The single biggest thing that we could all do to tackle our climate crisis is to change what we eat. The science is clear, and it’s beautifully simple – eat mostly plants. With mounting evidence that cutting back on meat and dairy is better for our planet and for our health, is it largely habit and preference that hinders this global dietary movement? These are far from trivial traits, but food is powerfully unifying and has the potential to be a regular drum beat for change.
I gave a talk about this in the Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, on 15th April as part of our departmental seminar series. I’ve made a recording that you can listen to here:
Kitchen 1.5 
One of my children is vegan and the other is vegetarian. (I’m neither). I hear that sort of argument all the time.I haven’t brought it up with them, but perhaps you can answer: what would happen to the farmyard animals once they are no longer farmed?
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Hi, thanks for the question. It would be a relatively slow change, with fewer animals being farmed over time as demand goes down. Current livestock would go to slaughter as they currently do, since these changes don’t happen over night. Eventually more of the land once occupied by intensively farmed animals could be available for re-wilding, to provide habitat for native animals and to draw down more carbon from the atmosphere.
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