The truth is that as prices rise, people will naturally shift to eating less meat. Not a need for government intervention here.

People who propose the kinds of things in the article should be asked to explain the totality of the kind of life they espouse, the changes would go further than reading the packets of mange-tout in the supermarket to see how many food miles they have racked up.

The party is over. We can’t afford not to go green, to carry on burying our heads in the sand, assuming that more will always be there. This kind of irresponsibility brought us the credit crunch, only a return to living within our means & not living wantonly will end it.

A change in dietary habits resulting from a mere 5% of the world’s population choosing to eat less meat rather than completely converting to vegetarianism would serve both to significantly reduce carbon emissions and drive down food prices.

Your comment doesn’t follow from the previous one.

But otherwise, you’re asking me to be a neo-lib, which I certainly am not. “The market” as it stands today, does not deal with the fact that access to and the proceeds from the common land used for agriculture (or kept fallow) is not equal, and yet should be. If it were, then everyone could choose to grow for food or for biofuels on their share.

Try to be liberal here. Different people might prefer to put a different priority on eating and driving to those you would chose. The price mechanism is a perfect way for them to express those preferences.

Clearly, the price of food is now starting to reflect the short-term ‘freebie’ we’ve had in using abundant energy to give us seemingly cheap food.

We now have a situation where the cost of meeting our needs (primarily food, warmth and shelter) is high because those primary needs have no priority over secondary ‘wants’ such as private transport (hence the biofuels disaster), and ‘desires’ such as having the latest iteration of consumer electronics, complete with intentional obsolescence.

Perhaps there are answers in high carbon taxes, as someone suggested, but only where they ensure that the *needs* are met, either by a Citizen’s Income, or tradeable energy quotas.

It is certainly true that the wealthy are now paying too cheap a price for their luxuries, while the poor are paying too high a price for their needs!

This argument though does give vegetarians another reason to be even more insufferably smug than they already are.

But a lot of meat eaters go overboard and cause themselves ill health.

If cooked correctly meat is healthy.

Yes. But we haven’t been eating gigantic slabs of factory-farmed meat every day. In human history, people tended not to be vegetarian but they only ate meat rarely, because it was only rarely that they were able to.

Additionally, meat was at a higher standard even than the free range offerings of today, and was much healthier: more protein, less fat. For about 200-300 years, farmers have been trying to knock out more and more meat at the expense of quality. Witness the factory farming and the near-extinction of “rare breeds”.

So it isn’t natural or healthy to eat fry-ups, steaks and what have you every day like a lot of people do. People don’t seem to understand the connection between poor diet and physical and mental ill health. I think there should be better education.

In my opinion it is only a sound medical choice for someone if there have a lush variety in diet together with supplements of omega oils. Which is not an option for many people on ordinary incomes around the world.

Animal fat also acts as a natural antidepressant.

Meat in ‘normal’ dosages is beneficial,

Being vegetarian or eating locally are admirable moral choices, but they should be left up to the individual as much as possible.