Skip to main content

Food and Climate Change without the hot air - S L Bridle ***

My first impression here was that S L Bridle was going to have to work very hard to recover from the subtitle, which is painfully inaccurate. (Spoiler alert for those who don't like suspense - thankfully, the book is a lot better than the subtitle.) The subtitle reads 'Change your diet: the easiest way to help save the planet.'

Firstly, the planet does not need saving from climate change. A good number of species are put at risk by climate change and human civilisation could be severely traumatised, but the planet will be just fine. It's gone through far worst in the past. Second, changing diet isn’t easy. Not at all. As Bridle makes clear, one longhaul flight has the same impact as a whole year of food consumption, while even a shorthaul flight contributes a similar amount of greenhouse gasses as the change that could be made by a transformed diet. It's much easier to not take one flight than it is to change several meals a day. (Of course it's best to do both - but it doesn't make sense to claim that changing diet is the easiest way to make a difference.)

Luckily, when we get onto the presentation of the facts in this big, glossy, full colour book, things are much better. (Incidentally, doesn't being a big, glossy, full colour book have more climate impact than being a small, non-glossy, black and white book?) I really like the way that Bridle assembles the greenhouse gas emissions from the different aspects that go into things we eat and drink, from making a cup of tea or coffee to typical meals through the day. It is clearly explained and well illustrated with charts. This does really help readers to think through the way that their eating actions cause greenhouse gas emissions and how, for example, eating less meat could have a positive impact.

If I have one criticism here, it is that the numbers are rather plucked out of the air, and are over-simplistic when dealing with what can be quite complex factors. So, for example, Bridle says that my electricity use implies burning coal or gas and hence significant emissions, which are factored into the impact of my tea, coffee and cooked meals. But in the UK, we hardly burn any coal now, and my energy company assures me that my electricity is 100 per cent from renewables - so why is this true? These kind of points need more rounding out to make sense to the reader.

I'd also say that after you've seen the details on a few meals, things get a bit similar. There are plenty of other aspects to bring in, of course. Greenhouse gas emissions from animals and from food waste, for example. But the format of describing what goes into meal after meal isn't ideal. Again, we could have done with some more detail. So, for example, there's much debate over whether having sheep on grassland that can't be used to raise crops is or isn't better than not having them. Similarly, in There is No Planet B, Mike Berners-Lee does a great job of breaking down how food waste happens and how to reduce it, where here we get a lot less of that detail (even though this is a lot bigger book).

I liked this book and the ideas it was putting across, but for me it could have been significantly better.


Paperback:    
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur