![]() It is still more food – way, way more – than two billion people currently have access to. Of course, and to reinforce how sobering is the global perspective the study brings to the question “what’s for dinner?”, this diet isn’t even that taxing. To date, however, governmental guidelines, such as those published this week by the British Nutrition Foundation, specify 2,000 kcal for women. The diet functions on the basis of 2,500 kcal daily, which corresponds, the report says, to the average energy needs of a 70kg (11st) man and a 60kg (9½st) woman, both aged 30, with moderate to high levels of physical activity. Per day, you get 250g of full-fat milk products (milk, butter, yoghurt, cheese): the average splash of milk in not very milky tea is 30g. Similarly, you are allocated little more than two chicken breast fillets and three eggs every fortnight and two tins of tuna or 1.5 salmon fillets a week. A full month’s diet plan would be a better illustration, given that the daily ration of red meat stands at 7g (with an allowable range of 0-14g) unless you are creative enough to make a small steak feed two football sides and their subs, you will only be eating one once a month. The following, therefore, is a rough estimate of what someone in Britain might eat over a seven-day period. The diet also omits many things people cook with, from alcohol and seaweed to dried fruit and coconut milk (botanists call the coconut a drupe, and nutritionists, variously, a nut, a fruit and a seed, so go figure which category its milk fits into). It can most likely be made to work for other free-froms, although the list of what to eat clearly needs to be road-tested by everyone to be proved to be workable – or not. Crucially, it does include a range of foodstuff types that are adaptable, in theory, to the cuisines (potato or cassava palm-oil-based, say, or soy-rich) and primary dietary restrictions (omnivore, no pork, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan) found across the world. ![]() Dairy is, for western populations anyway, going to be a sticking point, because the suggested diet does not include much. It has identified a daily win-win diet – good for health, good for the environment – that is loosely based on the much-lauded Mediterranean diet, but with fewer eggs, less meat and fish, and next to no sugar. So how does the commission propose to fix this? Food production, the report states, “is the largest source of environmental degradation”. And what we are eating has a lot to do with that. Introducing the commission under the title Acting in the Anthropocene, the Lancet firmly places that global food system within the framework of human impact on both climate and the environment that has caused geologists to rethink how they work: we are not (yet) extinct, but we have an era named after us. Unhealthy diets are, it says, “the largest global burden of disease”, and pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than “unsafe sex, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined”. From the numbers quoted alone, it is hard to disagree: more than 2 billion people are micronutrient deficient, and almost 1 billion go hungry, while 2.1 billion adults are overweight or obese. The Eat-Lancet report posits that the global food system is broken. Should one eat omnivorously, organic and local, or go vegan? Is dairy milk production worse than California almond milk in terms of fresh water usage and carbon miles – and what about in terms of calcium? Which is better, farmed fish, wild fish or no fish? There are times when chickpeas feel like the only safe way to go. Indeed, the debate around how one should eat is so fraught as to now be dubbed the nutrition wars. To anyone who has spent any time trying to figure out how to eat healthily, economically, ethically and compassionately, this might sound too good to be true. The initial report presents a flexible daily diet for all food groups based on the best health science, which also limits the impact of food production on the planet. But they are clear that it depends on far more than just these basic requirements. Their solution is contingent on global efforts to stabilise population growth, the achievement of the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement on climate change and stemming worldwide changes in land use, among other things. The commissioners lay out important caveats.
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