What is a Happy Meal?

                                                  The Global Food Crisis

A growing global food crisis has seen staple food price rises of up to 80% in some countries and food riots in many cities. According to the World Bank 33 countries are now in danger of political destabilisation and conflict following food price inflation.

With these fatal food riots in poor nations, and with China rapidly approaching Western levels of consumption, we must re-define what constitutes a “happy meal”. Scientists are concluding that along with more fuel-efficient cars and curbing industrial pollution, the simple act of eating less meat could help slow global warming.

“For the world’s higher-income population it is as important to examine greenhouse-gas emissions from meat eating as it is to examine the emissions from driving and flying,” according to the authors of a study in the medical journal Lancet.

In fact the methane being released because of global meat and milk production is even more significant. Livestock occupy a third of the land on earth. Agricultural greenhouse gases are about 22 percent of all emissions around the world.

The study said that reducing agricultural emissions would require a cut in global meat consumption. There would be other benefits from this, such as lower rates in heart disease, cancer and obesity.

“Today, as Chinese, European and U.S. farmers begin to run short of land for crop expansion,” the study says, “the increasing demand for meat in developing economies is extending intensive agriculture as far as the rain forest of South America.”

The 2008 “State of the World” report from Worldwatch Institute calls meat and seafood “the global diet’s most costly ingredients.” The report says, “Eating less of these foods is a sort of investment in the future, since it will mean having more family farms, reducing water pollution, and, in case of wild fish, preserving a catch that is increasingly scarce.”