It was meant to be one point of return in the fight to reform the food systems that drive climate change and the global obesity epidemic.
In early 2019, as part of a collaboration between non-profits based in Norway eat and the British Medical Journal Lanceta team of world leading scientists was published a report which sought to answer a critical question: “Can we feed a future population of 10 billion people with a healthy diet within planetary limits?”
Their answer: yes, but not without “transforming” our current eating habits.
In its ‘planetary health diet’, the EAT-Lancet Commission made precise, carefully calculated recommendations about what foods can be eaten, and in what quantities, if we are to feed a growing population while preventing climate disruption and improve public health.
It was a recipe for more greens and more beans, with less sugar and much less meat.
Adopting the Commission’s advice would mean that many people – especially those in wealthy Western countries like the United States – would have to drastically reduce their meat consumption. North Americans, the report said, ate more than six times the recommended amount of red meat.
The report had a major media impact, generating nearly 6,000 articles in 118 countries. BBC call that “flexitarian diet to feed 10 billion” while the New York Times DESCRIBED as a group of “new dietary guidelines for the benefit of people and the planet”.
The Commission continued on its way, presenting its findings to governments and international institutions around the world. The report was exposed at the World Bank, presented prominently at the UN Food Systems Summit and helped inform food policy changes in Canada, Indonesia AND European union.
But opposition from meat and dairy advocates was fierce.
Pro-meat experts and livestock lobbyists lined up to criticize the findings. It is reported that the World Health Organization forced to withdraw of sponsoring the EAT-Lancet launch event following complaints from the Italian government; and politicians in major consumer countries such as the US showed no enthusiasm for incorporating sustainability goals into official dietary guidelines.
The reaction, however, was stronger online.
An analysis of the phenomenon, published later in Lancet, described how a “digital counter-movement” managed to “rapidly organize” around the hashtag #yes2meat in the days leading up to the report’s launch. This “new skeptical community,” the journal admits, was soon “dominating the discussion around the EAT-Lancet report in intriguing and disturbing ways.” While the report was received positively by the mainstream media, it “also led to highly polarized online debates including misinformation, conspiracy theories and personal attacks”. The Lancet concluded that these online controversies showed how “a rapidly changing media landscape poses serious challenges to science communication on health and climate issues”.
The authors of this analysis presented the emergence of the #po2meat opposition as organic and spontaneous. However, discovered has learned that working alongside and within that movement was a coordinated effort to mobilize scientists and academics against the report.
And the people who led this effort, and who later celebrated their success in a private report to their agribusiness funders, did not work for a corporate PR agency or a lobbying firm, but for a fledgling academic institute at a prestigious university. american.
The Center for Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research (CLEAR) at the University of California, Davis, was established in 2019 under the leadership of Frank Mitloehner, a prominent agricultural academic who is often quoted in the media discussing greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. The center publicly describes its goal as “helping the animal agriculture sector operate more efficiently” in order to “meet the demands of a growing population while reducing its impact on the environment and climate.” The center acknowledges that it has some close ties to agribusiness — including some industry funding for its work — but presents those ties as an academic virtue, arguing that “collaboration with animal agriculture is key” to its success.
But now, a big new one discovered the investigation has revealed that the center’s ties to the meat and dairy industry are much deeper and more entrenched than previously known. More than 100 pages of correspondence between the CLEAR Center and its agribusiness supporters – obtained from discovered under Freedom of Information laws – find out how the structure of the center was agreed upon through a memorandum of understanding between UC Davis and an affiliate of the American Food Industry Association (AFIA) – a trade body whose members include some of the most the world’s largest cattle and animals. The documents show how, under the terms of the agreement, industry groups have committed millions of dollars in funding to CLEAR’s work, and the center has pledged to maintain an “advisory board” of 12 of its agribusiness funders to provide “the data”. and advice’ on ‘research and industry communication advantages’.
The documents also show that the center’s industry backers saw its greatest benefit as its ability — as an ostensibly independent, academically credible voice — to make a positive case to the wider world about the environmental impact of meat. and dairy.
This communication role is the focus of CLEAR’s outreach to its agribusiness donors. In these briefings, CLEAR outlines a campaign to review the industry’s climate footprint and describes research designed to undermine plant-based alternatives to meat products; he also celebrates his role in the EAT-Lancet backlash as an early success for the center, crediting Mitloehner with launching “a massive campaign” that, along with the #yes2meat social media message, “was successful in getting rid of audience undecided by EAT. -Lancet Report.”
Answering it discoveredThe findings of Walter Willet, a distinguished professor of nutrition at Harvard University and lead author of the EAT-Lancet report, said: “It is quite shocking that UC Davis, which is a major research institution, allows their name to be lend credence to a coordinated disinformation campaign supported by the beef industry.”
Mitloehner said discovered:”The CLEAR Center works with the livestock sector to improve it for the environment. To suggest that we are doing anything other than that is a gross mischaracterization of what we do.”
