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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more