A View from the 'Hill

today's China Post editorial:


For our global health make Mondays meat-free

Meat was very much in the news last week.

First, the chairman of the Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy called on citizens to eat less meat. Citing Council of Agriculture statistics, Eugene Chien told the Council for Economic Planning and Development that, in consuming an average of 77.1 kilograms of meat each year--more than 200g per day--the Taiwanese ate the most meat in East Asia. This is 27 percent more than that eaten in China, almost double that eaten by Japanese and Koreans, and very similar to the figures for Germany and the United States.

This bad for our health: Taiwan's average life expectancy has risen to around 78.6 years, similar to that of Germans and Americans, but is still far behind the 82.6 of Japanese. Moreover, since producing one kilogram of beef causes emissions of 36 kilograms of carbon dioxide as well as more than 100 other air pollutants, Chien said, it is bad for the planet too.

A 2006 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization surprised many people with its findings that animal food production was responsible for 18 percent of climate-change emissions, more than those of all forms of transportation combined. It is now thought even that figure was too low, and that production of meat, milk, eggs, cheese and so forth contributes as much as half the effects of all such emissions, largely because the methane and nitrous oxide produced are far more potent global-warming gases than carbon dioxide.

It was less of a surprise, therefore, when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called on people around the world to eat less meat. He described becoming vegetarian as the single most significant action an individual person can take to reduce carbon emissions.

While some meat-eaters responded directly to this challenge, others felt it was too great a cultural leap. As a first step towards this goal, therefore, some advocate eating no meat one or two days a week. In Taiwan, this was taken up by, among others, the Meatless Mondays movement.

Part of an international campaign initiated in association with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, this group admits that cutting meat consumption by 15 percent would only be a first step. It targets therefore Mondays for abstention since this is typically the first day of the working week and psychologically acts as a new start. It hopes that the vegetarian habit will thus encroach further into people's lives.

The second meat-related report in these pages last week came from Taiwan's own Nobel laureate, chemist Lee Yuan-tseh. The former president of Academia Sinica said that global warming would be much more serious than scientists previously thought, and that Taiwanese people needed to cut their per-capita carbon emissions from the current 12 tons per year to just three.

This, he said, would take more than a few slogans, turning off the lights for one hour, or cutting meat consumption. In fact, Lee claimed, “We will have to learn to live the simple lives of our ancestors.” Without such efforts, he said, Taiwanese will be unable to face the next generation.

Be that as it may, a third report, reproduced from a scientific publication, presented more reasons for giving up meat. The craving for junk-food that can drive some people to overeat operates through the same molecular pathways that cause addiction to drugs, researchers found. As the body became less sensitive to the “feel-good” brain chemical dopamine, there was a progressive worsening of the reward response, and more frequent stimulation was needed, they said. Hence the slippery slope from casual drug use to addiction and the similar transition from over-eating to compulsive indulgence.

As Meatless Mondays campaigners point out, the case against meat, and not just fast food, is convincing. Taiwanese people's 200-plus grams of meat is almost half more than the recommended daily maximum, and meat typically contains more saturated fats than plant foods. These saturated fats are responsible for numerous preventable illnesses, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancers. Consumption of red and processed meats is particularly correlated to lower life expectancy. This is an issue which affects everybody, since treating these chronic illnesses costs the Bureau of Health Insurance billions of dollars a year. Consequently, some more radical campaigners are demanding a tax on meat.

Finally, since meat production requires around 10 times more water than equivalent quantities of soy and around 20 times as much fossil-fuel energy per calorie of protein produced, with the earth's finite water and energy resources coming under increasingly bitter dispute, these are concerns that will not go away.

So, whether one agrees with Pachauri that eating less meat might save the planet, or with Lee that we need to head back toward the Stone Age, perhaps a meatless Monday would be a good start. Perhaps today is that Monday.