We need to save ourselves

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet” - Albert Einstein 

Unhealthy diets are responsible for 11 million preventable deaths globally per year, more even than smoking tobacco, according to research of the Global Burden of Disease study by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, published in the Lancet medical journal.

But the biggest problem is not the junk we eat but the nutritious food we don’t eat, say researchers, calling for a global shift in policy to promote vegetables, fruit, nuts and legumes. While sugar and trans-fats are harmful, more deaths are caused by the absence of healthy foods in our diet, the study found. Heart attacks and strokes are the main diet-related causes of death, followed by cancers and type 2 diabetes,

The study found that eating and drinking better could prevent one in five deaths around the world. Although diets vary from one country to another, eating too few fruits and vegetables and too much sodium (salt) accounted for half of all deaths and two-thirds of the years of disability attributable to diet.

“Our findings show that suboptimal diet is responsible for more deaths than any other risks globally, including tobacco smoking, highlighting the urgent need for improving human diet across nations,” they write.

Rather than trying to persuade people to cut down on sugar, salt and fat it would be better to promote healthy options, they say.

Prof Walter Willett from Harvard University, a co-author of the study, said, “Adoption of diets emphasising soy foods, beans and other healthy plant sources of protein will have important benefits for both human and planetary health,” he said.

The issue about vegetarianism these days is not so much the moral case that can be solved by individual choice but the environmental one which will require social decisions about food production methods being made. Our eating habits and manner of food production is not just a personal issue but a social question, as it is an environmental question. We cannot create a vegetarian/vegan world by individual conversion or changing personal taste inside capitalist society. We are not, despite our advocacy of less-meat eating, trying to impose a lifestyle on to others but suggesting that such a conclusion will be by collective politics in the interests of society as a whole when socialism is established.

Preventing catastrophic warming is dependent on tackling meat and dairy consumption, but the world is doing very little. A lot is being done on deforestation and transport, but there is a huge gap on the livestock sector. There is a deep reluctance to engage because of the received wisdom that it is not the place of governments or civil society to intrude into people’s lives and tell them what to eat. Livestock-related emissions and associated issues are not in the spotlight of international climate negotiations, partly because of the difficulty of measuring the emissions accurately. The result is a lack of awareness on the subject among global policymakers. A shift to an omnivore (or flexitarian) diet can dramatically slow down the global warming trend.

The Socialist Party avoids associating socialism with one particular lifestyle choice and it is not on a crusade to proselytise for vegetarianism or veganism but as socialists, we envisage a rational well-planned society that will endeavour to be sustainable as far as possible which leads me to reach certain conclusions. We associate ourselves with the steady-state, zero-growth model of economy for a socialist society, explaining that we envisage an anti-consumerism trend to prevail and expect a drop in consumption levels with the important caveat that there will be an initial phase of higher production to raise people to a decent standard of living We say this sustainable future can come about because with socialism there will be little need for conspicuous consumption and public ostentation's to show status. Meat-eating is deeply embedded in our culture and the multi-billion-dollar cattle and dairy industries are powerful and politically connected, making change difficult.
Meat-eating will decline over time in socialism, because the profit system will have been scrapped. We don`t expect to see the hunting and eating of individual animals necessarily disappearing, or even the raising of animals for food, until quite some time, if ever. Socialism will provide a democratic forum which no one has today other than the capitalists, who will also have disappeared. Local and regional factors will also apply, with democracy working at a local as well as a global level. We don`t see anything being compulsory. Coercion is not compatible with socialism (except, perhaps, some coercion necessary initially in dispossessing the capitalist class.)

Only within a socialist framework can a rational food policy not involving the mistreatment of animals be put into practice. Present society is not providing for people because of its economic imperatives and that we can change those by political action which will then permit people access to a better life, a better well-being both physically and mentally. Socialism is all about aspiring to live in togetherness with our fellow human beings and from that will arise living in harmony with the planet, whether a wild forest or tamed farmland.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/03/bad-diets-killing-more-people-globally-than-tobacco-study-finds