**14. Reap and sow**

The vast grain export as Aid helped farmers in the USA dispose of their surpluses helping short term but did not encourage local development. Some interventions back-fired badly such as peanut farming in Tanzania, apple farming in Nepal and the exacerbation of a food crisis in Malawi [175]. Green developments can be criticised for fueling population explosions rather than credited for alleviating hunger. Import substitution encourages empty calorization of locally processed foods and drinks and is responsible for the "commercial determinants" of ill health and the triple burden of combining diseases of poverty with obesity rather than providing a balanced omnivorous diet [176–179].

The modern period has, despite the above, seen some telling upswings for the majority (such as 1945–1975), that relate to more egalitarian diets with more milk and meat after World War 2 rationing. A 30 years "Trente Glorieuses", helped by the rise of welfare states, lasted longer than relief from the exigencies of war would explain. Divergences related to more neoliberal policies and less attention to or sympathy for welfare and the incomplete success of civil rights, consumer or cultural power (music, sport) suggest something more fundamental [180–182]. Meat transitions are nevertheless in progress as in China (the high price however favouring the upper and urban middle classes), but are only slowly occurring in India and only arguably in sub-Saharan Africa.

#### **15. Meat downsides**

Downsides of meat production and consumption given the "Long Shadow" of the livestock revolution and ecological "Hoof-prints" are well rehearsed as are health consequences of meat gluttony from gout onward to (bowel) cancer [183–185]. The knives are out for "hamburger" carnivores and this is not surprising given meat's green-house gas effects (CO2, CH4 and N2O [186]), let alone animal rights concerns and risk of food poisoning (e.g. E.coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter), and emergent zoonoses, including COVID-19).

Agri-businesses encroach on land over and above the pastureland that could not be used for crops, that is grabbed and de-forested with little attention to improving the soil long-term leading to desertification -and uses gigantic quantities of fossil fuels as "food-miles" and for artificial fertilisers with consequent loss of biodiversity and insect apocalypses, from pesticide use [187, 188]. Meat markets and farms are under intense pressure, by the poor and the rich (with their exotic tastes), to produce in close ecological proximities often linked to de-forestation increasing risk of (bat) coronaviruses crossing species boundaries.

Rich Americans eat their body weight or more in meat per annum [189]. The poor in sub-Saharan Africa and other places in the "Dickensian" Global South eat negligible amounts. In middle- and low-income countries there is a marked class divide with the rich eating a great deal. Even in the USA or UK, the very poor can live in food deserts and metabolic ghettoes reliant on food banks when austerity is policy [190]. In 1962 the average for the Chinese was 6Kg of meat pa but that figure is now 60Kg and rising toward the American average of 120Kg [191].

Ten calories of animal feed (grain, soybean and fishmeal more than grass), produce one calorie of meat and require enormous quantities of land (deforestation), water, oil, artificial fertilisers (fixing nitrogen using fossil fuels and allowing eutrophication), antibiotics (enabling evolution of superbugs and not even given for therapeutic purposes), and pesticides ("silent springs") [192]. Some relief

comes from less use of ruminants and more of mono-gastric chickens and pigs (badly affected by pandemic induced culls) and plant-based green-marketed foods and drinks as meat and dairy substitutes.

The case against meat is, as a result of the above, strong as a major contributor (30–40%) to greenhouse gas emissions (methane and N2O ' tipping points' as they are potent but have shorter half-lives than CO2 but do not have its fertiliser effect), and climate change (1.4%F since 1880) [193]. Meat intake is currently running at 300 million metric tonnes having been 7 million in 1960 and could rise by another 75% by 2050: artificial meats are unlikely to be the whole answer to curb this hunger but other mitigations such as less beef and more insects in diet are possible [194].

### **16. Vegetarianism**

Widespread vegetarianism is usually proposed by those in the rich world who have all micronutrients available from other, often supplemented, foods not available to poor economic vegetarians [195, 196]. Embarrassment over meat eating and distancing from the sight of slaughter has a long history dating back to Pythagoras and tied up with concerns about man's place in nature "*Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you*" (Genesis ix.2–3), versus "*Take not away the life you cannot give: For all things have a right to live*" (Dryden's Ovid),- up to 17th and 18th C tracts and modern animal rights and animal sentience campaigns and research [197, 198]. There is resistance to vegetarianism culturally, despite "Veganuary," and converting to some plant-based diets that are heavily processed or engineered corn now 'super-sweet' can increase emissions and may have health risks or be too expensive [199–203]. Our new found feelings about stewardship of animals should extend to different geographies as "out of sight out of mind" may shield us emotionally from slaughter houses but should not work for other human-beings on poor monophagic vegetarian diets [204].
