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meat consumption
We Don't Face Crisis of Scarcity or a Population, But a Crisis of Capitalism
We must explicitly name the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.
Jul 25, 2025
Mounting concern over declining birth rates, the devastation of the climate crisis, and a rising conservative pronatalist movement have led to a renewed focus on population. People across the political spectrum express show up on both sides of the debate, whether about the economic challenges of an aging population, our planet’s destruction (and its very real human toll), or pushing a regressive agenda.
Late last month, The New York Times published “Depopulation is Coming, Don’t Expect it to Solve Our Problems.” I read it eagerly. Economists Michael Geruso and Dean Spears do make important points. They write: “Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.” Here, here! And, in making their argument against depopulation, they also share a vision for the future where systemic barriers driving birth rates down, like the high duress placed on mothers, are no longer so prominent.
Those are great points, but they don’t tell the whole story and we need to be honest about the real crisis.
These questions bring me back to the beginning of my life’s work. The authors reference Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which argued that, if the population kept growing, humanity would implode from famine or disease due to a lack of resources. It came out when I was a young woman and took the world by storm.
When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play.
I wondered, “Is this true?” The resulting research led me to write my first book, Diet for a Small Planet (1971), which proved that our growing population was not the problem. Instead, concerns over scarcity—at least in the realm of food—pointed to a larger culprit: Concentrated corporate power and extreme economic inequality which together promoted meat-centered diets.
In a moment when population is again in the limelight and meat-based diets are increasingly valorized, I want to return to the argument I made then. It feels more important than ever.
About three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land is devoted to livestock that provide only about 11% of our calories. And just four corporations—JBS, Tyson Foods, and Cargill, and National Beef—control over three-quarters of the global beef market. In pork, three firms account for two-thirds.
We can see concentrated power still hard at work here. Meat is the most inefficient way to feed ourselves.
Here’s the key point: Meat production is not only wasteful, it’s incredibly destructive. For one, it furthers destruction of carbon-absorbing rainforests while adding cattle-emitting methane—a particularly intense greenhouse gas. According to one report, “Cows pack such a punch that, if they were a nation, ‘cow country’ would rank as the world’s sixth worst greenhouse gas emitter.” And, tragically, cattle farming alone is responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation.
These mega-corporations—with their substantial hold on the meat market—have no real reason to slow or stop their production; instead, they profit, while we bear the brunt of the destruction.
Let’s return to the question of population. We know that the meat industry—as one of the big drivers of our climate crisis—is a huge part of creating scarcity-based depopulation rhetoric. At the same time, we know that depopulation is no longer an idea simply made mainstream by Ehrlich et al., but a reality driven by declining birth rates.
The decline in birth rates is a phenomenon across the West, but the U.S. has a distinct landscape. In a 40-country comparison, we come in 38th—third worst—for childcare affordability. For single parents in the United States, a gargantuan 32% of income is spent on childcare. According to The Guardian, in Massachusetts, infant care costs almost $27,000 per year on average--“21% more than the average rent, and 83% more than in-state tuition at a public college.”
While the cost of childcare is mind-boggling, it’s not a stand-alone issue: We are in a full-blown cost of living crisis. The U.S.’ median income is just over $80,000 a year, yet to live comfortably in Mississippi—the U.S.’s most affordable state--a family of four would need to make around $190,000 in 2025. All of this in a nation where the richest 1% of Americans make 139 times as much as the bottom 20%.
When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play. This means explicitly naming the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.
We face neither a crisis of scarcity nor a crisis of population. Rather, we face a crisis of capitalism.
The solution is a democratic economy with rules against monopoly and an adequate safety net that provides the resources we all need to thrive.
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'Less Meat, Less Heat': China's Plan to Drop Meat Consumption Gets Praise
New dietary guidelines would reduce the country's livestock-related carbon emissions by 1 billion tons by 2030
Jun 21, 2016
Climate advocates are praising the Chinese government's new dietary guidelines, which are designed to cut meat consumption in half. This would reduce the country's livestock-related carbon emissions by 1 billion tons by 2030.
Li Junfeng, director general of China's National Center on Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, said that if China's population of 1.3 billion took up the new guidelines, released once every 10 years, "it is expected that the livestock industry will transform and carbon emissions will be reduced."
The average person in China currently eats 63 kilograms (138 lbs) of meat yearly, which amounts to 28 percent of the world's meat. The Chinese Nutrition Society (CNS), in partnership with the advocacy groups WildAid, Climate Nexus, and My Plate My Planet, is now advocating that consumers reduce that to 27 kg (39 lbs). That would prompt a 1.5 percent drop in global emissions, more than France and Belgium's entire yearly output combined.
Notably, the average person in the U.S. eats twice as much meat as in China.
"Tackling climate change involves scientific judgement, political decisions, entrepreneurial support, but at last, it still relies on involvement of the general public to change the consumption behavior in China," Li said. "Every single one of us has to believe in the low-carbon concept and slowly adapt to it."
To encourage Chinese citizens to respond to the campaign, the CNS and WildAid have enlisted celebrities such as actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, American film director James Cameron, and Chinese actress and singer Li Bingbing to spread the word through public service commercials and other advertisements.
The campaign, launched with the tagline " Less Meat, Less Heat, More Life," comes after more than 170 nations signed the Paris Agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep global temperature rise to under 2 degrees Celsius. It also coincides with a report by WildAid showing that livestock emissions account for 14.5 percent of total global greenhouse gas output.
"China's move to cut meat consumption in half would not only have a huge impact on public health, it is also a massive leadership step towards drastically reducing carbon emissions and reaching the goals set out in the Paris Agreement," Cameron said. "Livestock emits more than all transportation combined. Reducing demand for animal-based foods is essential if we limit global warming to two degrees Celsius as agreed at COP21."
Climate Nexus and My Plate My Planet will distribute English-language versions of the ads in the U.S., where there are currently no limits on meat consumption.
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World Health Organization Links Red Meat to Cancer - Time to Eat Less and Eat Better
Oct 26, 2015
Americans' love affair with meat - we already knew - has some supersized impacts on the environment, from its intensive use of water to the enormous carbon footprint, as well as our nutritional health.
And today we learned more about its supersized impact on public health. Eating processed meats like bacon and hot dogs causes bowel cancer, while eating red meat (including beef and veal, pork, goat and lamb) probably is carcinogenic to humans. That's the conclusion of the World Health Organization's authoritative International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which classifies red meat as a Group 2a carcinogen. The findings were published in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Processed meat was classified as Group 1, carcinogenic to humans - the strongest possible designation, like tobacco and asbestos. The classifications describe the strength of the scientific evidence, not the potency of the carcinogen. WHO's analysis estimates that for every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily, the risk of bowel cancer rises by about 18%.
A Group 2a classification means there is strong evidence from studies in animals to label red meat as probably cancer-causing, combined with limited evidence from human studies that also shows eating red meat to be positively associated with developing bowel cancer in the colon or rectum. There also is science linking red meat consumption with prostate cancer and pancreatic cancer. Cancers of the colon and rectum are the 2nd most common cause of cancer-related deaths in American men and women, with nearly 50,000 deaths expected in 2015.
These are WHO's two highest cancer classifications. The risk rises with the amount of meat consumed. It would not be good medicine to wait longer before strongly advising the public to eat less red meat, especially less processed meat. WHO recommendations also include eating diets higher in whole grains and vegetables and limiting red and processed meats because of evidence that dietary fiber protects against cancer.
Luckily, the WHO's ruling comes on the heels of a growing trend toward eating less and better meat in America. American red meat consumption has already dropped about 25% since the mid-1970s. But Americans, on average, still eat about 1.9 lbs of red meat per week - approaching double the E.U.-recommended amount of no more than 500 grams (1.1 lbs) of cooked red meat per week.
Yet, if history is any guide, Big Meat will likely resist the new IARC classification and try to undermine the well-considered opinions of nutrition and health experts.
Happily, Big Meat doesn't represent the entire industry, so when people eat red meat, they can also make better choices. Producers of better meat are meeting an increasing share of the red meat consumed today—meat from well-stewarded farms and ranches, from animals raised more humanely and with no or reduced hormones and antibiotics.
How red meat is produced is a major health issue for the animals, of course, but also for people. Recent announcements by meat and restaurant companies, including Subway, underscore what the CDC, NRDC, and others have long maintained - giving human antibiotics routinely to healthy animals has helped create a superbug problem. And that's a problem we can no longer ignore or tolerate.
Companies like Panera and Chipotle show that this approach to buying meat can be good for public health and business. While sales of conventional meat are flat or declining, sales of healthier, more sustainably-produced meats are up.
And because meat products can be some of the most resource intensive to produce, eating less - and more sustainably raised - meat can reduce the impact of the conventional meat industry on our land, water, air and climate.
The bottom line is to eat less and eat better meat. Better for you, better for the planet. With Thanksgiving approaching, that's a change for which we could all be thankful.
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