The British government’s “food czar” says that Britons need to eat less meat for farmland to be used sustainably – while acknowledging that getting them to do so will be nearly impossible.
Henry Dimbleby, lead non-executive board member of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told The Guardian that the only way to meet the United Kingdom’s climate and biodiversity targets would be to dedicate less land to feeding cattle. Some 85% of all agricultural land in England is used either for pasture or to grow crops that feed livestock.
Dimbleby estimated that for British land to be used more sustainably, Britons would have to consume 30% less meat over the next 10 years. “It’s an incredibly inefficient use of land to grow crops, feed them to a ruminant or pig or chicken which then over its lifecycle converts them into a very small amount of protein for us to eat,” he said.
He added, however, that meat is so integral a part of the British diet that asking for substantial reductions in its consumption would be politically toxic: “The government would fall in a fortnight if it implemented a meat tax.”
