reading World Hunger: 10 Myths still. still yet to finish, but more than halfway.
But it brought something to mind. While most of the book speaks to solutions that would require a lot of community, it does recommend dietary changes a person can do as an individual, namely reducing meat, particularly beef.
Within the context of the rest of the book thus far, this makes sense. It has a lot of stats on the inefficiency & pollution of modern meat farming, esp beef. However, it recognises that animal ag can be a pretty important thing in some contexts. Animals can convert things humans can't eat into things we can eat, which is essential for communities in climates where growing crops really isn't viable. & in the book, encouraging reliance on importing food is heavily critiqued, and is usually an extension of colonialism... it'll be better for folks to eat animals than to be reliant on people far-away to deliver food to them. Plus animals have important ways of helping plant agriculture, e.g. manure, fuel/electricity-free ways of pulling carts, milling, etc, so on and so forth.
But what Confuses me is how this is as far as the recommendation goes. The book specifically points out plant crops that use extensive slave labor and land grabs, and disenfranchise people, crops like chocolate, bananas, coffee, oil palm -- sometimes naming particular corporations, Chiquita, Fyffes, etc. But the book does not say to try avoiding these plant crops, or even to boycott particular corporations. This is something that bugs me often, it shows up often, where cutting back on animal/beef products is the totality of someone's recommendations for sustainability. Why does it always end there???? Why is it so common to fail to hold the banana/cacao/coffee/oil agriculture responsible for incredible harm as well??
I straight up dont have an answer for this one, idk if yall have thoughts. I have seen some stuff on palm oil at least but woefully little on the others despite how well-documented their inhumane & ecologically destructive cultivation is.