In a new book named Food in a Planetary Emergency, writers Diana Bogueva and Dora Marinova say food production is accountable for more than a third of the world’s greenhouse gases and the demise of a large number of wildlife species due to land clearing.
Dr. Bogueva from the University of Sydney’s Centre for Advanced Food Engineering explained that farming was leaving enormous strain on the environment through a loss of biodiversity, loss of savanna, deforestation, plastics pollution, overuse of freshwater, exhaustion of the planet’s soils, and exploitation of species.
The book has explained the outcomes of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and meta-analyses on the link between food and environmental effect.
It alarms for change in areas differing from packaging pollution and food waste to meat consumption, flexitarianism, and circular agriculture, which is a mostly plant-based diet that encourages the periodic meat dish.
Professor Marinova explained that two-thirds of the planet’s wildlife had become extinct in the past 50 years, according to a study by the World Wildlife Fund in 2020.
She said vacating land for livestock output or producing food for livestock didn’t make sense because cattle required 38 calories of feed to generate one calorie of beef for human consumption.
“That’s a very inefficient and I would say irrational way of feeding the population because rather than growing the grain or the food we need for human consumption we are growing the grain for the animals and then eating them,” Professor Marinova announced.
