How to Save the Planet from Meat
It's a very cool feat to know that the least meat-consuming country in the world is Bangladesh. But why does Bangladesh consume less meat from the rest of the world?
Meat is very expensive in Bangladesh compared to the income. Some people can only make enough money to buy meat once a year.
Which makes countries like Bangladesh, India a place where they contribute the lowest when it comes to creating greenhouse gas from farm-produced animals.
For now, that may be the case but it is rapidly changing. As countries get more developed their consumption of meat increases. The more we are able to buy meat the more we will eat it.
And if you see the overconsumption of the USA and UK, especially in the boomer era, you can get an idea of what will happen once India and Bangladesh become richer and richer.
There are hundreds of more African and Asian countries which are going at a rapid pace towards growth.
An excerpt from the Guardian says
Eating meat has been closely connected with the growing affluence of China. In the 1960s, the average Chinese person consumed 5kg of meat a year. This had shot up to 20kg by the time of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” of the late 1970s, and to 48kg by 2015
We already know if we eat meat we will eat ourselves to destruction and reducing meat can be an important factor in order to fight climate change.
There are alternatives to meat popping up nowadays but they are not growing as rapidly as expected. And it will take a lot of understanding for people to choose one over the other.
We cannot stop countries from progressing and even if we could we should not obviously, so what can be the solution.
- We must make going vegan sexy in all local contexts. Running communications campaigns and advertisements geared towards a lifestyle in films and cinemas can be a major way to earn new subscribers
- Massive awareness campaigns that we did for things like AIDS or COVID, against things like obesity in the west, against the consumption of tobacco products, we need to start doing those. There is a push and pull factor on how things like these will work and we need to push people away from meat and pull them towards vegetarianism.
3. Make alternatives widely available, not just for the few western countries, it should be widely available, replicable, it needs to cater to the taste of people from all around the world.
If we do these three we can hopefully see a reduction in the consumption of meat in developing countries. God forbid if least meat-eating countries become hungry for meat we will be eating ourselves to death.
