With the holidays upon us and 2020 winding down (finally), I hope you have the opportunity to take some time off to relax with your friends and family. Everyone in the meat industry has certainly earned it after an intense year with unprecedented (sorry, last time I’ll use that word this year) and ever-evolving challenges. As you’re hopefully taking a bit of a break and gearing up for 2021, I do have something to add to your list of things to be thinking about. After all, it just wouldn’t be my blog if I wasn’t sharing some potentially concerning news, even during the holidays.

As I’ve shared previously, we’ve been hearing a lot of calls (some coming from the well-intentioned, others not so much) that the wake of the pandemic is the time to radically overhaul the food system, since we are all still feeling the ripple effects of processing difficulties, market instability and more. One driver of that narrative that I believe we need to be paying close attention to is the United Nations, as it gears up to host a Food Systems Summit (FSS) in September 2021. The FSS is being convened to “launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food” in order to drive progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

While we can all certainly get on board with continuous improvement in the area of sustainability and the FSS is taking on some laudable goals, it is anticipated that one outcome will be suggested dietary guidance that countries will be asked to adopt, and it’s not looking like those will be very positive toward meat and dairy. One of the FSS’s five “action tracks” is titled “shift to sustainable consumption patterns” and the EAT Foundation’s Gunhild Storladen is at the helm as the chair. That name and organization should ring a bell from January 2019’s EAT-Lancet report, which used some dubious methodology to call for drastic reductions in consumption of animal protein in its prescribed “planetary health diet.”

I’ve sat in on a few pre-FSS webinars that have already been held and the tone toward meat is definitely not positive. In one event (co-hosted by activist group Compassion in World Farming), a speaker suggested that Western countries need to cut meat and dairy consumption by 50%, with the meat we do eat needing to come from small-scale, pasture-based systems. Various mechanisms of achieving this were put forth, including adopting new dietary guidelines, taxing meat or raising costs by requiring less efficient production methods.

Another session I attended focused on private companies and unveiled a new benchmarking report based on public sustainability commitments made by 350 companies (including several U.S.-based animal protein companies). Only a handful of companies were deemed to be making appropriate commitments and the FSS seemed to be positioned as a potential pressure lever to push the rest to go further.

I encourage you to add looking into the FSS to your 2021 to-do list and consider finding ways to engage, as the conversations that will influence the policies adopted there are already happening. We need the meat community to take its seat at the table and make sure our perspectives are heard in this important discussion.

Heads up: more calls to ditch meat on deck in 2021

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