World Food Day Op-Eds

For World Food Day, our executive director Mia MacDonald has co-authored two op-eds about sustainable diets and animal agriculture. World Food Day honors the date of the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1945.

The first op-ed is with Isis Alvarez of Global Forest Coalition (GFC) entitled, “World Food Day and the fires next time: Mortgaging the future of the planet for meat and dairy.” The piece takes a look at the Amazon fires and how they’ve been fueled by our demand for meat and dairy and highlights how global efforts to provide healthy and sustainable diets for all must tackle industrial meat and dairy production. They write, “further intensification of a model that ignores traditional livestock farming and agro-ecological systems will only mean deforestation, biodiversity loss, violations of human rights and animal welfare and the concentration of land as well as other critical natural resources in the hands of a few privileged minority.”

The second op-ed is with Judy Bankman who authored the Brighter Green policy paper, Chronic Disease, Changing Diets and Sustainability: The Globalization of Western-style Eating and Its Implications. It is entitled, “World Food Day: ‘Big Food’ vs. Sustainable, Healthy Diets — Kids and Earth are at Stake.” The piece looks at the need for sustainable and healthy diets that are also affordable and accessible. This can only be achieved with a commitment from everyone: from policymakers to industry influencers, from city planners and local business owners to consumers. They write, “we’ll need to start incentivizing health-oriented supermarkets to open locations in areas where they’re needed most. This will take commitment from policymakers, community members, and planners, as well as from forward-thinking companies willing to be change a paradigm that right now threatens the health of the planet and of coming generations.”