People are used to seeing stark warnings on tobacco products alerting them about the potentially deadly risks to health. Now a study suggests similar labelling on food could help them make wiser choices about not just their health, but the health of the planet.
The research, by academics at Durham University, found that warning labels including a graphic image – similar to those warning of impotence, heart disease or lung cancer on cigarette packets – could reduce selections of meals containing meat by 7-10%.
It is a change that could have a material impact on the future of the planet. According to a recent YouGov poll, 72% of the UK population classify themselves as meat-eaters. But the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the government on its net zero goals, has said the UK needs to slash its meat consumption by 20% by 2030, and 50% by 2050, in order to meet them.
This seems like rather an optimistic headline, seeing as the article also says that the results from the study were “not statistically signifiant”.
Considering how meat is in most things, you’d think that it would just oversaturate people with warnings, and they would just end up ignoring it. Similar to how people more or less ignore California’s Proposition 65 in the USA, because it’s so broad, and the thresholds are so low that basically everything has a label saying “This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer”. Anything significant gets lost in the noise.
“how can we shift responsibility to the consumer today?”
Eh, in all fairness the meat & dairy industry is one thing that we as consumers really do need to take a bulk of responsibility for. I say that as a devout meat eater.
BUT, governments could go a long way by not subsidising dairy and meat and instead subsidising protein alternatives. It’s fucking nuts to me that it costs more for me to buy plant protein.
(Before the die hard vegans come at me saying you don’t need to eat pseudo (plant) proteins to eat less meat, please remember you’re trying to convert people that are familiar and enjoy one diet to another. You’re not going to encourage anyone by advocating a cold-turkey or 0% meat approach. I hate that I have to put this disclaimer here, but I’m fed up with arguing with puritanical vegans that overshadow pragmatism.)
No, we don’t.
the meat & dairy industry is one thing that we as consumers really do need to take a bulk of responsibility for
No, the capitalists that put profit before the well being of the planet, the consumer, and their products are to blame and should be held responsible, not the people just trying to live their lives under a system imposed on us for the benefit of a small few (and before the die hard vegans come at me - I am a vegan, I just don’t think the problems we’re facing are because other people eat meat, but because capitalism has made meat in to an industry).
meat & dairy industry is one thing that we as consumers really do need to take a bulk of responsibility for.
wrong.
Whose responsibility is it what to consume, if not the consumer’s?
consumption doesn’t emit greenhous gasses: production does. who is responsible for production?
What method of producing meat that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases do you propose?
“Consumption doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, production does”, that doesn’t really make sense. If no one consumed meat one year, much less meat would be produced the next year, leading to less greenhouse gases.
it seems like you understand that all the emissions are in the production but you’re incredulous and proposing and impossible hypothetical to support your position.
This is a salty comments section. Can’t even tell who’s salty or why, but they definitely are.
You should salt, generally season, your board, not the steak. Unless you actually brine/marinate the thing.
Ah, so that’s why this message board is so salty
I hate this idea. My appetite can be ruined by stuff like this, and that would suck to throw away food since I can’t eat it
You probably wouldn’t buy it, which is the point.
I remember when these were introduced on cigarette packs. For a while there was a trend of “collecting all the pics”, while other found a nice business in selling “cigarette pack holder” that would just mask the pictures. I’m not sure any of that was the initial goal.
I wonder how applying this to food would turn out, seeing that a fair share of people are well informed of the effect we have on the climate already but simply don’t care.
I watched this video about how reducing meat consumption isn’t the silver bullet it’s made out to be. I’d really like to hear what other people think about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g
I haven’t watched this video, but I do wanna point out that this channel also made a video called “vegan diets don’t work”, which was full of correlation = causation, cherry picking or straight up misrepresenting data, and just generally going against the scientific consensus on several key issues in that video.
I’m strapped for time, so I’ll just paste one of the comments under that video here:
Veganism is not healthy because more than 50% of vegans quit -> following the same logic: exercising is not healthy because 90% of people quit after the first 3 months
- Bases knowledge of Western Prices almost century-old studies (1927 and 1939) instead of relying on the most recent state-of-the-art studies
- Refined foods = Veganism (folowing this logic, white bread is only eaten by vegans)
- Netherlands and Montenegro have the tallest people in the world and at the same time they drink a lot of milk, this is correlation and not causation.
- The study itself overlooked individuals and instead focused on average, this is an ecological fallacy. We could say the same about smoking, if you plot smoking and timespan per country we could say the more people smoke the longer their lifespan is, which is ridiculous.
See for yourself the remaining of the video, this continues on!
So probably take this one with a big grain of salt.
The video isn’t really about debunking veganism on an individual level. It’s more about the benefits of cows to society and avoiding waste.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
oh, god, it’s the “What I failed to learn” channel.
For everyone one of his meat shilling videos there are dozens of debunking videos. Doesn’t matter because people love to watch good news about bad habits.
Can you DM me a debunking video? I like to hear both sides
LOL. Big oil is hard at work. They want to get out of this one scot-free with their “mah quarterly profits”. Now they’re running after people’s food. Get the fuck outta here with this shit. I don’t care what they put on the package, I’m still eating my food. You go enjoy your private jets, yachts and billions of dollars and let me at least enjoy a fucking steak/burger. I hate this shit so much.
Yeah it’s going to stop people from eating what ever shit that’s available for the cheapest price to continue living. I’m pretty sure this is just another bullshit study to talk about how people should eat healthy while they don’t have budget or means to…
Edit: It seems many of you missed the meaning of what I’m talking about! Poor people who eat fast food, chicken or whatever processed meat products available for cheap not going to give a fuck about what their meat is labeled. Meat just doesn’t mean the steak people buy from the market! If this is so hard for you imbeciles to understand without getting triggered because someone said something you don’t understand than there is no need for further discussion. Processed meat consumption (including all kinds of meat beef, lamb, pork, chicken even fish) is the cheapest protein source for poor people. This study is disregarding how poor people do their food shopping. Until so called I can’t believe it’s meat type of vegetarian alternatives come to the point of real meat poor people going to continue to eat meat. And all you butt hurt so called activist can’t even see the difference because you have your head up so high up your high horses to realize what the fuck is normal people going through. Now kindly please go fuck yourselves and don’t comment any more unless you have an actual and feasible solution.
have you seen the prices of beans and rice?? i save a lotta money by not eating meat. even with the outrageous subsidies poured into meat it can still hardly compare.
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It’s weird hearing my dad and sister complain about how expensive meat is. Today i shopped pretty cheap, although i didn’t have to buy meat.
And i just sit there and think: oh man if only there was any alternative.meat simply has better protein options
what kinda high protein low fat and carb options are there for veggie folk?
id like to substitute chicken breast occasionally. i looked into tofu but its super fatty for pretty mid protein. beans high carb mid protein. lowfat plain greek yogurt and cottage cheese are NICE protein but taste like literal dogshit though its so close to being worth trying to stomach.
im on the search for more macro friendly foods that don’t taste like sour liquid chalk
Sure there’s people that just buy what’s cheaper. But there’s also people who consciously make the choice of eating meat having the possibility of not doing so. It makes sense to target that part of the population.
Now, if subsidies to the meat and dairy industry was redericted to plant-based farming, then the only reason left to consume animals would be people’s choice of personal pleasure over ethical and environmental factors
Ha! Love it! Do it! Not like there is any lack of studies to show the health dangers of meat.
- Conclusion: Red and processed meat intakes were associated with modest increases in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality.
- The study found that people who ate two servings per week of red meat or processed meat had a 3% to 7% higher risk (respectively) of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, and a 3% higher risk of death from all causes.
- observed strong correlations of dietary HCA intake and consumption of fried and processed meat with DNA adduct levels in breast tissue of 44 women
Won’t ever happen in the US tho. The meat industry is so protective that a lot of states have food libel laws, as well as gag laws that’s limit filming of slaughter houses. If something is so obviously safe, weird how you can’t talk about it’s risks or show its production.
We can’t forget how wasteful meat is as a food supply. Which is sorta obvious when you think about it for 5 seconds. Feeding cows edible food, drinkable water, on farmable land for several years to only get a handful of meals out of them is just silly inefficient.
And that’s just the data, not even going in to ethics. Which, come on. Cut a cow, they bleed, yell and flee. If you cut their young, they attack. Just like we do. Does it matter if they can’t talk? The question is, can they suffer? (yes)
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A hundred and twenty years from now: “officials announce plans to label beetle burgers for their high calorie counts in hopes that consumers begin to gravitate toward the more abundant and cheaper mosquito burgers”
“Vegan advocacy groups continue to lament the abuse of the beetle population. ‘Beetle lives matter’ says Sue Johnson of the group, while holding her designer luxury leather handbag”.
Go with eco-friendly cement and enforce car pooling. That would have far better effect than meat consumption.
We need to do all of it, it’s not an either-or. That luxury is long gone.
Cattle don’t have any impact though.
That’s a weird take. Methane emissions are one impact, land use change another. There are even studies arguing in both directions.
Meat production is a main driver of rainforest deforestation. All three of these claims are well documented and easily searchable.
So either way, it’s evidently wrong to say cattle don’t had any impact.
There’s no rainforest in the UK.
Eyup… Energy, construction and transport contributes the most, with energy being the mother of all emissions:
The right way to read that chart is “20% of emissions is in making energy for people, 70% of emissions is making energy for literally everything else”. If you consider that my other major personal sources of emissions are driving, domestic heat/hot water, and electricity, that’s saying 1/5 of my personal emissions are just from what it takes to provide my food.
But meat is damaging for more reasons than emissions. It’s also a major source of excessive water consumption, land use, antibiotic resistance, and pollution of potable water sources (runoff from excrement and chemicals used in the production of food for livestock, which is actually the majority of food grown…which is another reason…it’s just inefficient AF. Our food eats way more food than we do, and almost all necessary micro and (and all macronutrients) are available directly from the plants anyway.
I’m not saying we all need to be plant based, but the typical American diet is far too focussed on the meat. It’s practically heresy to go a meal without consuming the flesh or excretions of at least one beast. Simply put I think it’s unsustainable to continue consuming meat at this rate, and literally impossible to change the meat industry to grow meat more ethically and sustainably (as in, there isn’t enough arable land in the world to sustainably and “ethically” (in the modern sense of free range/pasture raised-and-finished, limited antibiotic use, etc) grow meat at the rates we are consuming it. I think it’s more immediately achievable to change that attitude and reduce consumption first and foremost.
Also I do agree that roads should be made of more sustainable materials (though improving mass transit would be an even bigger win, IMO. Make sections of cities car-free (save for emergency services, local deliveries, trash pickup, busses, etc) easily accessible and interlinked by mass transit and park-and-rides from the suburbs. Make most commutes by train/subway faster and easier than driving and people will switch. Bikes and scooters available at every stop. Make employers provide transit and bike/scooter passes. Incentivize employers having hybrid and WFH environments. So much stuff we could be doing, but tearing up or paving over roads that still have useful life left in them shouldn’t be among them.
That’s all false though.
lol but not on gas? Plastic?
Waste of money and time.
Please focus on curbing your own satisfaction, so the oil industry can continue to be the biggest polluter AND make money hand over fist.
Since around 2018 we have known that agriculture, specifically the raising of cattle, spews out more harmful emissions than the oil industry does.
😂 mind adding a source for that?
Any study that also includes indirect greenhouse gas emissions such as methane, and not just CO2.
There are NO emissions from cattle at all! Cattle eat grass, then fart, then “emissions” precipitate and new grass grows up. It’s a closed loop. And since it’s a closed loop, there are zero emissions. Emissions only happen when you dig up oil, burn it and it and your smoke doesn’t get converted back to oil.
Thanks for giving me the dumbest shit I’ve heard today.
Lolwut?
It doesn’t.
I’m not eating Soylent so you can reduce carbon emissions. why don’t you put some restrictions on breeding?
soylent is awesome.
it’s fine but it ain’t no cheezburger
Ask them to make a cheeseburger flavor.
Unless they can make it also kill an animal, I ain’t interested. The suffering is necessary for the flavor.
