The Place of Meat in Dietary Policy: An Exploration of the Animal/Plant Divide

Introduction

While meat has been cherished as valuable food by most humans during most of their history for its contributions to biosocial well-being and sustenance (Leroy and Praet, 2015; Leroy and De Smet, 2019), its appreciation has become more ambiguous over recent decades (Leroy, 2019). Analysis of mass media communication data on the relationship between meat and health has shown that about half of the news items that were published in the online version of The Daily Mail during the first 15 years of this century represented meat as unhealthy, often in a sensationalist manner (Leroy et al., 2018a). The remaining items were either ambivalent or positive. Since then, the antimeat narrative has only been intensifying. The Guardian, another leading British newspaper, received a $886,600 grant from the Open Philanthropy Project in 2017 to publish a series that paints contemporary animal agriculture as mostly inhumane and harmful to humans and the environment (“Animals farmed”; OPP, 2017). This hard stance is not restricted to mass media as it is also being amplified in scientific literature. Moving to “plant-based” eating is defended by certain academics because it allegedly contributes to public health (e.g., Wolk, 2017), increases food security (e.g., Cassidy et al., 2013), prevents environmental harm (e.g., Poore and Nemecek, 2018), and reduces animal suffering (e.g., Deckers, 2016). Public and academic antimeat narratives are substantially intertwined (Leroy et al., 2018a), which is also reflected in national and global food policies. Below, we will exemplify the current state of affairs with a much debated, ambitious, and influential policy proposal aimed at profound dietary reform: the Planetary Health Diet.

Toward a Great Food Transformation?

In November 2018, a mediatized study argued for a severe meat tax to improve public health (Springmann et al., 2018). Its first author was a member of the EAT-Lancet Commission, a coalition of the nonprofit EAT and the medical journal The Lancet. Later that month, an editorial in that same journal argued that a healthy amount of meat is “very little,” supporting a plea for targeted taxation (Anonymous, 2018). Early 2019, the Commission announced its plan for a Great Food Transformation (Lucas and Horton, 2019). The proposed diet, promoted as the Planetary Health Diet, is nearly vegetarian and allows for a vegan option (Willett et al., 2019). It refers to red meat as “unhealthy,” only allowing a small daily dose (0–14 g).

The Commission is aware that such profound systemic change will fail if left to “the whim of consumer choice” (Willett et al., 2019), making a case for active shaping of public opinion and hard policies. EAT has placed itself within a strategic network by forging an alliance with leading food multinationals. This alliance (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health; https://eatforum.org/initiatives/fresh) comprises members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) who publicly endorse the prospect of a more “plant-based” market (e.g., Gretler, 2018; Wood, 2018). In addition to the WBCSD, EAT connects with various (Silicon Valley-backed) innovative food industries, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods (cf., EAT, 2019). Such companies envisage the elimination of livestock in the next 2 decades (Levitt, 2017; Garcia, 2019). Furthermore, EAT’s network includes global quasigovernmental entities that seem interested in ensuring that those markets are supported politically, including the World Economic Forum (WEF; e.g., Whiting, 2019) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Generally supportive of the Planetary Health Diet (e.g., UNEP, 2019; UN News, 2019), UNEP has also awarded Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods “Champions of the Earth” status in 2018, representing the United Nations’ “highest environmental honor” (UNEP, 2018).

Together with UNEP, the WEF, and the WBCSD, EAT is part of a Global Commons Alliance (http://globalcommonsalliance.org), which also involves its cofounder, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and—among others—the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the World Resources Institute (WRI), and various business-linked platforms (e.g., the Natural Capital Coalition, We Mean Business Coalition, BSR, and Ceres). Together, EAT, the WRI, the WBCSD, and the IIASA constitute the Food and Land Use Coalition, which has proposed a 91% decrease of red meat for Australians by 2050, based on the Planetary Health Diet (Navarro-Garcia et al., 2019). The C40 Cities initiative, another business platform in which EAT (funder) and the WRI (network partner) are operative, has included total dietary exclusion of meat and dairy as one of the “ambitious targets” of its headline report (C40 Cities, 2019a). In October 2019, the mayors of 14 global cities belonging to this initiative (e.g., London, Tokyo, Stockholm, Toronto, and Los Angeles) committed to achieving the Planetary Health Diet for all citizens by 2030 by introducing policies and using their procurement powers (C40 Cities, 2019b).

To redirect consumer choice, the WRI has suggested a set of strategies with varying degrees of compulsion, including taxation, exertion of influence over nutritional labelling and dietary guidelines, stimulation of 30-d diet challenges, nudging and interference at retail level, and the banning of meat from menus (Ranganathan et al., 2016). Although the latter option may seem extreme, it has been advocated by Christina Figueres (quoted in Vella, 2018), who is a member of the WRI’s Board of Directors (WRI, 2019) and the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A plea for a total legal ban on animal products can be found in an academic study financially supported by the Wellcome Trust (Deckers, 2016), one of EAT’s main funders (https://eatforum.org/about/who-we-are).

The EAT forum has not been immune to criticism (Leroy and Cohen, 2019; Sustainable Food Trust, 2019). After being pressured on its environmental claims, its science director declared that “the meat consumption limits proposed by the Commission were not set due to environmental considerations but were solely in light of health recommendations” (quoted in Mitloehner, 2019). The health claims, in turn, were dismissed as “improbable” (Leroy and Cofnas, 2020), “unjustified” (Alan Matthews, Trinity College Dublin’s emeritus professor of agricultural policy, quoted in O’Sullivan, 2019), “flawed” (Zagmutt et al., 2019; Zagmutt et al., 2020), or “science fiction” (John Ioannidis, Stanford University’s professor of medicine, health research, and policy, quoted in Bloch, 2019). The diet was said to overlook local context, risking unintended environmental and health impacts (Tuomisto, 2019), a concern echoed by Ethiopia’s Minister of Agriculture (Gebreyohannes, 2019). Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative to the international organizations in Geneva warned about the impact of “centralized control of our dietary choices” on health, livelihoods, cultural heritage, and freedom of choice, questioning the diet’s scientific basis (Torjesen, 2019), a critique reminiscent of Scrinis’ (2008) concept of “nutritionism.” A coalition of anthropologists made a similar charge, noting that EAT-Lancet’s interventions are aimed at changing individual behavior in a way that ignores what may be truly at the root of endemic poor health: structural inequalities and histories of poverty and dispossession (Burnett et al., 2020).

To understand how the Global Food Transformation was able to acquire such a level of endorsement worldwide despite controversy, a historical perspective is needed to outline its “conditions of possibility”. Such a perspective should help to clarify the deepening of the animal/plant divide, which is also likely to reflect the rise of vegetarianism (cf., Figure 1). We also refer to Hite (2019) for an in-depth exploration of the role of biopower, governmentality, and meta-genre in dietary policy making.

Figure 1.

Use of the word “vegetarian” in books written in English for the period 1800–2008 according to Google Books Ngram Viewer, with the indication of relevant historical periods and events.

Tracing the Origins of the Animal/Plant Divide

Dissolving the Binary

We conclude that the provision of dietary advice to prevent chronic disease or to mitigate environmental concerns that is based purely on objective knowledge and rigorous science is improbable, given the context outlined earlier. In that sense, the Planetary Health Diet does not differ from earlier top-down models in that all of them should be considered as constructs shaped by politics and ideology rather than as empirical sets of rules (Scott, 1998). Regarding diet, they mostly offer a form of nutritionism (Scrinis, 2008) that focuses on the use of nutritional epidemiology to provide links between foods or food components and chronic diseases. The weaknesses and shortcoming of nutritional epidemiology of chronic disease precludes it as a means for establishing cause–effect relationships between foods and health outcomes (Hite, 2018). Regarding the environment, similar issues of weak methods applied to complex issues result in insufficient evidence to create guidance established on strong evidence (Friedberg, 2016). Together, however, these discourses provide measures for moral discourse and social comparison (Hite, 2019). With the rise of the alternative food movement, pleasurable eating became virtuous again but also reshaped the desires of the middle class around specialty products—often more expensive than animal-based foods—that would ostensibly have a lower environmental impact than meat, a trend that can be capitalized on by corporations (Biltekoff, 2013). This is exemplified by UNEP’s praise of vegan burgers (UNEP, 2018), the WRI’s nudging strategies (Bacon et al., 2019), and EAT’s Planetary Health Shopping List (featuring items such as raw tahini, mango, fresh coriander, and nori; https://eatforum.org/learn-and-discover/weekly-shopping-list).

As far as the Planetary Health Diet is concerned, its “conditions of possibility” have only been met recently even though its blueprint goes back about 4 decades to the Dietary Goals and the Maurice Strong network. Increasing income inequality in the middle classes (Finn, 2017), highly mediatized food safety concerns (Leroy et al., 2018a), and alarms raised about climate change have only increased society’s angst about what to eat (Biltekoff, 2013). Meat seems to take much of the blame in that process, acting as a convenient scapegoat (Leroy, 2019). The Great Food Transformation’s insistence on the animal/plant binary should thus be seen primarily as a societal device rather than as the basis for robust nutrition or environmental policy. The evidence underlying its dietary health model is insufficient to warrant such an extreme view on dietary change (Zagmutt et al., 2020), most of it referring to overstated epidemiological studies that suffer from a healthy-user bias (Leroy and Cofnas, 2020), among other concerns (Trepanowski and Ioannidis, 2018). Nutritional epidemiological studies of chronic disease undertaken in the context of this historical discourse, which includes government policy that depicts whole grains as beneficial and red meat as harmful, reflect the eating habits of health-conscious, (upper) middle class professionals, who make up the bulk of the cohorts studied, rather than true diet–disease relationships; these studies were in turn legitimized by shifts in the framework of public health, which portrayed poor health as individual failure (Hite, 2018). As we have outlined, this discourse exceeds physiological grounds because it has been shaped by a range of factors, including ideology (e.g., that meat provokes lust while whole grains generate temperance) as well as pragmatism (e.g., meat was suitable for transport in World War I, while whole grains represented less waste than refined ones). As a result of culturally contingent healthy-user bias, the link between the eating of meat or animal fat and chronic disease observed in the US often tends to vanish when other geographical settings are surveyed (Dehghan et al., 2017; ACC, 2018), which is indicative of health beliefs rather than health effects (Leroy and Cofnas, 2020). As a recent set of papers indicates, both observational studies and clinical trials that attempt to link red meat to chronic disease provide only evidence of the lowest certainty (Vernooij et al., 2019; Zeraatkar et al., 2019). The researchers who performed those analyses assert that there is no way to determine, for any given individual, what the risks or benefits of eating meat might be (Johnston et al., 2019).

In fact, how the conclusions of these studies were received by other nutrition experts once more demonstrates the entanglement of science with other social, cultural, and economic factors. The studies used a rigorous systematic review methodology, known as Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE), to rate the certainty of evidence relating meat to cardiovascular, cancer, and mortality outcomes. The GRADE framework is a transparent and reproducible method for generating recommendations from available evidence, is considered an international standard, and is used by over 65 international organizations, including the World Health Organization (Mustafa et al., 2013). Yet when the aforementioned GRADE meat studies were published, Neal Barnard—president and founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that promotes veganism—accused one of the researchers of undisclosed “conflicts of interest” (Dyer, 2020). The funding in question was not related to the studies at hand and was provided through an extension of Texas A&M University that is a state agency affiliated with an academic institution and thus beyond minimum requirements for disclosure. Yet many interpreted these accusations as evidence of the animal product industry’s efforts to “undercut the work of the medical community,” as Barnard put it (Dyer, 2020). Yet Barnard’s own ideological entanglements can also be used to argue that he was the one attempting to “undermine” the rigorous methods of the GRADE meat papers. If so, he was not alone. Prominent Harvard researcher and first author of EAT-Lancet’s dietary plan Walter Willett joined David Katz, founder and head of the True Health Initiative (THI), in campaigning to have the GRADE meat studies retracted prior to their publication, a very unusual move (Rubin, 2020). The campaign by the THI indicates that Katz broke embargo with the journal that published these studies (Annals of Internal Medicine) in order to generate interest in having the papers retracted. Even as the THI echoed and amplified the potential ties to the meat industry raised by Neal Barnard (who also signed the THI’s request for retraction of the GRADE meat papers), the relationship of the THI to food corporations that make products supporting meat-free diets was seldom mentioned. Although the conclusions of the GRADE meat papers would seem to be as transparent and objective a review of the evidence as is possible, they were called into question by experts with their own economic and ideological interests because they did not align with the narrative produced by the animal/plant binary—that reducing meat consumption will preserve human and planetary health.

The animal/plant binary is thus problematic in many ways. It overstates the harm of animal source foods on both the nutritional and environmental front (White and Hall, 2017; Leroy et al., 2020). Animal agriculture will have to evolve, but it has the potential to meet and even serve the global sustainability agenda (FAO, 2018). Setting up a sustainable food chain without livestock agriculture, including ruminant production, is highly improbable. Moreover, the binary overlooks the vital benefits of animal source foods in the provision of adequate nutrition (Leroy et al., 2018b), from the intake of nutrients to their role in satiety and weight control (Wyness, 2016). The global nutritional challenges mostly relate to the provision of high-quality protein and a wide range of micronutrients (Nelson et al., 2018), in which animal foods play a key role (Leroy and Cofnas, 2020). Finally, the binary also risks giving the false impression that all is fine on the plant side of the division, which is far from being the case (Leroy et al., 2020). However, like the ties to industry maintained by the THI, these are seldom investigated or discussed.

Conclusions

The praxis of dietary reform during the last 200 years has resulted in the contemporary advice to eat less meat and more grains, vegetables, nuts, and fruit. It has contributed to the formation of an animal/plant divide, which amplifies its own message through the mechanism of healthy-user bias, affecting epidemiological literature through positive feedback. As an act that is both moral and scientific, “eating right” (e.g., less or no meat) has come to overrule tradition and preference, being at the same time consistent with the interests of the industrial order. Governmental intervention is welcomed by drawing support from the middle classes and activating social engineering. This evolution is problematic as food is no longer about culture, diversity, adequate nutrition, or even sustainability but is about how technocrats and their industrial allies measure and uniformize dietary needs within normative discourse, in view of societal management. The excessive focus on “plant-based” policies is not only counterproductive but also potentially harmful. It distracts from the actual planetary priorities that society should be dealing with, namely the root causes of climate change and inadequate nutrition because of nutrient-poor diets.