There’s no legal definition, but, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, sustainability is ‘the degree to which a process or enterprise is able to be maintained or continued while avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources’. There’s no escaping the fact that what we eat has a massive impact on the Earth’s wellbeing: a 2019 report by medical journal The Lancet bluntly stated that food production ‘is the largest source of environmental degradation’.
The problem is that deforestation, pollution, animal welfare and human health and prosperity all make competing, and occasionally contradictory, claims on our attention. A glass of cow’s milk, for example, leads to three times as many greenhouse gases being produced as any plant-based milk—but it takes 1,611 gallons of water to produce only one litre of almond milk . There really is no such thing as a (guilt) free lunch.
This story is from the May 20, 2020 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the May 20, 2020 edition of Country Life UK.
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