The ‘Dublin Declaration of Scientists’m on the Societal Role of Livestock’, launched at the Irish government agricultural agency Teagasc in October last year and signed by over 1,000 scientists, and was covered by newspapers including the Telegraph and the New York Post, is a short document that argues for the nutritional, environmental and social benefits of meat-eating. It says that livestock is “too precious to society to become the victim of simplification, reductionism or zealotry”.
But hundreds of pages of emails, meeting minutes and other documents obtained through freedom of information requests reveal that the Declaration was written, released and promoted by agribusiness consultants, and has been used by trade groups and lobbyists to oppose green policies in Europe.
I think we’ve turned a corner. Vegetarian options are getting better and better. Even for an inveterate meat enjoyer like myself, it’s absolutely not a hardship anymore to only eat meat a few times a week.
The meat market has peaked for good.
I do think that we’re about to see a giant generational shift when all the boomers and older gen x die off. There are a lot of people who are mysteriously tying the eating of meat to their identity and won’t budge on the subject.
What’s mysterious about the identification with meat-eating? If you learned to do something wrong, so that you are used to it, it takes severe effort to unlearn it. So, once you are confronted with it being wrong, you can either accept the fact and adjust or if you are not able to have to deal with the cognitive dissonance by strengthening your personality around the wrong and bend the facts in whatever way neccessarry to fit that bill.
I’m referring more to people who were brought up with certain expectations and have never once in their lives considered those expectations. Not just around food, but everything. These same new generations I am referring to will have their own version of the same and some next gen people will complain about them the way we complain about boomers. Remember that we’re all going to be boomers eventually, but not all people are built equal and many can adjust with these changes.
