A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee was published earlier this year. The book is about interrelated crises that are threatening humanity, and the essential role of truthfulness when attempting to analyze, explain and resolve them.
This post focuses on a few sections of the book that are directly relevant to plant based or vegan diets. Other sections are, of course, equally informative and well worth reading
The book begins with the observation that humanity is accelerating into a deadly Polycrisis – a set of overlapping, and reinforcing crises threatening civilisation including climate, biodiversity, health, and pollution crises.
The book considers a range of causes. Amongst them, and a significant contributor to most of these problems is the livestock and meat production industry. Firstly, the industry contributes to the crisis through its environmentally destructive activities, and secondly through the disinformation it promotes to hide the damage and stifle the response. Berners-Lee exposes both.
While Berners-Lee is clear that meat consumption must be radically reduced as part of the solution to the crisis, he is not advocating wholly plant based diets. However, the book is a great source of information and should convince all interested readers that changes must be made to diet in order to address these crises. For myself, it is evidence similar to that which is presented in the book that persuaded me to take up a plant based diet and the book has inspired me to look at other areas of my life that can be changed.
Here are some extracts from the book, particularly highlighting the role of meat production.
Food and Biodiversity, pg 60
The drive to feed an ever-greater number of people ever-more cheaply and with ever-more animal products has been hugely detrimental for biodiversity and land fertility, as well as for climate.
The inefficiency of feeding plants to animals, compared with simply growing plants and eating them is dramatically increasing the pressure.
We need to talk about Chicken, pg 62
The production of every meat has its own issues, but chicken makes a case study that is indicative of the meat industry.
The vast majority of chicken is grown through a system in which the birds have been bred to put on weight at the fastest possible rate – but that leaves them almost unable to stand.
They are packed in tightly, because that is cheaper, and leads to fewer energy losses through chickens doing energy wasting things – like walking around and having to keep warm.
However, to prevent disease in this over-packed environment, and also to stimulate growth, they are fed antibiotics – raising the spectre of antibiotic resistance in humans.
Antibiotics don’t protect against viral infection. We know that bird flu jumping across to humans at scale would make COVID-19 look like a minor inconvenience.
we also know these chicken factories cultivate exactly the conditions which exacerbate that risk.
The streamlining of chicken production to minimise the cost per kilo of meat leads to a product that is nutritionally inferior to the product we were eating in the 1970s.
The modern version typically has far more fat but only one-fifth of the omega 3.
And these chickens are fed entirely on grain, which requires vastly more land than would be required to provide the same nutrition to humans via a plant-based diet.
Meanwhile, in the UK, for example, phosphorus pollution from the poo of the 20 million chickens in the Wye Valley is thought to have almost wiped out the fish population in the River Wye [1].
It is possible to manage this excrement, but that costs money that currently not enough companies are prepared to pay. There are no wins here, and a lot of losses
Pandemics and Antimicrobial Resistance, pg 88
Resistance to every kind of antimicrobial antibiotics can be slowed by the reduction of quantities used on farms and by humans. The threat of diseases crossing from farm animals to humans will be greatly reduced by doing away with over-intensive animal farm systems and by reduction in farm animal numbers.
Truth in the Food and Farming Industries, pg 204
… some of the big changes we need in our food system are crystal clear. To achieve them, we are going to need more farmers than we have now, and they are going to need more support, both financially and in the development of new areas of expertise.
The food processing and retail industries need to do a much better job of letting customers know what lies behind the food they supply, without greenwashing or rose-tinting it. If the reality of the chicken on sale is an antibiotic-packed, bird-flu-inducing hideous experience for the chickens, then don’t pretend otherwise. The real solution, of course is to sell something about which you can tell an authentic, positive story. Most of the global meat, dairy and fish industries rely on customers not understanding, or not thinking about, the supply chains when they go to the shops: the desperate living conditions, the antibiotics, the sea lice, the pandemic threats; to say nothing of the climate impacts and the pressures put on both nature and the global food supply.
Vegan Pieces – Further Notes
As Berners-Lee indicates, a major source of disinformation that weakens our ability to understand and respond to these crises comes from the meat and livestock industry.
The Freedom Food Alliance has recently shed some light on this. The Alliance is not a vegan organisation but does help to explain how the meat industry obscures the truth about it’s products.
In February this year the Freedom Food Alliance published a detailed report titled, Harvesting Denial, Distractions and Deception: Revealing Animal Agriculture’s Disinformation Strategies and Exploring Solutions [2]. The report analyses how the animal agriculture industry uses disinformation to block progress towards plant-based foods, despite environmental and health benefits.
The study’s lead author Nicholas Carter said “Animal agriculture giants are waging a disinformation war, threatening public health and the planet” [3]
In an earlier report, Lifting the Veil: A Deep Dive into The Disinformation Practices of Animal Agriculture, the authors wrote,
“In an era where truth seems more malleable than ever, The Freedom Food Alliance’s 2024 Disinformation Report emerges as a critical lens through which we can discern the murky waters of misinformation and disinformation in the animal agriculture sector. This comprehensive analysis sheds light on the sophisticated strategies employed by the industry to mislead the public, policymakers, and even investors about the environmental and health impacts of animal-based food production” [4]
[1] https://wyeuskfoundation.org/news/nations-favourite-river-facing-ecological-disaster, June 2020
[2] https://www.freedomfoodalliance.org/thereport, Feb 2025
[3] https://plantbasednews.org/news/environment/report-meat-industry-disinformation, Feb 2025
[4] https://www.freedomfoodalliance.org/unfork-the-food-system/the-disinfo-report, May 2024
