Are 7-a-day calls tantamount to a Vegan manifesto?

You've probably heard of the calls from various official health advisors to eat 5 portions a day of fruit and vegetables. As part of a balanced diet including plenty of exercise, we're led to believe this is the best way to achieve a generally healthy lifestyle, which is backed by proper data.

I've no problem with this. Now, there are calls from some quarters to take the 5-a-day axiom even further and turn it into a 7-a-day rule.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I have no doubt that it would result in an overall healthier populace if adopted and mean we lived longer and suffered fewer diet related maladies such as diabetes. I for one feel much better after just a couple of days of eating much more fruit and veg. My, well, I'm not really sure it's an issue as such, but well my point is that with this high level of "mandated legume consumption", I'm not sure it would even be possible to eat much more than just fruit and vegetables. Seven portions seems pretty filling to me. It would seem to comprise at least 2 if not 3 meals a day. It would not be possible to eat a meal without basing it around veg. Gone would be the days of sausage, bacon and the full English breakfast would breathe its last. The phrase "no more room" springs to mind.

Given this, I think adopting such a practice on any reasonable scale in the population, would lead to the fairly rapid decline in demand for meat products. And thus a concomitantly massive need for improved sources of vegetable types that were quick, easy and ready-made to consume.

It's a huge change in a lot of our habits. I don't think everyone is ready though. I was in Subway the other day buying a Veggie Delite on wheat with everything salad and mayo (as is my wont these days), and there were 2 big families next to me in the queue, all of whom had ham, egg, bacon or sausage on white bread and no salad to speak of. It was the discount breakfast time, so you can't judge much by that, but even so, it made me think. Can we really go on doing this?

Vegetarianism

After listening to a few debates between archetypal carnivores and  vegetarians / anti-meat advocates, I feel that the latter very much own the moral high ground. Ethically, consuming another animal's flesh when you don't have to, seems to be somewhat indefensible to me. 

The inhumane treatment of factory-farmed animals, not just in farms but in slaughterhouses, is quite shocking whenever I happen to scratch the surface of what goes on in these places. The whole idea of a building specifically made for killing, stringing up carcasses, and people actually having the job of wringing chicken's necks, it's almost unthinkable. 

It makes me never want to eat meat again. I almost certainly will end up doing it, but I've been keeping my consumption very low for years now. I only have a meal with meat about 1-2 times a week, certainly not even every other day. I am now just starting to deliberately avoid meat entirely, and choose meat free alternatives and finding them quite attractive in terms of price and also very tasty.

Of course, the counterpoint to vegetarianism, that is sometimes raised is "speciesism". This was well debated in a recent episode of the fine podcast "Skeptics with a K". 


Who's to say that it is animals whose suffering should be prevented any more than plants? After all, not eating meat would result in a massive increase in the amount of plant harvesting which would need to occur to compensate. However, I find it hard to view this objection as much more than a barrier to progress. It seems to be a desperate attempt to try and slow down any efforts to cut meat consumption, by shrouding the whole enterprise in a moral smog. I think it's more important to cut our reliance on farmed animal meat right now than worry at this stage what other species of plants we may be putting in their stead. 

After all, we have to eat something, and it seems the best way of doing this is to minimise the suffering of conscious creatures whilst in the act. Maybe later, when meat has become a rare delicacy rather than a staple food, we can look at the plight of vegetables and plants. However, this is an interesting philosophical point, which I will return to ponder in a later post. I think the real difference is one of mindset. We should be open to potential course corrections.

Another argument against the moral superiority of vegetarianism is the "suffering vs. killing" argument, which posits that it is really suffering we should try and prevent, so if animals can be killed for meat humanely, it is preferable. Whilst I admit that being as humane as possible is an advantage, killing in any fashion is ultimately going to be less humane than not killing, in almost all conceivable circumstances. For me the priority in encouraging humane slaughter practices should be fighting back against the resurgence of Kosher and Halal foods, which are produced in a very inhumane way.

In fact I think this 7-a-day approach may be the most effective way of eliminating eating far too much meat, and reliance on intensive and cruel factory farming. Even 5-a-day can be hard to achieve without basing at least 2 meals a day around 1-2 portions of vegetables.

An interesting aside on how capitalism, yes that thing, can actually help and is in fact necessary in solving the food problems we face. From the Population Matters Facebook page:


"Demand for meat alternatives is growing, fuelled by trends as varied as increased vegetarianism, consumer demand for healthier sources of protein, and concerns over the impact of industrial-scale animal husbandry on the environment. The unsustainability of rising meat consumption in a world of 7 billion is also on many people's minds - including venture capitalists.

“Frankly, we’ve never said we’re interested in food,” said Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, a venture capital firm that has backed Google, Facebook and Beyond Meat. “What we’re interested in is big problems needing solutions, because they represent big potential markets and strong opportunities for building great returns.” Among the problems he listed that his firm’s investment in Beyond Meat are intended to address are land and water use, stress on global supply chains and the world’s growing population."

We should not ignore the role the Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in helping both solve the meat problem and the general world food provision problem. The common misconceptions of GM foods being "unnatural" or "unsafe" are far from the truth and highly damaging to sustainability. In my view we need GM technology to meet the needs of a growing worldwide population, and to meet our land use targets. It's no good covering the whole continents with crops (which would be required to feed everyone with vegetarian organic foodstuffs) as this has been shown to be detrimental to wildlife compared to a smaller area of more intense farming combined with other areas of completely untouched countryside. (I'll return to this later).

 So the constant anti-GM blathering which goes on in Europe, and which is expounded by otherwise well intentioned social media campaign groups like Change.org and Avaaz, is dangerously misplaced. Monsanto may bot be perfect but they are far from our worst enemy. Please do not support these anti-scientific  campaigns of Change and Avaaz. Most of the other ones appear to be on the level though!