WICHERT: Plant-based foods have the ripple effect we need

Article content

When we decide upon important resolutions, our goals are always in some way about making life better: For ourselves, for family, for the world.

Article content

Yet it can be difficult to determine how to change, and paths to improvement become more complicated with global issues such as climate or public health crises.

Sometimes, however, simple ideas can have significant payoff, and that’s the case with plant-based foods. Through Humane Society International/Canada’s Forward Food program — an innovative culinary resource that offers free-of-charge plant-based services to food service professionals — I have had the opportunity to collaborate with many decision-makers in food service, business and education. These relationships demonstrate that plant-based foods produce the “ripple effect” necessary for catalyzing change.

To clarify, “plant-based” means ingredients and dishes sourced from plants and which contain no animal products (meat, fish, eggs or dairy). Some advantages of plant-based eating are more apparent. Since plant-based means no animals are killed, it is compassionate. Across the world, we are recognizing animals’ sentience and sapience (self-awareness) through declarations and laws. Recently, the Spanish legislature declared that animals are not objects but sentient beings while the U.K. government has acknowledged the sentience of vertebrates, decapod crustaceans and cephalopods in a bill currently going through Parliament.

Article content

Yet there are also many, often less obvious, ways through which the plant-based ripple spreads outward. Plant-based foods are more environmentally sustainable. Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture are at least 16.5%, comparable to emissions from global transportation. In a 2020 Science paper, Clark et al. explain that, even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, current global food system trends would prevent achieving the 1.5-degree climate target.

What is good for the earth, meanwhile, is good for personal health. Research links diets rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and other whole foods to reduced risks of chronic health conditions such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. The pandemic has brought a stern reminder, too, of how intensive animal agriculture is an incubator for zoonotic diseases.

Article content

Plant-based ingredients are also often more cost-efficient compared to animal protein, and foods from plant sources promote food security and help feed a growing population. In fact, the farm animal production sector is the single largest anthropogenic user of land, with meat, egg, dairy and aquaculture production systems using approximately 83% of the world’s farmland while providing just 37% of the world’s protein and 18% of calories. A video from the World Economic Forum outlines how a global plant-based shift would free 75% of our planet’s farmland.

Although not all land can be converted to crops for humans, we can feed more people with less farmland and challenge world hunger by rethinking land use. With this comes increased biodiversity — a 2018 PNAS article by Bar-On et al. shows how humans account for 0.01% of all living things but have caused the loss of 83% of wild mammals and half of plants. Animal agriculture heavily contributes to this total, yet rewilding and reforestation are still possible through progressive measures.

Any start, be it on individual or global scales, can be daunting. We can enact measurable change, though, by supporting the plant-based industry and making conscientious decisions to show policymakers what matters. For resources on how to begin, visit friendsofhsi.ca/issues/forward-food-support and create another ripple in this rising tide.

— Alex Wichert is specialist, Forward Food, with Humane Society International/Canada, helping the food service industry make plant-based options a bigger part of their menus.