Rethinking grand challenges within sustainable animal production

Dietary policies are rapidly evolving, as the urgencies related to public health and sustainability of the food system are becoming more tangible and menacing. Increasingly, such policies bring up the need for a protein transition. This implies that society should consume less “animal protein,” while the protein gap should be filled with legumes and nuts, a series of so-called “plant-based alternatives” (i.e., imitations of animal source foods), bioreactor foods (e.g., lab-grown meat), and other sources of protein (e.g., algae and insects). The risk of such an approach, when taken too far, is that it tends to generate a simplistic categorization of the food system, whereby animal source foods (red meat in particular) are seen as intrinsically harmful and the non-animal replacements as mostly beneficial. This division is further fuelled by societal dynamics that are generated by vested interests, ideologies, societal anxieties, virtue signalling, white-hat bias, and scapegoating. Although there are obviously clear challenges that need to be urgently addressed within the livestock sector (as for most other parts of the food system, including various types of crop agriculture), we should not be blinded by such an irrational binary division. Moreover, the proposed solutions would come with their own issues (water-intensive crops with high chemical inputs, ultra-processed imitation foods, the negative effects of pasture land conversion on biodiversity and carbon deposits, concerns related to food security and food sovereignty, etc.) Instead, production and consumption practices need to be carefully evaluated based on a holistic assessment, and not through the myopic use of reductionist metrics that can easily be manipulated to reify preconceived points of view. The problems at hand are multidimensional, requiring proper contextualization. From a nutritional point of view, for instance, protein comes with substantial variability related to digestibility and amino acid profiles. Also, animal source foods offer much more than “protein” alone, including several key micronutrients and bio-active compounds that are often more difficult to obtain from plants. Within the area of sustainability, the entire climate change discussion would also benefit from a more inclusive assessment, thereby avoiding all-too static interpretations (ignoring the role of progress and technological development), negligence of true nutritional value when comparing very different foods (e.g., when using such metrics as CO2-eq/kg or CO2-eq/kcal), the use of global aggregates for local discussions, simplification of global warming kinetics (cf., the GWP100 vs. GWP* debate), and so forth. Taken together, Grand Challenges should aim primordially at the achievement of adequate essential nutrition within specific dietary contexts that need to be more broadly assessed (also including lifestyle, cardiometabolic health status, culture, food preferences, purchase power, etc.) and that should be generated within the constraints of a sustainable agricultural operating space. Some red lines may indeed need to be drawn by policy makers (e.g., halting of deforestation or water pollution), whereas some other practices may need to be optimized (veterinary care, nutrient cycles, emissions, etc.) or promoted (carbon sequestration, improvement of soil health and biodiversity, etc.), but it would be a fatal mistake to consider animal agriculture as a monolithic entity that needs to be severely restricted or even dismantled. Taking livestock out of the equation would undermine our only hope on a healthy and sustainable food system. They are essential for the upcycling of otherwise inedible materials (forage, waste and side streams, etc.) into the high-quality foods that are needed to combat malnutrition globally, the valorisation of marginal lands that are otherwise unproductive, the sequestration of carbon and the (re)generation of soil health, the provision of crucial ecosystem services and landscape management, the generation of livelihoods, and the (all-too often underestimated) treasuring of our various cultural legacies. Instead, an improved integration of animal and crop agriculture should be central in any Grand Challenge. This should be done based on the best available science, but also by being prudent about the potential black swans further down the road. Complex systems always kick back in unpredictable manners, especially if they are radically altered through hurried top-down approaches.

Trefwoorden:sustainability, essential nutrition, food system