You and I. The people who regard themselves as environmentally conscious individuals. With all our means, we are the people who replace our plastic straws with metal ones, single-use coffee cups with reusable cups, plastic bags with eco bags, and countless other environmentally friendly alternatives. While our effort to restore and decelerate climate change is undeniable, and endless awareness raised around the issues of global warming, animal extinction and rising sea levels all deserve acknowledgements. However, we often are blinded by the number of carbon emissions by driving our cars or flying our planes that we become oblivious to the ever-increasing number of emissions from the production of the meat we consume. The meat that we eat is simply just tender, juicy and an irresistible sensation. It is hard to describe what makes meat so fitting to our palate, and hard to admit the problems that it has left after our knives and forks. 

Here in New Zealand, we are the world’s 4th largest meat consumer, and this is only made possible by killing 24,000 animals every 10 seconds. This is only possible when there are 1 billion pigs, 1 billion sheep, 1.5 billion cows and 23 billion chickens. And this is only possible when 40% of all our Greenhouse Gas emissions are from the animals that we farm to eat. The land, water, and emissions are rapidly becoming unsustainable. Yet we still spare 50,000 litres of water just to produce 1kg of beef. With demand for meat that only seems to be increasing, we refuse to acknowledge that meat is one of the least efficient ways to feed people. For every 100g of plant protein fed to a cow, it ends up as just 4g of protein in our beef. If every country in the world was to produce and devour meat as we do, then every square metre of habitable land would have to be used to feed people. It still wouldn’t be enough. We would actually need two of our Earth just to satisfy our hunger for meat. 

Things weren't always this way. Ever since the discovery of our meat-eating culture, we bred wild oxen into cows, wild boars into pigs and Red Jungle fowls into chickens. It is our technology that enabled us to satisfy our desire for 80 billion slaughtered animals every year. Back in the 1950s when chicken meat was still a foreign wonder to our menu, the size of a chicken then was roughly the size of a bird. But through selective breeding, growth hormones, fortified feed and drugs, our well-engineered chicken today is so big that it must be killed at 5 weeks of age. So big that if any more time or mercy is spared to that living being, its legs can no longer hold up the mass of its own body. 

As eating animals no longer involves seeing anything that looks like an animal. Animal agribusiness makes it easy for you and me to distance ourselves from the reality of what we’re eating. Many of us are uncomfortable eating meat that resembles the animal it once was. We have progressed from freshly slaughtered animals to canned meat such as Spam, or processed meat such as chicken nuggets. Therefore we camouflage the actual source of the meat. So we don’t say cow, we say we are eating beef. And we don’t say we are eating pig, we’re eating pork.

New Zealand and many other top meat eaters are all doing this. From sacrificing the previous water to raise animals for meat, to pushing the efficiency of meat production using technology and as hidden as concealing the reality of our food with language. We have reached the biological limits with what we can do with whole animals, and we are also reaching the limit of how many farm animals we can raise to fit on our planet. We’re not just going to simply lose that craving because we wake up and recognize that meat is problematic. But the truth is, we do not have to become vegan or vegetarian to reach the pinnacle of restoring and putting a brake on climate change. Because if everyone just all reduces our meat intake to the recommended consumption from credible medical authorities of 500 grams per week, that can substantially slow global warming down by 15% by 2050. Which would be the equivalent of taking 1 billion cars off the streets each year. These changes that we must make to our diets are not only beneficial for our environment but also happen to do the same for our health. Since most of us are already eating twice as much meat as we need to maintain a healthy and balanced diet, we can begin to tackle this environmental obstacle by having 1 no-meat day per week. Or the next time when we eat a pork chop, think about a pig locked up in a massed feeding slot, it might take us one step closer to being the environmentally conscious person we regard ourselves to be, and the meat conscious person we want to be. While not all of us can afford to buy those new and efficient electric cars, or install solar panels on our roofs to maximize the reduction of our carbon footprints. I’m sure we can all afford to purchase one less tray of meat on our next supermarket visits. As Sir Philip Wollen, an animal rights activist has once said: “The Earth is enough for everyone’s needs but is never enough for everyone’s greed”.