Essay by Eric Worrall
“… tells me he only likes eggs, fish fingers and pancakes …”
My quest for a climate-friendly family diet
Graihagh Jackson
Climate journalist Graihagh Jackson goes on a quest to find a diet that’s healthy for her child, and helps fight climate change – but will her son actually eat it?
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… My diet is currently about 75% plants and I follow EAT-Lancet’s “Food for the Anthropocene” report recommendations.
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For those considering cutting meat and animal products out entirely, one factor to consider is age, as a vegan diet can be risky for young children, and there have been cases of death or severe malnutrition of babies or young children being given only plant-based food or drinks.
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But here comes the next challenge: getting my toddler to actually eat those plants. He frequently tells me he only likes eggs, fish fingers and pancakes and eschews the colourful plate of my carefully cooked (and in my opinion, delicious) vegetables I serve up alongside his favourites.
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Back in the kitchen, my toddler is blowing Zs in his bed. The Lion King has finally stopped playing and I’m on my hands and knees, trying to scrape the cereal out from between the grout. As my mind meanders, I’m struck by an image of my son. He’s older but still has those same curious eyes locked with mine. I imagine him asking me: “Did you do everything you could to fight climate change?” And I want to be able to reply yes, I did. I want the best possible future for my kid and I want him to feel good about those decisions too.
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250813-my-quest-for-a-climate-friendly-family-diet
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To her credit Graihagh Jackson rejects the vegan option. I agree with Graihagh that feeding kids a vegan diet can be dangerous.
It is easy to slip vegetables to kids, if you do your own cooking – my mum taught me the trick of using a grater to shred vegetables and slipping them inside meat patties or rissoles. Crushing them up inside potato mash is another trick. Apparently these subterfuges were our main source of nutrition when we were kids.
But if the kid is craving bacon there’s a good chance that bacon is exactly what their body needs.
There was an experiment in the 1930s which showed when offered pretty much everything they want, young children ended up picking out a more or less balanced diet. Sure they gorged themselves on sweets initially, but they got sick of sweets, and started eating other foods.
My cousin told me a similar story of when she worked in a chocolate factory. They didn’t even try to stop production line workers from picking chocolate off the line, the only rule was you weren’t allowed to take it home. But my cousin told me after a few days even the thought of eating chocolate made her feel ill.
I’m not advocating completely unsupervised eating for young kids, but that study certainly opened my eyes to why my mum frequently asked us what we wanted to eat, just as my grandma used to ask her what she wanted, even when times were hard. Wisdom didn’t start with modern science.
Meat protein is good for kids. They should eat some vegetables, and slipping vegetables into other foods for kids who refuse to eat their greens is just good parenting. But if they want fish or bacon, give them what their growing bodies need. The climate will take care of itself, but your kids need you to take care of them.
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Take it from the Eskimo, what your body requires tastes really good.
Especially blubber.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/all-meat-diet
“The Arctic Explorer Who Pushed an All-Meat DietVilhjalmur Stefansson wanted to prove a point.”
And he did. My wife and I are carnivores. Over four years now. Never felt better – 73 going on 40. Not to mention that this stopped my wife’s “terminal” bone cancer in its tracks. She’d had breast cancer, fixed, the metastasis was a result of the hopeless NHS, finger pointed at the RUH in Bath.
2018 clear, annual scan. Skipped 2020 as felt fine, no lumps, and hospitals were hell during Covid (despite being empty); Dec 2021 the terminal diagnosis. Refused further chemo (had been terrible, and would have added maybe 4 or 5 months). 6 monthly scans.
NO CHANGE since the diagnosis.
Nor is she by ANY means alone.
I agree. Feeding a child a vegan diet is depraved indifference as to their welfare.
Hominidea was never vegetarian.
Correct. Homo whatever goes back one million years, and until the advent of agriculture, some 8k years back, our basic diet was meat, fish and seasonal fruit. Honey a bonus. Hence out very short gut – we don’t need to ferment meat to digest it, indeed, you can swallow a large lump of meat whole (ask our dog, who pythoned a 10oz sirloin when my back was turned) and digest it all.
Try that with a carrot.
Also, we have the highest sromach acid of the mammal
Flesh is our species-adapted diet.
That’s also why a high carb diet all year round can have disastrous effects.
Up until very recently carbs were a bonus just before winter set in.
We know that hominins were eating meat regularly by about 2 million years ago when the genus Homo first evolved in Africa. This is clear from evidence of stone tools used for butchering and processing meat. There is also ample evidence of animal bones with cut marks that could only have been produced by our ancestors using tools for animal butchery.
However, the earliest evidence of hominins butchering large animals actually dates back to 2.9 million years ago at a site on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya.
So there can be no doubt that the evolutionary process from early hominins to modern Homo Sapiens REQUIRED a diet of meat.
Who the hell does the lady think she is, for chrisake?!!
Meat contains vitamin B12. A vegan diet lacks this important vitamin, without which there is great risk of developing pernicious anemia.
Extreme vegans sometimes argue that we (like other animals) make B12 in our gut. And we do. The difference is at what point in the gut we make it: for humans, its after the point at which food absorption takes place. So we may make it, but its of no use to us.
We could not have evolved to be vegans because before B12 was synthesized in the early 20C no human population could have lived and reproduced for generations on a purely vegan diet because of the effects of B12 deficiency.
So how do Asian populations of religious vegans manage? The reason historically has partly been food storage. In pre-modern times food stores would have been well contaminated by insects from which a nominally vegan dieter would have gained some B12. And of course the point of the Hindu reverence for cows is that they produce milk and cheese from vegetation which in native form is useless to humans. Vegetarians, but not vegans. Vegetarianism was always perfectly possible, unlike veganism.
the effects of B12 deficiency.
I suffered from that some years back. The effects are pernicious, they creep up over time so you don’t notice them until they’re rather severe. The good news is that once I realized the problem and upped my b12 (initially by supplements since it was so severe) I was much better in about a week.
I can’t imagine living like that.
I’ll never forget the look on my son’s face, and the horrified tone in his voice, as he asked me:
“Is there broccoli in this mashed potato?”
My kid hates tomatoes but loves red sauce. Then the swim teacher dropped me in it, said “but red sauce IS tomatoes”
”Dad, YOU, you …” I didn’t hear the rest I was too busy running 🙂
I once added a few veggie pieces to the grandkids’ favorite grandad dish – macaroni & cheese.
Anguished howls of outrage, tears & snot ensued.
Sorted, the best of both worlds, meat based vegetables.
https://www.businessinsider.com/arbys-meat-carrot-made-out-of-turkey-2019-6
Shit masquerading as food
I suppose if anyone was going to do it, Arby’s was the safe bet!
My quest… to tell people what they should eat. And how much.
Give the poor kid a good old English fry up.
“Did you do everything you could to fight climate change?” And I want to be able to reply yes, I did.
What is really crazy is that this lady seems really to think that what diet her family eats is going to make some difference to the climate. Did you, one wants to ask, stand on your head for a few minutes every morning? Well then, you failed to do everything you could have, didn’t you?
But the climate movement is full of this stuff – people arguing for doing things which can make not the slightest difference ‘because climate’.
This is the point where you realize it’s no longer science, and has morphed into a cult.
This is so funny. FOTFL .., fall on the floor laughing. Only idiots with no technical competency, spelled “Intelligence” would put out such complete crap.
I see this comes from ‘The Climate Question’ on the World Service. It’s an eye opener if you’ve never heard it. It’s where the BBC can promote the most lunatic far out climate propaganda and drag up the most deranged climate extremists for leading re-enforcing questions without being limited by the scrutiny they would face on the UK channels.
Count the teeth. Grain, meat, vegetables, opportunistic.
young children require about 30% of their calories from fat.
What an inane thing to focus on, even for those in the Carbon-is-Evil Cult. How big is her house, for example. Is it a 3-400 sq, ft, Tiny Home, and if not, why not. If it is instead a more modern-day size of perhaps 1,500 – 3,000 sq, ft. monstrosity, then she will definitely be going straight to Carbon Hell. How about how much she drives or travels for vacations. Huge carbon dino prints there. What about her 401k and other investments. Climate friendly, and if not why not. The list goes on. The line drawing these carbonphobic mouth breathers have to do just to get through life is mind boggling. How do they do it?
Do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches count as vegetables? 😁 I virtually grew up on them (along with beef, chicken, pork, potatoes, and more).
My mother had rather less interest in what her children liked (or what they said they didn’t like when playing up at home), by simply saying:
‘I don’t want you to like it, I want you to eat it!’
After a while, the question: ‘What’s for supper?’ was replied to with the simple answer: ‘FOOD!’
Basing a child’s diet on their own statements of likes/dislikes is actually putting an infant in charge of their own diet, which isn’t something they are yet ready to take responsibility for.
I’m not suggesting putting kids in charge, otherwise my kid’s diet would consist of Pringles. But taking cravings for fish or whatever into account might be smart nutrition.
I don’t recall ever being asked what I wanted. Mother put food on the table and that’s what we ate. As each of us got big enough we helped in the kitchen. Maybe just shucking corn or rolling out dough for noodles or peeling carrots.
‘I don’t want you to like it, I want you to eat it!’
When I grew up, the frase was different:
‘You don’t leave the dining table, until your plate is empty!‘
If it was my mothers favorite dish – haddock with roe sauce, it would take hours before I could leave. I do like fish, but to me, haddock has always tasted like garbage …
“But if the kid is craving bacon there’s a good chance that bacon is exactly what their body needs.”
Pregnancy cravings would fall into that category also.
When my wife was pregnant with our first child she craved steak. But she couldn’t stand to smell it cooking.
There was a restaurant very close to our house. So everyday while I was at work she’d waddle down to it and order a 4 oz. steak. And just that. (They stopped bringing her a menu.) When she was done, she waddled back home.
My son came out just fine.
If ever there are times I feel my genetic connection to my long ago forebears, it’s when I smell meat cooking. My dog and I share these moments, caveman and wolf.
Just to be clear, it was only while she was pregnant that she couldn’t stand to smell a steak cooking. 😎
The climate kooks are welcome to deprive their children if that is their choice.
If enough do it, the demand for meet will drop and it will be cheaper for the rest of us.
Kids that don’t eat meat grow up to be maladjusted adults … some don’t grow up at all. Evidence is everywhere to be seen at leftista gatherings.
“grow up to be maladjusted adults”
ie… often climate alarmists.
My cousin told me a similar story of when she worked in a chocolate factory.
It’s no myth as I know a woman who worked at Arnotts choccy biscuit factory in Adelaide (Med climate with low humidity for choccy) and exactly as you described. Eat those chocolate coated TimTams etc all you like but you’ll be done within the week.
Yep.
Twas a wee bit different as my maintenance fitter mate noted with SA Brewing’s factory churning out Southwark and West End cans of beer. The factory has gone due to economics and the site on the banks of the Torrens is fast turning into inner city yuppiesville with tram access to the CBD.
You have to see it to believe the pace of high volume canning and as they come down the line in their thousands they’re automatically weighed for leaks or under fill and shot off the line by air injectors as rejects. Where did the sealed but slight underfills go in the 1970s and into the 80s? Into onsite fridges for any workers to have a drink anytime and yep there were mostly teetotallers a few social drinkers having one or two at knockoff but a bunch of hard core pisspots permanently pickled at work.
As I recall sometime in the 1980s all good things must come to an end with OHS ramping up and Management were between a rock and a hard place explaining how a perk of work could no longer occur by X date and the fridges were going. Naturally that didn’t stop the really hard core for sneaking off with a warm beer but slowly the brewery dried out.
Most of the breweries I visited in Britain the people doing the tour were pickled. The Scottish distillery guide obviously enjoyed the product. But it’s a bit like trusting a skinny chef, if they don’t drink their own brew I don’t want it either.
To this point in comments, no one has mentioned
EAT-Lancet’s “Food for the Anthropocene” report recommendations.
Say what?
I couldn’t bring myself to look at it, I think reading Graihagh Jackson’s piece we get an idea of what is about.
My grand children were here for the last week. My grandson would eat nothing for breakfast but hotdogs.
My nan was a better cook than my mum (sorry mum), so we always came back stuffed to the gills with whatever she decided to cook that weekend 🙂
I think try to retrain them a little with a fry-up, they might stay fussy but if you pile enough yummies in front of them their instinct might kick in.
The funny thing is that producing eggs, milk and wheat has very low amounts of CO2 per kg.
According to Poore and Nemecek (2018), farmed fish have the highest footprint in that lot.
fish (farmed) – 12.5 kg CO2/kg
eggs – 4.6 kg CO2/kg
milk – 2.8 kg CO2/kg
wheat – 1.6 kg CO2/kg
Vegetables tend to be around 0.5 kg CO2/kg.
None of that is taking into account the nutritional value or water content.
Hmmm, not having a child* would save 100 tonnes of CO₂, so maybe you failed
*I’m not advocating people remain childless, just pointing out the hypocrisy of these people
Vegans I know way back nearly killed their toddler with the diet. Kids – and pregnant women NEED meat.
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/mmb/article/id/13040/
The Importance of Meat for Cognitive DevelopmentAbstractOver 200 million children worldwide suffer from malnutrition and, as a result, are underdeveloped both physically and mentally. Meat has more bioavailable essential micronutrients than plants and is the best source of nutrient-rich foods for children aged 6 to 23 mo, according to the World Health Organization. By consuming meat, which contributes essential bioavailable micronutrients to diets, children in particular can reduce undernutrition and the associated growth and cognitive impairment.
Worth considering that in the UK at least, it is ARABLE farming that has destroyed the countryside.
Livestock farming done properly, replenishes the earth.
Ever wonderfed WHY those NA Mid-West plains are SO fertile?
Centuries of Buffalo shit.
Environmentalists are as thick as it comes
As I read this, my thoughts turned to what is happening with our kids in schools.
Sorry for going off topic.