Food is an interpersonal choice or even a planetary choice because it’s changing our world.

Meat, diary and fish are hugely wasteful, damaging and polluting industries. Eat them and destroy the planet for everyone. That’s not personal.

To eat an environmentally and physically healthy plant-based diet is to choose a peaceful and plentiful future. That’s not personal either, that’s a love letter to the world and everyone in it.

How our food effects everyone – or not

The production and consumption of animals wastes land, water and food. It’s estimated around 56 billion are bred and killed each year. The scale of these problems ever increases and is set to double by 2050 in a business-as-usual scenario.

In a time of global drought, we’re loosing water to our animals. Livestock use more water than people in certain drought affected landscapes. Here in Australia we are exporting our water. We’ve created drought by past and present land-clearing. Everyone needs water.

From these animals we get back around 10-20% of the nutrition that we put into them. We get it in toxic decomposing packages that sicken and slowly kill us. It’s no secret that vegans avoid heart disease, diabetes and many types of cancer (the worst ones – we’re talking breast and prostate) more often. The strain on public health effects everyone.

These points are enough to show that food is not just a personal choice. But to clinch it we have the looming threat of climate change that will destabilise our seasons, weather and is already blamed for the death of hundreds of thousands and the migration of millions of climate refugees.

The official UN estimate of livestock’s contribution to the warming problem is 18% (from late 2006’s Livestock’s Long Shadow). Estimates go as high as more than 51% and it’s clear that we’re just starting to understand the full picture.

Because livestock occupy so much land (that must be deforested releasing carbon and black carbon), create so much methane (by enteric fermentation) and require such heavy use of fossil fuel in fluorocarbons in their production, transportation and refrigeration, their contribution is massively high.

Inefficient fishing and feeding of fish stock to livestock is also destabilising the ocean’s ecosystem which can help to balance atmospheric carbon.