Marco Riva
UNIVERSITY OF GASTRONOMIC SCIENCES

Flexitarians e Locavores

Flexitarians—a neologism worth learning. Sooner or later, for good or for evil, we are going to have to espouse this style of food consumption. Declared the most useful and innovative word of the year by the American Dialect Society (1) in 2003, ‘flexitarian’ defines the behavior of the occasional meat eater: someone who for ethical or health reasons, or maybe on account of systemic concern about the destiny of the planet, is shifting his or her eating habits towards a semi-vegetarian regime, or someone who eats meat sporadically and is basing his or her diet more on cereals, legumes, vegetables and fruit, preferably fresh and of good quality. Unlike veganism or vegetarianism, whose view of food is often enveloped in an intrinsic philosophical structure, flexitarianism refers to the natural penchant of many more mature and better informed consumers in affluent societies for behavior dictated by a set of rational and diversified and, in many cases, socially ‘noble’ factors. Let us begin with the most recurrent and rooted of these, even in the global agricultural produce price crisis: it is impossible to support a consumption trend that ‘espouses’ present dietary and nutritional habits in the first and second worlds. FAO has warned us that if even half the current rate of American meat consumption (over 100 kg a year per capita) were to become the average consumption for the planet, then we would have to deforest an area of land equivalent to ten times that currently allotted to meat production, meaning livestock breeding and cereal growing. It would be impossible to predict the impact of the consequent greenhouse effect—already sizable, on a par with that of more familiar sectors such as industry and transport (it is estimated that meat production determines 80 percent of the total effect produced by all agroindustrial practices, which in turn represent 22 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions)—on the climate and the state of the biosphere. (2)
Let me explain what I mean with a concrete example. In energy terms, it takes 8 to 20 MJ (millions of joules), the equivalent of 0.25-0.50 liters of oil, to produce a cheeseburger; due to the combined effect of the use of primary sources of energy and breeding practices, this corresponds to the emission of 1-3 kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The outcome is significant: bearing in mind that an American eats 1-3 cheeseburgers a week, the total impact on the environment is the equivalent of that of the circulation of 7-20 sport utility vehicles, the thirstiest, most polluting means of individual transport of all—in other words, of all the SUVs in the USA. (3)
There can be no arguing with the somewhat disturbing proposals that insist on the need to label products with environmental impact values. The figure shows what a cheeseburger would say!
Other surveys confirm that a ‘low meat’ diet produces an impact equivalent to fewer than 1,500 kilometers by car per day, while simply shifting from red meat to chicken or fish for a day saves about a thousand. The best practice is to eat vegetables: in a single day of the week that saves 1,800 kilometers.
The earth’s surface, emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen oxide—the problem doesn’t stop here. It’s a well known fact that conversion from vegetable to animal proteins is relatively inefficient: hence it takes 5 kg of cereals to produce 1 kg of beef, 7 kg of maize and soybean to produce 1 kg of pork, 3 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of chicken and more than 15,000 liters of water for every kg of red meat (against the little fewer than a thousand necessary to produce 1 kg of cereals). (4)
All of which means that we are all going to be forced to become flexitarians over the next few decades, though some people are already becoming flexitarians out of choice.
The mad cow disease scandal and, more recently, the bird flu outbreak have made consumers more suspicious than they used to be about the hygienic and health risks of meats. Statistics on food consumption, for example, show that beef and offal consumption in Europe recorded a 15-20 percent drop (even higher in countries most affected by the prion affair) in the ten-year period from 1996 to 2006 with a shift towards pork and chicken consumption that has since fallen.
Not that mad cow disease is the only problem. Meat, especially if it is of poor quality, ground and poorly stored, continues to constitute a great health risk. In the USA alone, it is blamed for more than 76 million cases of food infection and poisoning a year (350,000 of which leading to hospitalization and 5,000 to death). The statistics are implacable: for example, over 70 percent of the antibiotics produced by the US pharmaceutical industry ‘serve’ to keep animals on breeding farms healthy, but the danger is that traces might also enter the food supply chain.
We thus come to health. Diets based prevalently on the consumption of foodstuffs of animal origin—above all, meat—are viewed with increasing alarm by all the institutions responsible for public health. In the countries of the first and second worlds, low consumption of foodstuffs of animal origin and saturated fats is directly correlated to life expectancy (this is true of Italy or Japan), whereas high consumption is linked to the spread of dismetabolisms of hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, coronopathies and obesity. For the lazy, sedentary inhabitant of the first and second worlds, the ideal diet (12-15 percent of energy from proteins, 25-30 percent from preferably unsaturated fats, 50-60 percent from carbohydrates, preferably complex, hence starches) turns into a daily protein requirement of about 60 grams, and a dish of pasta and parmesan cheese accounts for 20 of them by itself! But if he or she isn’t a gourmet, the big meat eater is even more at risk, eating animalderived fast food accompanied by other critical elements such as sugary soft drinks, fries, sauces with hydrogenated fats and so on. Alternatively, he or she eats meat that is grilled, and this involves the neoformation of an increasingly broad range of what have been identified as precarcinogenous compounds.
In short, there are many reasons for considering flexitarianism more than just a trend among ecologists or the hypersensitive. And it would be a good thing if the flexitarian and locavore (5) diets were to receive due consideration from the economics of sustainability. By moderating our meat consumption, more than through useless packaging and overcirculation of foodstuffs, we have an evident opportunity to stop the planet’s mad dash towards the brink, especially since the world of vegetable food resources is richer and more biodiverse than that of produce of animal origin, especially meat.

NoteS

1) American Dialect Society, 2003 Words of the Year, at http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/20 03_words_of_the_year/

2) McMichael A.J., Powles, J.W., Butler, C.D., Uauy R., ‘Food, livestock production, energy, climate change and health’, fifth in a series of six papers about energy and health by www.thelancet.com at http://www.eurekalert.org/images/release_ graphics/pdf/EH5.pdf

3) Cascio, J., ‘The Cheeseburger Footprint’, at http://openthefuture.com/cheeseburger_CF.html

4) Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI): ‘Water – More Nutrition per Drop; Towards Sustainable Food Production and Consumption Patterns in a Rapidly Changing World’, 2004, at www.siwi.org

5) Neologism recently included in the Oxford American Dictionary and selected as ‘word of the year’. Literally, ‘someone who eats food grown or produced locally’.

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