How diet can fight climate change: eat bug powder, fungus meat – or simply cut down on meat and dairy and eat more plants to save the planet

Scientists find adopting foods such as lab-cultured meat and insect meal will help stop climate change – but so will eating less actual meat and dairy

In their modelling, replacing 80 per cent of animal food sources with plant-based options resulted in a 75 per cent reduction in climate impact

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You don’t have to add new foods and technology into your diet to help stop climate change – simply cut down on meat and dairy and eat more plants. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:45pm, 2 May 2022

A new study from researchers in Finland found that diets that simply cut down on meat and dairy products are nearly as climate-friendly as diets that rely on culture-grown meat and milk.

Global agriculture and food systems, especially the production of meat and milk, accounted for 31 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

Could eating bug powder and fungus meat help stop climate change? Yes, say scientists – but they’ve also got some more palatable suggestions.

The researchers created a model that calculates how different diets reduce the potential for global warming. With some tweaking, they got that reduction as high as 80 per cent but it came at a price – some variants of the diet got much of their protein from things like cell-based cultured meat, microalgae and milk produced in a tank from cow mammary cells.

Two samples of lab-grown meat. Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto

The happy surprise was that diets that simply cut down on actual meat and dairy were almost as climate-friendly.

“It doesn’t need to be technology,” says Rachel Mazac, a food systems researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland and one of the paper’s authors.