Name: How could veganism change the world? | The Economist
Uploaded: 2019-06-26T07:29:31.000Z
Duration: 6 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

By 2050 the world's population could approach 10 billion

and around 60 percent more food could be needed to feed everyone.

[Marco Springmann] The environmental impacts of the food system are daunting.

It's responsible for about a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions

and uses about 70 percent of all fresh water

resources and it occupies about 40 percent of the Earth's land surface.

the total emissions budget that we have in order to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

Interest in vegan food has been booming across the rich world.

A major study has put the diet to the test,

analyzing an imagined scenario in which the world goes vegan by 2050.

[Marco Springmann] If everybody went vegan

by 2050 we estimated that the food-related greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by three quarters.

Cows are the biggest emission contributors.

Bugs in their digestive system produce methane

and deforestation for their pasture releases carbon dioxide.

I'm a ninth generation farmer in this area.

I grew up on a farm with cows and feeding bulls.

Jaap Korteweg comes from a long line of farmers in the Netherlands.

My goal is to be the biggest butcher in the world.

But he's now a butcher with a difference.

develop products with the same experience without an animal.

We can produce beef as big as a front door with the right texture of real beef.

The equipment we use in our plant-based plants

The only difference is there is no blood on the floor.

Jaap made the switch to plant-based meat 11 years ago.

He now ships to 17 countries with annual sales of 20 million Euros.

We look to the meat product we want to copy

and look for the right ingredients to get the same experience.

Over 80 percent of the world's farmland is used for animal production.

But it produces only 18 percent of the world's calories.

So a lot of food is wasted as feed for animals that we would then eat.

Growing animal feed means more land per calorie of food is needed to produce beef than broccoli.

then that would be the size of the continent of Africa that would be freed.

more varied, with less calories could save lives.

Which could make the global economy healthier too.

is used to treat certain diseases that are associated with diets.

Coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

Then we get to an estimate of about one trillion U.S. dollars in 2050 that could be saved.

That would be about three percent of all home health care related cost.

But global meat consumption is growing around the world by almost three percent a year since 1960.

Nobody like the way we treat animals in factory farms.

Nobody like the situation that is not good for our health, not good for the environment,

While Jaap's firm threatens meat farmers, meat companies and butchers are customers and partners.

Meat companies don't own the farmers, so it's easy to change from chickens or pigs to plant-based meat.

If the consumers want it and the market want it

Affordable and accessible alternatives could yet see the rich world hit peak meat and head down the other side.

that the world would really go vegan by 2050.

We found that without large scale dietary changes

towards more plant-based diets, we would have

a very slim chance of staying below dangerous levels of climate change.

But even moving towards a plant-based diet could help.

get us probably three-quarters of the way.

Governments can play a crucial role by setting the right dietary guidelines.

where it's clear that the standard foods that are ordered are plant-based, healthy and sustainable.

plant-based meat is just the next step in a long history of developments in the farming world.

It's always changing in the agriculture world.

A hundred years ago there were millions of draft horses to transport, to plow.

because we don't need work horses anymore.

to produce our meat and the slaughter animals