You write in the book that your diet really doesn’t include much meat. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about why you gravitated towards writing about animal products like insects, fish sauce and cheese and pork in the book?
I’m not really a vegetarian. In fact, I’m not a vegetarian at all. I eat seafood. I wrote a book about fish and seafood called Bottomfeeder arguing that it’s the last wild food on the planet. And making the point that the human appetite is having a huge impact on the oceans, the rivers and lakes, and that we need to change our way of eating. I eat eggs and dairy. Occasionally, I eat ethically raised meat. It’s a very occasional treat. I believe hospitality is really important, so if I’m offered something in goodwill, I will consume meat products.
The problem is that we are consuming too much protein as individuals. In the developed world, in Europe and North America, we’re getting twice the grams of protein we need per day. In the developing economies, especially in China and India, protein consumption is increasing. It’s really unsustainable. They say that we’re going to have to increase the amount of protein we’re producing by 50 per cent by mid-century, which will have an incredible impact on the planet and on our ecosystems.
So I make the case in the book that we should be eating less protein, and we should be willing to value it more. We should be asking questions about where it comes from, and doing our best to seek out sustainably raised, ethically raised protein, whether it’s eggs, dairy or actual meat.
I’m aware that it’s hard to make this case, because it’s hard to say that we should be eating more expensive food. But it’s a question of spending the same amount of money but eating these proteins less often, which is actually better for your health.
I also believe that foods like Wensleydale farmhouse cheese, if they’re produced in a sustainable way — if the livestock are raised properly — it can actually enrich the soil. To say that we should take livestock completely off the land ignores the fact that well-grazed animals can actually help the soil, which is the ultimate source of all the food we eat. I’m thinking of things like the idea of bringing back the Buffalo Commons, of, you know, pasture-fed beef. Not in the Amazon. We shouldn’t be cutting anything down to graze beef. But in places that are already grasslands, it’s actually a good way of bringing fertility back to the soil and increasing biodiversity.
I’m arguing for a return to the diversity of the past. And the diversity of the past, in terms of the plants, the animals that we ate, actually contributes to our own health and it contributes to the health of our planet.
