A Quote by Tristram Stuart

When is population going to become an accepted part of the food debate? If it's fine to encourage people to think about halving their meat consumption, can we really not cope with a conversation about how many children we have?
I must say that in my own mind, I think what's important is for us, as a society, to radically reduce the consumption of meat. This is more important than some fraction of us become moral saints and become vegetarians so it would be much better if we would reduce meat consumption by three quarters of each of us as an individuals would only eat one-quarter as much meat as we do now then that half of the population should become vegetarian. We should see this as a collective challenge rather than an issue about individual, moral period.
Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.
I was in a conversation and someone said: "You know, we were talking about the whole issue of transgender and how it has become so accepted now, and somebody said, 'You know the Oprah show, I think has had a big impact.'" I said, I don't think so. We did several transgender [shows], but we didn't do as much for transgender as I did for, say, abused kids or battered women. And they said, "But no, you started the conversation. You started the conversation and the conversation has led us to here."
My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably?
We are being conditioned, as a population, to never wait, to never delay our gratification, to accept thoughtless, constant consumption as the new norm. But how we think about consumption and willpower carry enormous implications for the environment and the culture of society as a whole.
Obviously, if I'm in Argentina, I'm going to have a steak, but I don't love meat, really. I always think about where the food came from and who had to get it.
When you watch the way some of the commentators talk about this, it makes it seem as if people are crossing the border every second. How much money have we spent on the border? Why? And who's really exploiting whom?" And then he gets quiet. But I think just airing these out and having a face-to-face conversation about it helps both of us internalize what the conversation is really about. I don't think we have that in the public sphere.
Those of us who think about what we eat, how it's grown, those of us who care about the environmental impact of food - we've been educated by fabulous books, like Fast Food Nation and documentaries like Food Inc. But despite these and other great projects that shine a critical light on the topic, every year the food industry spends literally tens of millions of dollars to shape the public conversation about our food system.
One reason we planted the White House vegetable garden was to set an example about what food can mean, but to also begin a broader conversation about how we're feeding our kids, what they know about the food that they eat, how they're taking care of themselves.
A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!
There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors. And yet there's this political conversation - this reform conversation - that paints a very negative picture of the effectiveness of the teaching population. So there's definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers.
If you like eating meat but want to eat ethically, this is the book for you. From the hard-headed, clear-eyed, and sympathetic perspective of butchers who care deeply about the animals whose parts they sell, the customers who buy their meats, and the pleasures of eating, this book has much to teach. It’s an instant classic, making it clear why meat is part of the food revolution. I see it as the new Bible of meat aficionados and worth reading by all food lovers, meat-eating and not.
Twitter has allowed the conversation to broaden and become more inclusive. At times, the conversation is really tense but that's because we're talking about really important issues. It's not going to be easy but at least the conversations are happening.
For me, it's about optimizing health. It's about lifestyle and longevity. Then you think about what vegetarian diets can do for the mass population, in terms of lower consumption of resources. When you look at the numbers, it's pretty staggering.
For animals, for humans, for the planet: It makes sense to curb meat consumption, and that is something vegans and omnivores agree on. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report reducing their meat consumption, and many are sensitive to the way their diet might be damaging the planet.
I do think that if people are taking the time to think about their environmental footprint when it comes to how many flights they take, whether or not they have a 4X4, whether or not they are going to have a patio heater, then putting the question to themselves about how many kids they are going to have is a reasonable thing to do.
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