Ignorance of basic human biology and the woke propagandising of food ‘science’ to control global human behaviour lies behind the recently-published second version of the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet (PHD). Produced by dozens of credentialled cretins around the world, it restricts meat and dairy consumption to levels not seen since the Second World War. Pasty-faced and possibly protein-starved researchers suggest around 15 grams of red meat a day and promote a mainly plant-based diet. A suggestion to cut agricultural emissions by 50% within 25 years means using much less hydrocarbon-produced fertiliser, and that would lead to mass global starvation. But then this potty planetary piss-take could only have been suggested by people who believe that, whatever societal devastation they cause, the soy latte will magically appear as they make their way to Whole Foods to pick up their organic humous.
The few people still watching CNN were treated to the suggestion that the diet could feed 9.6 billion people “equitably” by 2050, save $5 trillion yearly and prevent 15 million deaths. All this, of course, came from a ‘business-as-usual’ computer model which used a scenario similar to the widely discredited RCP8.5. More than a daily allowance of salt needs to be taken with this made-up agitprop. Second World War total calories of 2,500 are suggested, with land-hungry whole grains, vegetables, legumes, nuts and unprocessed oils providing the vast proportion of the diet. Competing with all those wind turbines, solar farms and rewilding schemes, hard-pressed farmers, facing increasing ‘carbon’ taxes on artificial fertilisers, will still be expected to provide City-based wokies with their virtue-filled home deliveries. Haloes can be polished while they luxuriate in the glow caused by knowing that their sainted scoff has been produced by “inclusive governance that centres indigenous knowledge and community voices”. Who knows what that guff actually means in practice, although it is good to know that it is a “transformative action”.
It is easy to mock. Humans are natural meat eaters and have thrived on its consumption. A largely plant-based diet needs careful planning to ensure healthy nutrition. It is not generally recommended for growing children, and the likelihood of it being widely accepted is minimal. Poor diets, by choice or circumstance, have always existed, but on average today humans live much longer than in the past and generally have much better food supplies across the world.
Needless to say, the EAT-Lancet report is not primarily aimed at the general population, since it is funded by the Green Blob to influence policymakers. Already in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has signed up the City to implement the plan for all by 2030. Since the PHD first appeared in 2019, it has been extensively referenced, integrated into policies and endorsed in declarations by numerous international elite organisations. Various parts of the United Nations have framed the recommendations as a scientific blueprint for aligning food systems with climate and health priorities. Waffle about climate and social ‘justice’ is ubiquitous. The Green Blob-funded C40 network of 100 cities, chaired by Khan, is committed to climate bothering and is one of the PHD’s strongest supporters, driving action at the urban level.
As noted, there has been some media coverage of PHD 2.0, but the limited publicity – the BBC has stayed silent – suggests the main target audience is the elite political class. Best not to worry the smelly food-eating plebs too much at this stage. But, as always, look at what they write and say amongst themselves, particularly when it is the product of huge quantities of Green Blob money. But how will the State enforce such dietary requirements in a free society without stringent rationing and control? As it happens, and no doubt a complete coincidence, the UK Government is currently floating proposals for a nationwide identity card. Marketed as a possible help in mitigating the country’s open borders experiment, it is not difficult to foresee widespread future uses. Apart from providing right-to-work checks, the Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has also let slip that it could be rolled out to access ‘”your own money”. Handy, of course, if the State wants to check up on your weekly rationed purchase of an egg, a couple of pints of animal milk and a small packet of planet-destroying sausages.
The EAT operation is awash with Green money. Co-founded in 2014 by the wealthy, private jet owing environmental activist Gunhild Stordalen, it seeks to transform the global food system to mitigate the overwhelming problems it imagines are caused by humans changing the climate. In common with many other such operations, the money buys influence, if not effective control over wide swathes of industry, politics, media, academia and science. EAT is based in Oslo and is backed by the Stordalen Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC). Any colour of promoting money, except Green expert George Monbiot, is a member of its advisory board. In 2015, Gunhild Stordalen was named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum.
The SRC is chaired by Johan Rockstrom from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, often described as the activist’s activist. He is also the lead author of the EAT-Lancet paper. The SRC is backed by its own long list of so-called philanthropic, tax-efficient foundations. Meanwhile, the latest list of cash investors in EAT-Lancet Commission 2.0 are said to include IKEA, Rockefeller, Wellcome Trust, Swedish Postcode, Novo Nordisk and Seedling.
The world is moving on from a lot of this sinister Net Zero nonsense. Peak silliness has passed but the Blob will not give up the hard Left grift until decisive political battles, still ongoing, are finally won.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
“A largely plant-based diet needs careful planning to ensure healthy nutrition. It is not generally recommended for growing children, and the likelihood of it being widely accepted is minimal”.
The chance of this appallingly unhealthy diet being widely accepted is exactly nil. Multiple studies have shown that almost all vegans have dietary deficiencies.
All my diet is plant-based (made mainly from CO2 & sunlight)
Fruit, Veg, Grains, direct consumption.
& indirectly,
Grass, Roots, & Phytoplankton, pre-processed by Beef, Pigs, Sheep & Fish.
You cannot deny… trophic levels.
I’m a vegan! Almost everything I eat used to eat plants. 😉
We should be eating more ‘Greens’ !!!
But cannibalism is illegal.
If everybody is forced onto this insane diet, long pig might suddenly seem more attractive.
Had to look it up 🙂
Soylent Greens.
Cannibal Island was already a thing in the USSR decades before Soylent Green.
During the famine in the Ukraine caused by Stalin, the peasants were known to dig up the graves of their loved ones so they could grind the bones into soup.
Very environmentally friendly, and sustainable
In communism you don’t eat meat.
You are the meat.
Vegan by design.
I actually know some vegan cannibals,
and they say greens taste the best.
Food fascism is all the rage in the UK. And to go against their “expert” [well intentioned?] advice causes obesity etc. etc. Advertising foods is heavily controlled; you can’t even have a picture of a wedding cake on the Underground…
West End play poster banned by TfL over ‘unhealthy’ cake – BBC
The sugar tax It’s a similar story with salt. And it doesn’t end there.
Calls for ‘fat tax’ to be introduced on junk food to cut childhood obesity
Expert groups quoted in a report suggest – Independent
What does all this have in common with the climate dudes?
Things work differently in “public health” where modelling is used as evidence that a policy will work and then, when the prevalence of the problem increases, modelling is used to show that things would have been even worse if the policy had not been introduced. This is quite obviously the business model of the snake oil salesman. The Critic
And that’s long before anybody has so much as mentioned the weather, or as The Guardian insists we refer to it, climate breakdown.
We are back to quack doctors and their fraudulent remedies.
UK really is sinking fast into the fetid sewer of fascist/marxist totalitarianism.
They need to save themselves,.. very quickly !!
You should… model that.
The thing is that healthy options in the supermarket are priced higher, even sold as premium products. This makes it harder to go for theses healthy choices, especially for low-income families.
If a vegetable or meat is labelled as biological or ecological, I will avoid it as overpriced nonsense I am not paying for. Example: 250 grams of cherry tomatoes in my local supermarket. Regular price is € 1.39, bio price € 2.69, 94% more expensive. I dare people to prove any measurable health or environmental benefit.
Another example: processed meat hamburgers with 64% chicken separator meat and 10% bacon costs € 6.04 per kilogram, low-fat beef burger € 16.95 per kilogram. What do you think people are going to choose if they are put in a position that they cannot afford to both heat their home and have dinner?
“healthy options…”
A term so incredibly vague it is largely meaningless. One man’s poison and all that.
“If a vegetable or meat is labelled as biological or ecological, I will avoid it”
Doesn’t it have to be biological? Even if it is plant based? I think it does.
In a free world you pays your money and you takes your choice. Any thing else is… food fascism. State/technocrat directed.
In our country food labelled as biological is food that is produced according to specific European rules, including only pesticides and fertilizers from natural sources. Organic is a better term, my translation was too literal.
In our country […] specific European rules
Which country? The UK no longer follows those rules. My point still stands…
In a free world you pays your money and you takes your choice. Any thing else is… food fascism. State/technocrat directed.
The Netherlands
Ok. I know Amsterdam quite well.
But Art, why are you against individual liberty? You avoided my point, I wonder why?
This is an incorrect conclusion, I am very much for individual choice and that comes with individual responsibility. Sugar tax is a dumb idea. If people want to trade longevity for enjoyment and quality of life, if that is indeed the trade-off, it is up to them. As long as my freedoms don’t trample on other’s freedoms, nothing should be done.
Unfortunately many people proclaim that since healthcare is being paid for publicly that this gives them the right to control other people’s eating and lifestyle choices. After all those choices impact how much health care you are going to consume, and since they are helping to pay those costs …
Low fat beef is not healthier if one is not consuming glucose. More fat is needed.
Yeeah… Always a tax. It’s not going to change little Johnny wanting his Snickers, it just means Mum is going to pay an extra 10p for it, and the forking troughers will spend it on whatever new bullshirt initiative comes up.
PH.D.: Piled Higher and Deeper
On a bright note however, the vegan food darling Beyond Meat has seen its valuation fall from nearly $8 billion to $79 million.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-15188259/beyond-meat-vegan-burger-stock-price-drop.html
I’m not surprised. Beyond Meat’s products were ultra processed junk food which couldn’t possibly have been healthy for anybody.
I actually like Bill Gates’ Shit Meat.
Whenever I get nostalgic I eat a meal to remember the time in the Gulag.
I have it on very good authority from none other than Jethro Tull
A little of what you fancy does you good (Or so it should)
RIP Common sense.
Don’t want to be a fat man
People would think that I was just good fun, man
Would rather be a thin man
I am so glad to go on being one, man
Too much to carry around with you
No chance of finding a woman who
Will love you in the morning and
All the nighttime too
Jethro Tull
These days one is advised not to Stand Up, but to cower.
“A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good!” first published in 1915
Sung by Marie Lloyd.
pick me up at half past none
there’s not a moment to lose.
there is the train on which i came.
on the platform are my old shoes.
station master rings his bell.
whistles blow and flags wave.
a little of what you fancy does you good (or so it should).
“ land-hungry whole grains, vegetables, legumes, nuts and unprocessed oils providing the vast proportion of the diet.”
Not only are they land hungry, but four tons of topsoil is lost for every ton of food produced.
Everything is sprayed ploughed and killed before a monocrop is sown and any small animal that strays into the crop is killed at harvest.
Grazing livestock at high densities and fast rotations will repair the environment and the country doesn’t need to be flat or free of rocks, trees and small animals, insects and birds.
Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change | TED Talk
I heard that the latest diet was plain nuts.
No salt or sugar added.
I think this sort of diet is just a return to Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg, of maintaining oneself in a state of ritual purity because The End Times are near.
Graham and Kellogg were Millenarian Christians, while this crowd are green Apocalyptics. In neither case is human welfare a real concern.
It’s the food equivalent of an hairshirt
George Monbiot is NOT a ‘Green Expert’, he is a Green Grifter. He plays at green politics whilst holding an entirely worthless academic position at UCL, then guzzles carbon getting down to Somerset to his country pad each weekend.
Apart from the scientific rubbish being spouted in these proposals, it is beyond scientific debate that animals are hugely beneficial to the ‘carbon budget’. The evidence has long been in that effective animal rotational grazing can improve organic soil content by 0.5% per year, year after year, until you have some of the richest, most fertile soil going. This has been reported not by the oil and gas industry but by notable ‘green entrepreneurs’ like Joel Salatin, whose family bought a large amount of dirt in the 1960s and have progressively turned that farm into one of the exemplar holistic agriculture demonstration projects worldwide.
Does Salatin evangelise about ‘no meat’ diets? Absolutely not. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of his vision of thriving smallholder farms is the rearing of chickens in outdoor tractors grazing and fertilising fields. He also reports that the powers-that-be impose ridiculous limitations on adult-to-adult consensual trading requiring him to find work-around after work-around to build a sensible business that his customers truly value.
So let’s all be clear here: animals, used properly, create a net transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide into soil carbon. They do it via animals eating the grasses, fertilising the soil on which grasses grow, which provides food for the soil microbiome to make the carbon in that animal manure available to other life forms, etc etc, until you have a rich soil, a rich soil microbiome and a rich soil cover of plants, trees etc etc.
Of course, if you have far too many grazing animals on far too small an area of land, you have a guarantee that you will have a desert pretty soon.
This, however, is rather like saying that because you have a certain number of alcoholics on the planet that all alcohol is dangerous and that small consumption from middle age onwards cannot be beneficial to human health.
It is long beyond time to call every pseudo-scientist that claims that animals are intrinsically harmful to the planet ‘illiterate, ignorant, jumped-up, self-serving liars’. The scientific evidence refuting their lies should be slapped down in front of them on prime time TV with the specific aim of humiliating them.
The Wellcome Trust has zero knowledge about farming, about climate. It has 100 years of drug development experience and biomedical research. It is not in any way an organisation that can claim any credibility where climate is concerned, where agriculture is concerned. It was also a prominent mover in the Covid19 genocide scandal, which should see several of its senior executives/former executives out in the dock on charges of culpable corporate genocide, or however you describe senior decision-makers in organisations that wilfully set out to destroy economies, destroy human health and cause millions of deaths worldwide.
“If you don’t eat your meat you can’t have your pudding”
“15 grams of red meat a day ” :about ½ ounce
I think that’s any meat. One report says you should have only one (1) medium burger per week. I think I could eliminate 15 grams per day by giving a bite to the dog. Oh wait …
There are two aspects of a vegan diet that are wrong, among many others.
In many cases, cattle, goats, etc are grown on land that isn’t suitable for farming.
Too rocky, not flat enough, etc.
Not enough water, …
I keep goats, chickens, and LH cattle on my little piece of heaven, and generally have a bit of garden planted also. In the past, I would put a young male ( castrated) goat into the freezer a couple of times a year, and have a steer processed, but since I don’t cook at all anymore, those goats go to auction a couple of times a year and the steers get processed and donated to a local food bank. Lots of eggs that also go to the food bank, or my grown children if an when they make time to visit. I have nothing against eating any of it, and for years lived on a diet of cheese burgers and chicken fried steak, But I just don’t cook anymore, and would rather not eat out at a restaurant more than a couple of times a month. Actually. the diet that I have evolved is rather boring–an apple and a couple of ounces of a good Vermont sharp cheddar for breakfast, usually supplemented with some dried figs or a handful of mixed nuts. Afternoon meal is generally a salad, with some canned animal protein added, and usually a bowl of frozen berries covered in a good whole milk yogurt. Oh, and lots of peanut butter. I will nuke a piece of sausage for a sausage wrap in a flour tortilla once in a while, but that’s about the extent of my culinary adventures anymore. Wouldn’t recommend it to anyone though, It’s just what has been working for me–almost 80, and still going strong. (sort of)
When reversion back to sanity arrives, all those people who pushed the Lancet Planetary Health Diet should live the Lancet Planetary Health Diet.
Those mandated to dine on the PH Diet will include all the green billionaires, the eNGO leadership class – being sure to include the managers of Tides and the B&M Gates Foundation – the entire Soros clan, every member of Extinction Rebellion, and the politicians on record favoring PHD and Net Zero.
There’s nothing like a diet of beansprouts for make one’s eco-halo shine.
“and prevent 15 million deaths.”
An ansolutely useless statistic. Everybody dies at some point so their deaths are not actually prevented.
Except next to no one will pay any attention to this suggestion. It’s similar to ones urging people to stop flying, buy EVs, utilize more public transport, buy heat pumps, move to walkable neighborhoods, eliminate red meat consumption, and all the other harebrained ideas proposed by the green machine that wore out its parts long ago and should be relegated to the nearest figurative dumpster.
Very nice Chris, I don’t like these guys.
Why don’t any of these “experts” live on this diet they claim others should be forced to live on?
Humans evolved to eat animal meat. Only once year, for a short piece of time, plants are available during what we now call harvest.
Humans bodies get fat from the carbohydrates from those plants, just in time for winter ehwn it is harder to catch animals.
A diet, like the current food pyramid, rich in plants is garanteed to make humans ill or kill them. Just like what is happening now in America and most western countries.
A better diet conatins much more meat, animal fat and products and no seed oils.