The bestselling author explains why simple changes to our diet are a good way to address the climate crisis
There have been many proposed solutions to the climate crisis – from outright bans on fossil fuels to planting 2 billion trees – but Jonathan Safran Foer’s antidote to global devastation strikes me as the neatest and most achievable. It could sound like something written by a prophet in stone: Eat No Meat Before Sundown. But Safran Foer, in his brilliant book, We Are the Weather, insists on couching it in far more conversational terms: we need to make a “collective act to eat differently”, he says, and one straightforward way is to aim to eat no animal products before dinner.
This idea for a roughly two-third shift in animal consumption comes armed with unarguable statistics about its positive effect in reversing climate trends, including the killer pay-off: “If cows were a country they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.”
The goal is not to perfect a virtuous identity for yourself. The goal is to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere
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