Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable

NPR Morning Edition “New Dietary Guidelines Will Not Include Sustainability Goal”

Man, this is a bummer. If our dietary guidelines are simply aimed at maximizing our bodily health but not the long-term health of our civilization and the planet upon which we depend, what’s the point of these guidelines?

I love how the meat industry quibbles with numbers on this one. As if doing a more fine-grained quantification of impact-per-nutrient would radically change the fact that animal food products are unsustainable! Attention environmentally-conscious graduate students! Here’s a really easy project with the potential to impact sustainability policy: compare plant- and animal-based food on a nutrient-for-nutrient basis (rather than pound-for-pound) in terms of impact per nutrient delivered. That should put an end to the quibbling!