Fossil fuels usually get everyone’s attention at the annual United Nations climate summit. But at this year’s event in Dubai, COP28another topic generates headlines: food.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Friday saying that the world’s food systems, the source of one third of all greenhouse gas emissions, “to respond to the imperatives of climate change.” On Saturday during the conference, the Biden administration made a national strategy to reduce food waste, a major emitter of methane. And on December 10, the UN is expected to call on countries that consume a lot of meat to eat less of it.
All this news comes after years of urging from scientists and environmentalists who say the only way to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is to do things like limit how much meat we eat in the US and other beef-loving countries. (Livestock alone is responsible for about 15 percent of global climate pollution.)
The problem is that meat consumption is as politically polarizing as ever. Fox Business recently had a heading says world leaders planned to ‘declare a war on meat’ at COP28. “They don’t want solutions, they want a sick, depressed population,” television chef Andrew Gruel said on the social media platform X.
The political right also aims for climate-friendly alternatives to meat, such as cultured chicken and beef, made from cells grown in laboratories. State legislators in Florida recently proposed a bill that would make the sale of cultured meat a second degree misdemeanor. In Europe, the issue was just as partisan. Italy’s right-wing government has just banned the production and sale of cultured meat, ostensibly to protect the country’s culinary heritage. And Germany’s far-right Alternative for Deutschland party has raised fears that the left is coming for their fried chops. “They won’t take away my schnitzel,” a party co-chairman said at a campaign event this fall.
Some of the backlash is probably the result of lobbying by the meat and dairy industries and the distribution of incorrect information on social media. But no matter how good it might be for the planet to end factory farming and to stop turning forests into pastures, researchers say meat is inherently political.
“It’s a political relationship between our species and other species,” says Sparsha Saha, a political scientist who studies meat politics at Harvard University. “That’s what makes it very different. It is not a technology.”
Technological solutions tend to be more popular than lifestyle solutions, although some researchers say both may be necessary to prevent environmental catastrophe. According to a survey across 23 countriespeople in every country except France showed more support for solving the climate crisis through technology and innovation than through change how they live.
Saha’s research suggests that meat is even more polarizing than gas-guzzling cars. In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers, she found that voters are more likely to oppose candidates who advocate limiting emissions by eating less meat than those who talk about the need to limit emissions from transportation.
“It’s like asking us to be a different kind of person,” Saha said. “I think that’s why people are so reticent about it. It’s kind of an expensive thing to bring up. Even as an academic I have to be very thoughtful about how I frame things.”
For Saha, the solution is not to keep meat out of political conversation; it is to talk about it differently and focus on building consensus. Rather than avoiding the issue or pretending it doesn’t have to be political, she thinks the meat-reduction movement would benefit from messages supported by a broader coalition, including religious leaders, hunters and even farmers who oppose factory farming.
“If we had thought more about how this could be communicated well to people ahead of time, maybe we wouldn’t be in this position,” Saha said. “It feels like it’s jumped on people.”
Saha advises against “quiet meat politics,” an idea that in a piece 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 “shuns political partisanship and culture war in favor of creating a technological and infrastructural environment that can achieve long-term sustainable change.”
Smith wrote that plant-based burgers, such as those made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, have a lot of potential to replace animal products, and he predicted that more people would change their diet than those alternatives — as well as “more futuristic” laboratory — cultured meat — became cheaper.
Today, Smith is less optimistic. He told Grist that he is “mindful of the possibility” that plant-based meat will ever meaningfully displace poultry and beef, noting that “we’re still so far from really knowing the scalability, the real potential of cultured meat. ” In his opinion, efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions from farming cannot only focus on replacing beef. They should include the improvement of animal agriculture, such as the development of feed additives that reduce methane. Smith pushed back against the idea that making meat more central to our politics would convince people to eat less of it.
“There is pleasure involved. There is culture involved,” Smith said. “I’m relatively skeptical about the idea that we can distract people and push them ideologically, culturally speaking, towards anything other than that.”
Saha’s paper offers 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 eating meat. This may indicate that meat itself is not as divisive as some think. Perhaps made more partisan by its connection to another polarizing issue: climate change.
