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So we've got these two factors coming together. On the one hand, we all need to eat more healthily, and on the other side, we need to eat more sustainably, because food production exerts an enormous toll on the planet. Global food production accounts for 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and 40 per cent of land use.
So last year, a bunch of scientists sat down and tried to work out what a sustainable, healthy diet looked like. The key thing to remember though, is a healthy diet isn't exactly the same as a sustainable diet. It's not just the foods themselves that might be the problem. It can be the way they're produced.
So, for example, when it comes to fish, around 60 per cent of the world's fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished. The top line on this diet, less meat, less dairy, fewer potatoes, and a lot more plants. To be a true convert however, you need to pretty much give up chicken and fish, and move into nuts, seeds, and legumes.
So what would this diet look like on a plate? Well, around 1/2 the plate would be filled with fruit, veg, and nuts, and the other 1/2 would have things like whole grains, plant proteins, like beans and lentils, some starchy veg, a very small amount of meat and dairy, and some plant oils, maybe some added sugars.
This diet allows for around 2,500 calories a day. If you were following the diet, you could have one boiled egg a week. Just one glass of milk a day covers all your dairy requirements. Globally, the diet means that we need to 1/2 our consumption of red meat and sugar, and double our intake of veg, fruit, pulses, and nuts. The typical North American would need to eat 84 per cent less red meat and six times more beans and lentils, and that is a tough ask.
So it's not just about the food we eat and the way is produced, it's also about the way we behave. We might want to look at packaging, for example. Plastic has a bad name, but it's lighter than glass, and therefore for transport, it could have a lower carbon footprint.
And also the volumes of things. So if you compare, for example, concentrated orange juice to fresh orange juice. Concentrated, because it's lower volume, you don't have the transport costs and the environmental footprint of that. Food waste is another challenge. Around a 1/3 of the food that's produced globally gets thrown away.
Buying locally and buying seasonally can also make a difference. We know that by 2050 we might have 10 billion mouths to feed. If we're going to eat sustainably in the years to come, in the decades to come, we're going to have to change the way we eat.
