take to end the meat culture wars?<\/a> on Dec 7, 2023.<\/p>\n