Climate Progress, Cattle in the American Diet, and the Rhetorical Underpinnings of Behavioral Change: The Need for Storytellers in Environmental Policy

Abstract

Most people would be surprised to learn that the food on their plate is one of the most significant drivers of climate change: Agriculture accounted for approximately 24 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, making food production, behind the energy sector, the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Exacerbating this challenge is the fact that global diets are increasingly converging towards Western diet patterns, which are high in resource-intense foods like meat, dairy, and refined sugars; the World Resources Institute estimates that global demand for beef, the most resource intense food item, will rise by 95% between now and 2050. With the global population projected to grow from 7 billion to 9.6 billion people over that same period, this emissions intensity poses an acute challenge: how to feed the global population while also working to slow patterns of climate change?

The following work examines beef and dairy farming practices in the United States as a brief case study in the sources of those emissions intensities and their related environmental externalities, and then explores two distinct and very different avenues for intervention: technologies for synthetic milk, lab cultured meat, and cellular agriculture, and narrative. While a closer examination of rapidly developing cellular agricultural technologies, private businesses, and their products certainly suggests that cellular agriculture can do much to lower animal-product related emissions, this work asserts too that an understanding of the role of narrative and the affect-driven, irrational underpinnings of food behaviors is central to any progress on the issue. The Climate- Food issue, I contend, needs not only technological advancements, but also and perhaps more importantly, more stories.