Turning vegetarian won't stop hunger -but it'll help

A worthwhile article from priyamvada Gopal -whom I'd not heard of before. I liked her sensitivity borne of her Indian background to the way that diet can be used oppressively and belligerently and so she is right to be wary of diet-based moral highground campaigns: we have probably all encountered food fascists. I hope I'm not one of them, but when people ask me why I'm vegetarian I try to convey something of what Ms Gopal says:

...a report from leading scientists warning that catastrophic food shortages can only be avoided if the world switches to a mainly vegetarian diet in the next 40 years. With many regions like the Sahel in Africa already facing near-famine conditions, 2 billion people already malnourished, and an estimated 2 billion increase in the world population by 2050, a global plant-based diet seems not just desirable but inevitable.

And so she does categorically state that:

 there are strong environmental and health reasons to reduce our dependence on animal farming and for the better-off to drastically cut meat and dairy consumption,

And it is hard to see how that implication can be avoided. The economic power of the global north pull resources away from the economically disadvantaged and this costs lives and health. I find it hard to consider eating meat, knowing that by doing so I'd be contributing to a 'supply system' which is skewed to starve the poor to enable us to eat something that is, ironically, killing 'us' through overconsumption.

But she is right when she goes on to say:

we must resist the temptation to abstractly denote a universal vegetarian lifestyle as the sole or simple answer

Because in an interconnected system it is not as simple as that: do my micro decisions really make a difference? Would a 'much-less-meat' culture guarantee that the resources released actually were re-allocated back to the poor? -or would 'we' find further ways to denude the two thirds world of their daily bread? That last couple of questions really points to the necessity to accompany reducing or eliminating meat from our collective diets by political action to address the accumulation of economic power systematically impoverishing the less powerful and already-poor. As Gopal says "the inequitable commandeering of global resources". And then she expresses well what I have just tried to say:

Wealth concentration generates disparate purchasing power that allows richer nations as well as the better-off in every nation to consume – and waste – a disproportionate share of food, fuel, water and other resources. Arable land itself is put towards profit through speculation, mining and logging, rather than feeding people.

And whether I can make a difference: well, in a small way perhaps, but mostly by encouraging others to reduce or eliminate consumption of meat. At least not eating meat is an everyday way to make a contribution to the solution -however indirect and fraught that is in a complex obliquitous world and it is a way that complements -is even an icon and index of- political effort on behalf of the global poor.
So, while I take issue with her article's title: Turning vegetarian will not solve the food crisis because it looks a bit like she's discounting it and offering comfort to the meat-addicted or insouciant. I do however, agree very much with her main thesis:

The excessive consumption of animal products clearly poses an imminent danger to both planet and human existence. But addressing this cannot take the form of a coercive herbivorous moralism. We need a comprehensive reordering of the global economy and our priorities as human beings to end the limitless scandal that is widespread hunger.

I would have to add, as I have written in my book Praying the Pattern, those of us who regularly prayer "Give us today our daily" bread, must recognise that the normal means that God uses to answer that for those of us in the West are mis-serving and so preventing the provision of daily bread for many in the world. How can we pray 'give us our daily bread' without recognising that 'us' includes all who look to God? And so some of us praying it routinely find that this petition is answered inadequately. And, then, how can we recognise that without beginning to do something to try to redress the balance and enable that prayer to be answered for them as well as us.