The Wellness Scoop - Veganism and Climate Change

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

In our most startling episode yet, we talk to Joseph Poore at Oxford University about his recent study concerning the effect of our diets on the environment. We look at how we could cut global greenhouse gases by 23% with a vegan diet, how fish can create more methane than cattle, how food miles are the wrong metric to look at, and the alarming rate at which deforestation is happening to make space for meat and dairy farms. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hi everyone and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ellen Mills. Hi guys. So today we are doing something very exciting. It was actually on my birthday this year on the 31st of may there's some really interesting articles um that came out that really caught matt and his attention and the headlines were avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest

way to reduce your impact on earth and that this new research shows without meat and dairy consumption global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75 an area equivalent to the us china european union and australia combined and still feed the world and that was kind of too powerful not to um get involved in in our podcast so we've driven up to oxford today and um we're sitting in oxford and we are talking to joseph Poor who led this study on 40,000 farms so loads to talk about. So Joseph thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me on. So first of all could you just give any listeners who aren't familiar with the study just a bit of background on it how it came about what went into the study and what the top line findings were.

Yeah, sure. So we assess the environmental impacts of 40 foods that represent about 90% of what we eat in terms of protein and calories. We did that using data from 40,000 farms in almost every country in the world. and we assessed the full food supply chain from the deforestation and clearing of land for agriculture right through to processing, packaging, transport and retail. And is that things like the water that's involved in it as well? Yes, we looked at five environmental indicators. We looked at how much land is needed to make the food, the greenhouse gas emissions that are created the water use as you said and two indicators representing the degradation of terrestrial land and water ecosystems called acidification and eutrophication and can you give us a bit more detail on on the process and then what the what

the findings of the study were what we were basically trying to do is understand not just the average impacts for different products but the range i if you produce a product in a slightly different way or what what is the impact so for example the lowest impact beef is using 36 times more land and creating six times more greenhouse gas emissions than peas and beans so even peas and beans particularly bad peas and beans peas and beans are they're all relatively low. Peas and beans are some of the lowest. But you've also got tofu, which even the highest impact tofu, even if you want to get it from Brazil, for example.

Because there's been a lot of stuff in the papers about that recently, about soy being damaging for the environment. Yeah, so first getting a few facts on the table, most of the soy we buy in the shops in the uk to eat doesn't come from the amazon right where does it come from comes from it can come from europe there's actually soy grown in france um and a lot of it comes from america okay so for eating um but from the amazon it's mainly for animal food animal feed so even for plant-based proteins that maybe have to travel a very long way um and have a lot of food miles associated

with them um and maybe even lots of packaging with them they would still be in what you're saying is is more damaging than say locally reared beef that you buy from your local butcher that's right yeah that's pretty that's pretty much the message from our study. And so our tofu in our study includes tofu that's come from very far away. It also includes tofu that's got deforestation in the value chain. And even that has lower impacts than plant products. And just to go back to what you were saying, firstly, most tofu comes from europe or the

us that we eat and secondly most of the clearance for land most of the clearance land clearance for soy in the amazon is for animal products i'm at 90 of it is for feed particularly towards china for pig feed so that's where our that that's that's where this deforested soy is so actually all these kind of um things that have come out in the paper i think it was in the last week or so talking about how actually negative therefore vegan diet is because of this soy actually this soy isn't for the vegan diet this soy is actually for cattle yes so it's incredible it kind of makes the message even more confusing yeah so I mean globally if we just ate soy directly

we'd need literally a fraction of the amount of soy that we produce and the very large majority 80% probably globally,

it's just I don't have the exact number, goes to animal feed. 90% in the Amazon is, over 90% in the

Amazon is for animal feed. Wow. Particularly Chinese Amazon is, over 90% in the Amazon is for animal feed. Wow. Particularly Chinese pig industry. That's fascinating. And one of the other points that you included, which I think is really interesting, because I think when people are thinking

about changing the way they're living in order to have a positive impact on the environment, you know, we're quite kind of slow to think about food other than food miles and things like that., we're quite kind of slow to think about food in other than food miles and things like that. And we're thinking, oh, we must get an electric car or something like that. But again, you said that actually changing your diet is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car. Yes, that's one of the really positive things I think that came out of this study. The fact is, there are these different diets that deliver transformative benefits for the

environment and we looked at a range of diets but one of them was a vegan diet and we found that it would require a globe we just modeled a global transition so you could see the numbers at scale if 7.7 billion people became vegan and uh you obviously that scales down and i'll talk how that scales down to an individual level but globally would require 3.1 billion hectares less land to produce our food so that's the same as the entirety of africa would no longer need to farm wow um that could return to nature or reforest so that's the first thing is massive and that would also use much less water and things like that as well it's not simply just their land area.

Because water is looking to be a real scarcity, isn't it, in the future? Yeah, exactly. So land is one of the issues, and it cuts land use significantly. Secondly, it cuts water use by about a quarter, global water use, changing diets. And thirdly, it cuts our greenhouse gas emissions globally by about 23%. And half of that 23% is just the difference between animal products and vegetable products. The other half is the potential carbon that would be stored when trees grow on all that land that we've saved. Right.

Thirdly, it cuts our water pollution by about 80%. Our water pollution that's caused by food by about 80 percent um so that's nitrogen and phosphorus going into ecosystems and it also cuts our acidification which is a measure of pollution of land um so you're having a big effect not just on greenhouse gas emissions on a such a wide range of environmental indicators. And you can also look at it as a consumer. For a UK consumer, it's probably going to cut your greenhouse gas emissions by about something between two and four tonnes per year, per person. So that's bigger than a lot of other options that people typically consider.

That doesn't really feature. So some of the initiatives that are gaining a lot of traction at the moment, things like Meat Free Monday, is that enough by people just not eating meat on a Monday or is it something where there has to really be huge systemic change for actually for us to fix this enormous issue we're facing? Well, here are some numbers for you by by 2050 we're going to be consuming 1.4 trillion liters of milk that's the forecast and 500 we're going to say again 1.4

trillion liters yeah a year of milk and 500 billion kilograms of meat and that's a 60% increase on 2018. So it's pretty close in the future to 2050. And what would be the impact of this? To people who are listening to this and sitting here in 2018 and the sun shining and everything looks okay, in 2050 what could the world look like if that is the case and we continue on this trend? I mean, there are a lot of things that go into a forecast, and we didn't specifically make them in our paper,

but what is very clear to say is that we've already cleared about 40% of the world for farming, deforested or cleared it to turn into pastures or other forms of farmland. And what we also know is that since 2000, an area of tropical forests, the most biodiverse forests in the world, the area the size of the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal has been cut down or burnt. In the last 18 years?

In the last 18 years. So this is... Not even two decades? No, and we've cleared it largely for livestock, grazing a livestock feed. And we've cleared it largely for livestock, grazing and livestock feed. And we did that just because people prefer the taste of animal products to vegetable products. And the last two years have been the highest this century

on record for deforestation. And with those forecasts that I just mentioned, it's hard to see any scenario where we're not going to keep clearing land at that rate. It's hard to see any scenario where greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural production stage don't increase. And our other impacts on our really precious planet don't keep increasing. I think our study did highlight that there is this alternative yeah a vegan diet and it really does change the impacts that can we reverse the impacts that we've had to this point from that or is it something where we would then just kind of level off that's a difficult question and we could we can probably reverse most of the impacts on greenhouse gas emissions if other sectors also cut.

So we can avert the worst of global warming if we make some drastic changes today. But it doesn't look like we're doing that, does it? Well, the UK is doing quite a good job. Our emissions have actually fallen in the UK, and some other countries, particularly in Europe, are actually doing a really good job at emissions. Probably not quite fast enough, but... But you say that from the impact on planet Earth,

going to a vegan diet is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car. On what kind of scale are we talking about across those? Well, just as an individual, this is just on carbon. So remembering that my point was about the fact that agriculture, you're not just cutting your greenhouse gas emissions, you're cutting a whole range of other indicators. But you can also look at it on greenhouse gas emissions.

So for a UK consumer, diet change is going to cut your emissions by two to four tonnes per year of carbon dioxide equivalents. That's about the same as 13 flights from London to Copenhagen, return flights. So it's quite a lot of flying that you would cut out. Obviously, if you do a flight to Australia, you're going to blow your carbon budget.

But in terms of an electric car, the estimate is you'd save about two tons of carbon on buying an electric car, so it's probably bigger than that. But it's also much more achievable than that, right? It's much less expensive. It's actually probably going to save people money rather than a big purchase. Exactly, it's something that everyone can do right now.

And not everyone's taking flights to Australia. But everyone in any country in the world can change their diet and achieve these you know huge benefits not just greenhouse gas emissions but this wide range of so typically it's it's difficult to create policy changes for something that isn't visually in front of us today you know when you when you look at the issues facing us today long in nhs waiting lists or brexit and how that could affect our daily lives what do you think policymakers need to do particularly when it looks like the changes we need to make are so severe and will probably be very unpopular. What would you suggest we need to do as a collective human being to try and fix this?

Or is it something where, from what you're seeing and the trends we're on, is it something where we will just keep bumbling along and then at some point it will just break? That's a really excellent question. And he or she who has the answer to that has nailed it. But our solution was that we need labels on products. And this is what you were saying earlier, Ella,

that we don't really know when we're in the shops what we're actually buying. And if we knew those impacts, that would be a great start reminding consumers whether you're interested in the environment or not your daily you're confronted with the facts every time you go to the shops when you hear the facts like you're sharing with us now it's quite hard to bury your head in the sand and ignore them and people vote with their wallets ultimately don't they i mean supermarkets shops will supply what consumers want and if if something isn't selling, they take it off the shelf. We know that from our business.

And so we really can. We are all the voters here. One other question I had, though, which I've definitely noticed with friends and family, is that I think some people who are really interested in this matter, they've done some research into it, and they kind of appreciate that beef is not especially very good for the environment for example and lots of people have moved therefore kind of maybe not having so much red meat and maybe moving towards kind of a pescatarian

way of eating but one of the things that's quite interesting in your study which i know when i've shared it with friends and family people have been really surprised about and i think we were both as well quite surprised about was this idea that actually fishing and fish is potentially not again the solution and that actually fish farming especially is is not so brilliant for the planet yeah well there are a lot of surprises that came out of this study and fish farming was one of them so we didn't really know the true emissions of fish farming but when you what we we put in a model and we built we built a model that looked at what happens to the excreta of fish and the unconsumed feeds when you put feed in the fish don't eat it yeah and the excreta so this is looking at farmed fish yeah farmed fish so which is about 50 of global fish consumption okay so

it goes to the bottom of the ponds and it's this perfect environment for bacteria and microorganisms to convert this carbon which is what they're converting into methane there's no oxygen down there so normally you convert carbon into CO2 there because there's no oxygen they convert it into methane which is really potent greenhouse gas which is what's involved in cattle farming

which is what people are saying is such a bad thing. And what is so deadly or what is so damaging about methane? Well, it traps heat in the atmosphere and it traps, it's more potent at doing that and more powerful at doing that than carbon dioxide. So that's what's raising, part of what's raising global temperatures and warming the planet up? Yeah, so the biggest contributor to global temperature rise has been carbon dioxide. And the biggest contributor has been the fossil fuel industry, which is today about 61% of our emissions.

So it's very important. We shouldn't lose focus on the fossil fuel industry. But there are these other gases, methane, nitrous oxide, as well as hydrofluorocarbons, which is another one, but those methane and nitrous oxide both really come from agriculture. And as I was saying with fish farming, fish farms can actually create more methane than cows. Wow. Okay. And when your paper came out, I know we were really shocked by it and gripped by it. And it was a topic of hot conversation around our dinner table.

What have you found the reaction to be? Have you been hearing from politicians or lobbyists or anyone else who said, wow, we didn't know this, this is something we really need to get a grip of or has it been something that's you've seen kind of come and go and some people have just kind of wanted to put their head in the sand on it i've actually had a really positive reaction i'd say compared to so i've had some companies contacting me who'd like who'd like to understand more um next week i'm speaking to some uh agricultural agrochemical and agricultural companies about this and i'm actually speaking to a agrochemical and agricultural companies about this and I'm actually speaking to an EU

working group about this. It's actually got politicians and businesses that actually really want to do something and I think that's a really good sign and I just think it's got to be a combination of more consumers are interested in and businesses have ultimately just got people behind them.

We are all stakeholders in this, aren't we? This isn't something that can be fixed by one person or one group. Yes, but at the same time, the thing that's interesting is that actually, again, and we did a really interesting episode a few weeks ago with someone who works in the food waste space. And it was a similar sort of conclusion, if you can call it conclusion, which is that actually as individuals we we can actually play such a massive part in this and you think i'm just one person what does what i eat for dinner matter tonight but actually you know there's 27 million households in the uk so if 27 million

households had a plant-based dinner that would make a really big difference if we kept doing that again and again can the uk people in the uk make that big of a difference or is the effects that have been felt from china and places like that um too great are they just are they just too great for us to really be able to make any difference well there are different ways so there's obviously consumer change and that really matters it has in fact it has immediate impacts on the environment it also sets an example and shows what's possible to other people and that's really important as well so it can spread out but if you can do it in a really intelligent way as well that might be a way that labeling would work if we required that

label products food products were labeled in our country producers around the world who supply the food to this country would have to monitor their impacts and understand what they're doing to the environment when they produce their food and that is basically creating information that doesn't exist and it would allow them to reduce their impacts so if we require producers around the world to measure their impacts that's a kind of a smart way of expanding the benefits you know of our desire to do good good for the planet and so what happened to your own diet when you were doing the study so i think the thing that i found particularly hard to give up was cheese

yeah and i liked those prep cheese and tomato croissant they were my staple food for a long time but cheese can have a higher impact than pork and poultry and i just on doing this research and also actually learning about the dairy industry which is really intensified really intensified. Really intensified. Because our demand is intensified. Our demand is so high, and we want to produce at the lowest possible cost. And because half of our beef comes from the dairy industry.

It's typically the lower-grade beef that comes from it. So it's an industry that's trying to produce thousands of liters each year from a single cow to try and get maximum value for money and produce lots of beef from to get to get extra revenue and all of this comes together to highly intensified and effectively exploitative industry um that is also having really high environmental impacts. And that was what... I think there was a record for a commercially reared chicken of 21 days to get to supermarket grade, is that right?

Yeah, that's right. I think that was in New Zealand. But globally, across all countries, we're seeing a trend towards intensification of the additional food demand that we're going to require by 2050. About 80-90% of that will come from highly intensive systems and most pork and poultry around the world is intensively produced. So then you move away from just an environmental issue

to a kind of ethical issue as well, because this is becoming kind of, you know, whether you thought it was ethical in the first place to kill an animal it's becoming if you're shortening someone's some an animal's life cycle by kind of two-thirds or so it feels as though you're then kind of getting into the foie gras sort of space in no way in all seriousness i mean it's it's that's that in itself is also quite frightening our kind of but i think it's that we we don't want to see what's happening behind closed doors and every now and again a kind of documentary will come out and I think the documentaries can be quite sensationalizing like Cowspiracy and things like that but at the

same time they really shock people because I think we don't want to see necessarily what's happening because we don't want to as individuals make those little changes because as you said we're not doing it because people really like the taste of something even though we're creating something that's so incredibly unsustainable for our planet it feels like we're having the wrong conversations um if you want to look after the planet if you want to save the world um which i think we we've decided we do um you know and it feels like at the moment the way the media is talking about things and the way the conversations are going you know generally between between friends is that to save the planet, what we need to do is kind of point our fingers at restaurants who are using plastic straws and people that are using plastic straws.

And plastic straws, as far as I'm aware, are kind of a fraction of ocean plastic. And the Pacific patch has 46% of its fishing nets. And, you know, we're looking at the methane and things like that in fishing as well, in farmed fishing. And it just feels to me a little bit like we're having the wrong conversations like if you want to save the fish and you want to save the planet don't eat the fish rather than the plastic straw and I just can't help but feel like the conversation needs to move on and people need to become aware of this and I'd be really interested to understand from your perspective how do we share this with people how do we get people talking about this in a way that doesn't terrify them in a way that doesn't kind of turn people off from the conversation I think it almost it is terrifying

I don't think that there's any way of looking at the stark reality of what we're looking at and it not be terrifying but I think the way through it is by creating positive messages of excitement to get through it so is there are there exciting innovations that are happening uh or new technologies that are being developed that would allow us to fix this ginormous issue or is it something that really is it's the only thing that's going to change it is just by human beings just changing their, for starts, their eating habits. Well, there are. So, I mean, one technology is obviously managing and reducing farms impacts through digital tools and monitoring on farm and stuff like that. And labeling, food labeling. To give consumers a kind of very conscious choice.

Yes, there are a number of different technologies. One is labeling food and monitoring farmers' impacts through digital technology. That's interesting. I think that's one of the most powerful options we have. And other technologies might be lamb grown meat or other types of... So you're seeing some startups, a couple in the States I think are coming over here, one beyond meat which has the beyond burger i think that's launched here

yeah which is basically yeah it's a it's a burger that's basically made in a lab and it's a plant based burger um and it even bleeds so you get the you know if that's what you want you get you get all of the textures or appearance of of eating a burger made of cow do you think that that is a solution is that is is food made in a lab the way forward we don't know enough about the consumer demand for this kind of stuff nor do we know about the environmental impacts i think they would be great things to have in our bag of ammunition to understand these different approaches i think it's i think it's a good idea i think if we can get consumers to change what they're consuming to a more

environmentally friendly option i think that's a good thing did you say before we started though that there were studies where there could actually be a net greater impact from food grown in labs as well and there's there's studies that um that actually contradict each other whether there are actually big benefits or not yeah they're literally a handful maybe four studies out there that look at the environmental impacts of lab grown meat and one comes up with a really low impact one comes up with another one comes like a really high impact bit higher the beef so we don't really know where it's going at the moment all you've got is information from companies it's quite behind closed door processes at the moment yeah we need we need to know more

okay so for people listening that are now thinking oh my god this is so difficult i did not know any of this i do quite want to change my diet so they're thinking about changing their diet doesn't matter if you know should we really, really be focusing on local and seasonal? So, you know, in our winter, making sure we're having the carrots and potatoes and having that as the bulk of the meal. Or does it not matter as much to have your bananas and avocados, for example, because your net impact is so significantly lower? I mean, seasonal is good. And I think that's really important. Things like avocados are probably a bit overblown in the media,

and I think they're actually relatively low impact. That's good to hear, because guacamole is my favorite food. Is it something like 6% of carbon emissions are created from food travel? Is that right? That's exactly right, yeah. Six miles. Yeah, 6% of food's greenhouse gas emissions are generated by transport transport it can be a lot lower for some products but it can be quite high for some products so what we really want to avoid is those it is those very soft fruits that

are transported very long distances so for example uh you know raspberries from peru they're going to be quite high impact still if you're having them in moderation, it's like anything, it's probably not going to be that. So a raspberry, say, from Peru, which is on the bad end of the scale. Because it's come on a plane. Yeah, because it's come on a plane and it has high greenhouse gas emissions compared to, say, meat that's grown

a mile down the road? How do they compare? Because obviously, first of all, on just a greenhouse gas emission perspective, but then also throughout the whole of the rest of the chain that we're looking at. Yeah, so raspberries from Peru are a soft fruit transported by air to the UK,

could have the same emissions as something like pork. So they can actually be quite high impact. But that's just in greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah, so food miles are just a greenhouse gas emission issue. You're not talking about land use, you're not talking about water use and the pollution of terrestrial aquatic ecosystems. So it's just a single indicator issue, but food miles have definitely been blown up a bit in the media.

That's what I was going to say it feels like we've picked on a few topics that make it more comfortable for us potentially as consumers to point our finger at the guacamole or something like that because it's i just choosing guacamole because i love it so i want to defend it but avocados will come by boat which is very low emission that is brilliant i'm very happy about that but um what's interesting to me is i feel like again looking at that kind of whether we're having the right conversation it feels whenever i say something about a vegan diet someone literally the first thing they come back at me at is the avocado or something like that and the the food miles involved in that and it is it would it be right to say that potentially that

isn't necessarily looking at the problem? Not necessarily in the wrong way or the right way, but it's not looking at the whole picture. It's looking at it in a singular way rather than as a multidimensional way. Yeah, so there are all sorts of things we can do to change and make our lifestyles and make what we eat at lower impact. As you were saying, seasonal, avoiding things that have been transported for a very long way. But they all ignore the elephant in the room yeah so say and that is that that is meat and animal products and fish and farmed fish and fish from the oceans fish from the oceans has a is the real problems environmental problems there are to do with the over exploitation of fish stocks and some fish are virtually completely depleted.

But they can come back. I mean, I think it was... If we stop. Yeah, I think if we stop. So all we just manage it. So I think cod fishing in the North Sea, they got back down to levels, I think it was about 15 years ago,

where there were kind of no cod. And then over the last 15 years, they've been managed. They're now back to completely sustainable levels. But that's because we've been farming the cod now and what we've learning is that farming the fish is not a good thing for the environment so yes if we stop eating at full stop but moving from one to the other isn't necessarily dealing with the wider issue outside of the sole cod population of our environment as a whole exactly so when you just look at it on

fish stocks in the north sea it looks like you fixed the issue but you didn't you just moved the problem elsewhere but the positive as far as we're understanding from you today is we can fix the issue but we have to make the decision now in ourselves in our communities with our friends and family that we are going to change our diets yeah there are two there are two things that i think we need to do firstly we need to globally reduce our consumption of animal products that is such a key driver is it just animal products in food or is it animal products in fashion in yes it's leather and things like that involved in that well yeah they all have they all it's all part of the same system is food a bigger contributor than than the fashion industry yeah food is a bigger contributor than fashion by a long by a long way for me there are two things that we need to do firstly globally worldwide

we need to significantly reduce our consumption of animal products and secondly to go to all the points and the discussions and we've been here, we need labels, we need environmental information on our food products. So instead of having wild debates in the media or people not knowing, it just says it. There, you've got the facts. When you're in the shops, that's what the impact is. But it can't just be

greenhouse gas emissions, right? It needs to be looking at all five factors you mentioned because otherwise, again, we're getting a skewed picture on things. Exactly. And how far away do you think we are from having that labeling? I hope it's within five years, possibly around there. That's my hope.

And we're doing research on that at the moment here in Oxford. And there are a lot of companies out there. The EU's done a big project on labeling. And there are a lot of companies out there. The EU's done a big project on labeling, and there are a lot of companies out there that are actually really engaged with this, and I see it as a way to not just put information on products, but have a positive effect on the whole food system where you create information, i.e. farmers know what their impacts are,

and they can change it. Yes. And you've seen this with energy labeling. We put energy labels on things like fridges and freezers in 1992. And the energy efficiency of all those appliances has radically changed. We don't even need labels anymore because most things are ranked A++ and A+++.

So it's just been a huge transformation, and it works. It works on the consumer end, it works on the consumer end it works on the producer end and we we need it in food however you know that's what our research has been trying to really say that we didn't really have the scientific information now we're getting there so for someone who eats you know what you someone might consider a normal diet they have meat and a couple of veg in the evening and maybe a ham sandwich for lunch and um what can they do if they can't go cold turkey vegan overnight but they want to start making positive changes what is a practice that you think people could try and do each week that would really start to move the needle um and improve these issues

that we're facing well firstly cut out the beef that's going to have a really big impact so just if you cold turkey cold beef change it with something else secondly try different products and you know there are 20 30 different types of plant milk out there try them and that's going to be which is the best one i know i'll read as well as which is the best one for the environment the lowest impact probably somewhere between soy and oats oat milk nice oat froth is very well as anyone's listening is worried about their latte oat really does well yeah so they're probably some of the low out of the ones we looked at in our database so you there are new new moments like hemp and stuff they're exciting they may but of the

commonplace ones the commonplace ones site so i know it sounds like i mean even the worst plant milk how does it compare to a dairy milk yeah so we looked at soy even the worst soy milk uses less land creates fewer emissions than the best, the least impactful cow's milk. So try some different milks and then it's a gradual transition, you've just got to have some

bit of discipline and realise it's only really a small taste difference it's just the the impact of your choice it has to be positive and this is what you know at delicious yellow what our company mission is to try and make vegetables cool and people are only going to do it if it tastes great it's aspirational it sounds as delicious and as fun as eating a big piece of steak that's you know has been the thing that you go out to eat and celebrate with.

And so it's only going to happen if it's really, really delicious. And that is our task every single day. We've got to change the preconception so that when you say vegan food, someone thinks, yum. Great that you guys as people in the food space are trying to make the taste of vegetable proteins better.

And that's part of it. But consumers have also got to change their demands and their expectations. And then we reach that uh happy place happy zone where things taste better consumers expectations have changed a bit and the world's a healthier place but taste buds just change amazing i started eating a lot less meat actually before i uh met ella and it's amazing how your taste buds just change you just lose the craving that you used to have and it only takes if you cut out red meat i found this if you cut out red meat for a month or so you just completely and utterly lose the craving and it actually then becomes something that you just don't really want to eat something

you tried it again and then you were like yeah you just don't really want to eat something. You tried it again and then you were like, ooh. Yeah, you just don't really want to eat something that's kind of bloody and fatty. You're just like, oh, no, I don't really want that. It's amazing how once you make that change, you just, you do not miss it. And this comes from someone who, I used to really enjoy eating red meat. And so it really does.

I, you know, I hope I'm living proof of that. Yeah, in China, you get the most delicious, fresh soy milk that's hot in the morning. And it really doesn't taste anything like the soy milk you get the most delicious fresh soy milk that's hot in the morning and it really doesn't taste anything like the soy milk you get in the UK and they've tried to then introduce dairy milk into China and the Chinese consumers are actually like

you know what we've got is actually really good That's a good little example Yeah so it's great to have it the other way around. Well honestly we can't thank you enough for imparting so much wisdom yeah oh it's the biggest pleasure in the world honestly um and also so cool to come to oxford university we ask every guest at the end of each episode um what their kind of one practice they live by

every day that helps them create a kind of healthier happier life and just for context for some people that's meditation for other. And just for context, for some people, that's meditation. For other people, that's a daily walk. For other people, it's a kind of saying or just something they've introduced in their life that makes them happy. I keep a diary and I log what I said I was going to do. Nice.

How I achieved it and if I didn't. And I also just log general thoughts. I think a diary. And that's how Delicious Yellow started was just by basically creating a journal, right? And you just wanted something that would make sure that you were tracking what you were doing every day keeping yourself committed and look where it's led yeah totally I know I kept a diary a long time and I always find it really powerful tool as well I love I love talking but talking to yourself is particularly impactful I mean thank you

thank you so much it's been a huge pleasure speaking to you thank you so much thank you thanks so much for listening guys um a lot of food for thought there and please do come back next tuesday and if you liked it please do rate review it and please do share this episode with your friends because we think it's a very important topic thanks guys You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.