Church Times - Churches urged to push greener living

Tara Garnett, of the Centre for Environmental Strategy, and the University of Surrey, in her report Cooking Up a Storm, has linked food and eating patterns to “possibly a third” of greenhouse-gas emissions.

There were technological “fixes” that would help keep down emissions, but, given a rising world population, those would never be enough, she wrote in her report, published in September and available online. What was needed was to make “very substantial reductions” in the amount of meat and dairy products people ate.

People in developed countries needed to cut back to half a kilo (just over 1 lb) of meat a week, and one litre (1¾ pt) of milk: the equivalent of two sausages and a cheese sandwich every other day.

“We need to consume less ‘stuff’ overall,” she warned. In the West, one billion people were overweight, while, in developing countries, 840 million people, including one in four children, did not get enough to eat.

People in developed countries could help stop global warming by the way they shopped and cooked. Rather than buy “fragile” food that needed refrigeration people could buy “robust” foods that did not spoil easily. Asking for less choice meant foods would not be produced expensively out of season. There was also a “moderate to high” priority not to waste food, because food thrown away represented “embedded emissions”.

The developing world would need help to deal with these economic changes, she said.