The "Eat Local" myth pervades

How Big Ag is distorting the climate science around animal agriculture

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This post gives a brief look at the “Eat Local” myth i.e. the false belief that the best way to reduce your food-related emissions is to consume local products. It combines some of the above topics and it became particularly salient when the Social Change Lab (the org I run) was analysing public opinion polling data for Animal Rebellion. In a nutshell, we knew Animal Rebellion was planning a highly disruptive campaign at the beginning of September, which would involve stopping the supply of milk to a range of supermarkets in the South East of England. We thought this was an interesting opportunity to conduct some bespoke public opinion polling before and after this campaign, to see if there was any impact of public opinion as a result of these actions. 

You can read the full report on this polling here. However, the cost of living crisis, new Prime Minister and Queen’s death meant that Animal Rebellion struggled to break through in any meaningful way, and there was relatively little public awareness of Animal Rebellion’s campaign. As a result, we found no changes for any of the variables we measured. However, we did uncover some other interesting results.

One of the questions we asked presented our 1,700 nationally representative respondents with a list of government interventions that could help reduce emissions from the animal agriculture industry. We listed some options that there was pretty good existing science on, so we could tell whether the public generally had accurate beliefs on this issue. Somewhat unsurprisingly, we found a big gap between the actual best ways and what the general public believed were the best. You can see the results in the chart below.

We find that public perceptions on the best ways to reduce carbon emissions from animal agriculture are not just off by a small margin, but they’re basically anti-correlated. In less jargon, public beliefs are close to the exact opposite of what one would put if they were to rank these policies by greenhouse gas abatement potential alone. 

More specifically, respondents suggested eating local animal products was the best way to reduce carbon emissions from the animal agriculture industry, whereas Poore & Nemecek (2019) suggests that transport only makes up around 10% of a food’s life cycle emissions. In comparison, land use and farm-stage emissions account for around 80% of total greenhouse gas emissions for most food. This is highlighted below in a graph from Our World in Data, who have some great research on this exact topic. Overall, there seems to be an overestimation by the public in how eating local products can tackle climate change, when the reality is that eating local matters far less than the actual products you consume. Put bluntly, it’s better to eat chickpeas from Morocco than eat beef from England.

Additionally, the public also thinks that organic farming is an effective way to reduce carbon emissions, but this also isn’t the case. For example, Clark & Tilman (2017) finds that on average, organic food uses more land and other resources, without reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely another aspect where the public overestimates the carbon reduction impact of various food changes. This is also true for breeding cows that produce less methane, which only offers a modest reduction of 19% in greenhouse gases production, relative to a 50% emissions reduction from switching from a standard UK animal-based to a plant-based diet.

Why does the UK public have such misguided beliefs on how to reduce emissions from meat and dairy? It’s probably in no part due to advertising campaigns and the power of Big Ag. A recent investigation by Greenpeace found that the animal agriculture industry is funding scientists at top universities to basically cast doubt on the fact that meat and dairy accounts for around 14.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

In the UK, we have something called the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, which does the following: 

Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board helps to make Great Britain’s livestock, dairy and agriculture sectors more successful, providing market information to improve supply chain transparency and stimulating demand in the UK and export markets.

AHDB is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the [UK Government] Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. [emphasis mine]

This just seems ridiculous. Whilst the UK Committee on Climate Change is telling the Government that we need to be cutting meat and dairy consumption by at least 20% by 2030, there’s another governmental body that is actively working to stimulate demand?! This has to be one of the worst uses of public money that I’ve heard of - We’re literally paying taxes for opposing government bodies to advocate against each other. 

It’s not just the UK Committee on Climate Change either. There was the National Food Strategy, commissioned by DEFRA, that advocated for a 30% reduction in meat consumption by 2030, for both public health and climate reasons. Despite this, the Government’s latest Food Strategy seems to be a total missed opportunity with no substantive interventions to reduce animal product consumption.

Sadly, it gets worse. COP26, one of the most important climate conferences for the past decade, had a menu where more than half the menu items consisted of animal products. Why is this? This helpful quote from Sentient Media allows us to see the full extent of the Eat Local myth:

Livestock producers were selected as suppliers for a simple reason: being based within 100 miles of Glasgow.

It’s somewhat staggering that the most influential climate conference is buying into the Eat Local myth of food emissions. For a glance at the items served during COP26 and their respective greenhouse gas emissions, you can see the chart below. 

What can we do about this? There are a few half-baked (and maybe quite high-level) ideas I have:

• Campaigns to ban meat and dairy advertising in cities. This has already happened in the Dutch city of Haarlem, and similar campaigns are underway in the UK.  I think this can be quite an exciting grassroots campaign for both climate and animal advocacy groups to align behind, particularly ones that have a focus on local groups around the country. Supposedly 68% of the public supports a ban on advertising environmentally harmful products, so public support definitely seems to be there. I’m particularly excited about this so hopefully some animal or climate organisations team up with Adfree Cities to push this even further! If you’re interested, you can see a list of existing groups here.

• Climate and animal advocacy organisations should do more public communications on this topic. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are somewhat doing this (Greenpeace much better in my opinion) but it still seems under-represented given animal agriculture produces 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s an area that I’ve seen few animal advocacy organisations wade into to, and it might be important for shaping public perceptions around meat going forward.

• Pressure climate organisations to focus more on dispelling the Eat Local myth. Extinction Rebellion was barely talking about the impact of animal farming on the planet until Animal Rebellion came in and shook things up. Now, XR has made a few fairly bold posts platforming the issue.

• Shift the Overton window of the food debate. The Overton window describes a range of policies that are politically acceptable to the mainstream population. Currently, I think the Overton Window around climate and food vaguely looks like the diagram below (in a very rough manner I mocked up in 10 minutes).

How do we fix this? People like George Monbiot can helpfully make claims that might fit into the “radical” section, by writing books like Regenesis and emphasising why the farming industry is one of the most destructive ever, specifically focusing on organic and pasture-fed animal products. In an achievable and hopefully near-term world, I would like it to look like:

On a totally different note - our survey results also contain some good news for animal advocates in regards to the small animal replacement problem. In short, the small animal replacement problem refers to an issue where climate advocates might encourage the public to replace beef with chicken to lower their carbon footprint, which inadvertently leads to a larger number of animals being killed. Our survey finds that very few people think this is the best strategy to reduce carbon emissions from animal agriculture, and that it is less effective than simply eating more plant-based food.

As someone who thinks farmed animals have morally important lives, and that their lives are often full of terrible suffering, this is one piece of good news.