Throughout this blog, I have maintained a consistent theme of depletion of resources. As the population continues to increase exponentially, food, water and materialistic goods are becoming inadequate to satisfy the whole population. So what now? We’re exhausting all of our resources to satisfy our appetites so how about changing them?
The FAO (2014) estimates that fish now accounts for 17% of the global population’s intake of protein. As we have seen in previous posts though, there is evidence to suggest that we have reached a peak in marine capture and supplies may now in fact be declining. Bunge (2015) asserts that chicken will be the meat of the future; it uses the least water, requires the least feeding and is the most abundant meat available. However, some think that the sustainability of the planet relies on vegetarian diets (Leitzmann 2014; Macdiarmid et al 2012) or even plant-based diets (Sabaté and Soret, 2014)!
Macdiarmid et al argue that in the UK alone, food systems account for approximately 18-20% of GHG emissions. Through various models and testing, they showed that a sustainable, but realistic diet, with small quantities of meat, could reduce GHG emissions by up to 36%. Sabaté and Soret however, state that sustainable human life began with plant-based diets and thus we should return to it, to make human living habits sustainable once again. Perhaps we don’t need to go to such extremes of plant-based diets, but if we carry on depleting resources at this rate, we just might end up eating plants for Christmas lunch! Perhaps in the long term, we may see growing markets to support vegetarian diets, but we do need to stop hunting rare species for materialistic desires. Biodiversity is declining and we need to invest more in conservation.
Unfortunately, with regard to diet, I don’t personally believe the human diet will change that much. I believe we will continue to do and deplete as we please, no matter what the consequences, which is why the main focus of this blog has been on how to accommodate our infinite desires. Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory can be applied here. We strive to be at the top of the food chain and perhaps it is simply in our nature to kill other animals for our pleasure. I remain on the optimistic side of the fence, with Ester Boserup (1965), who stated: “Necessity is the mother of invention”; we will invent whatever we need, in order to survive.
