You’ll eat those vegetables – or else.

Under the auspices of a once-reputable medical journal, “37 experts from 16 countries” have spent two years designing the Great Food Transformation, otherwise known as the EAT-Lancet plan to intrude into our private lives.

Tamara Lucas, a Lancet executive editor – and Richard Horton, The Lancet‘s editor-in-chief – declare that “Civilization is in crisis.” A “comprehensive shift in how the world eats” is therefore required, involving “governments at multiple levels” wielding taxes, regulations, and full-blown bans on currently available food.

from The Lancet website (click)

These folks are the polar opposite of the live-and-let-live crowd. They’re also up there in the self-regard department. Addressing just one problem is apparently insufficiently challenging. Their intent is to improve human health and save us from climate change.

As Georgia Ede observes in her devastating list of Ten Things You Need to Know about the EAT-Lancet grand plan, the “drumbeat heard throughout…is that animal foods are dangerous and that a vegan diet is the holy grail of health.”

In this regard, the fix appears to have been in from the start. In a 10-page response to the EAT-Lancet‘s 47-page report, the US-based Nutrition Coalition points out that Harvard’s Walter Willett, “leader of the EAT-Lancet section on diet and health” has a decades-long history of advocating vegan/vegetarian diets, while the other nutritionists involved 

have published almost nothing on the subject of diet and disease, and nothing that contradicts Willet’s views. Thus…the report presents only one viewpoint.

The totalitarian tone of this report is of equal concern. Nothing is sacred here. Forget economic markets, ethnic culinary traditions, or individual choice. Forget recipes passed from one generation to the next, childhood favourites, or mothers and apple pie. The vegan/climate mafia intends to delegitimize, harass, and meddle. All in the name of science, of course.

You’ll eat those vegetables – or else sums it up.

On page 32 of the 47-page report, we find Table 6, a list of “hard to soft” policy interventions. These include eliminating our food choices by forcing the food industry to “Withdraw inappropriate products” from the market – otherwise known as prohibition.

Once society starts down that path, how many aisles of your local grocery store will remain standing ten years hence?

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Restricting food choices is another option. This involves rationing meat, eggs, and whatever else happens to be on the verboten list this week while the activist wing of the Great Food Transformation targets other “key products” with the aim of reducing them to “pariah status” next week.

Then there’s the disincentives approach, which calls for “building on existing…carbon and sugar taxation.” In other words, lots of food will become too expensive for people of modest means to afford, while everyone’s tax burden will increase.

Notice that when an allegedly academic report presents a table ordered in this manner, meat taxes begin to look like a moderate, reasonable step compared to the alternatives.

These kinds of people never go away, do they? Since the late 1960s a non-stop procession of self-appointed saviours has insisted the end is nigh unless we forgo our personal freedoms and submit to their grim prescriptions.

click to enlarge

Gosh, I’ve grown weary of these folks. Fifty years ago Paul Ehrlich advocated coercive, planet wide responses to an alleged population crisis. Radical change was necessary then. And in every decade since, according to people with fancy titles and letters after their names.

You know, I’d just like to live my own life, free to make my own decisions. I truly would like to pretend these people don’t exist.

But they’re relentless. And if they’re even marginally successful, some of our most vulnerable populations – people in nursing homes, hospitals, schools, and other institutions where government guidelines rule – will be served even less meat than is presently the case.

Our future well-being is, indeed, endangered. By precisely these kinds of reports. If we’re wise, we’ll remember the names of the people who produced this one:

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• Ashkan Afshin (formerly a “postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health” – Walter Willett chaired the nutrition dept. there from 1991-2017)
• Rina Agustina (attended a “summer course program at the Harvard School of Public Health” – Willett chaired nutrition dept.)

• Victoria Bignet (has “worked as a conservationist at the Greek NGO Archelon”)
• Francesco Branca (UN employee – “Director of the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development in the World Health Organization”)

• Abhishek Chaudhary
• Michael Clark (listed as a graduate student in David Tilman‘s lab)
• Sarah E Cornell (“teaches Challenges of the Anthropocene, an introduction to global change science and policy”
• Beatrice Crona (“one of the leaders of the ‘Patterns of the Anthropocene’ research stream”)

• Fabrice DeClerck
• Wim De Vries

• Shenggen Fan (“serves as a member of the Lead Group for the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement appointed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon”)
• Jessica Fanzo (“is the Team Leader for the High-Level Panel of Experts for Food Systems and Nutrition for the UN Committee on Food Security”)
• Elizabeth Fox (works “in the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program…with Jessica Fanzo”)

• Tara Garnett
• Line J Gordon

• Corinna Hawkes (“clients have included the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the World Bank and the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition”)
• Mario Herrero
• Malin Jonell

• Tim Lang
• Anna Lartey (UN employee – “Director of Nutrition at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations”)
• Therese Lindahl
• Brent Loken (“co-founder of the NGO Integrated Conservation”)

• Christopher J L Murray (UN employee 1998-2003, Harvard School of Public Health 2003-2007 – Willet chaired nutrition dept. 1991-2017)
• Sunita Narain (“a writer and environmentalist, who uses knowledge for change”)
• Sania Nishtar (“civil society activist,” and chair of WHO panel)

• K Srinath Reddy (“advocate and activist” who “has served on many WHO expert panels”)
• Juan A Rivera
• Johan Rockström (“acts as an advisor for sustainable development issues at noteworthy international meetings, such as the United Nations General Assemblies, World Economic Forums, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference”- see here, also)

• Lindiwe Majele Sibanda (UN employee – Food and Agricultural Organization)
• Sudhvir Singh (“led the organisation Generation Zero campaigning for better transport” – a New Zealand activist group)
• Marco Springmann

• David Tilman
• Max Troell
• Sonja Vermeulen (WWF employee)

• Walter Willett (promoting vegetarian diets since 1990, chaired Harvard’s nutrition department 1991-2017)
• Amanda Wood
• Rami Zurayk

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LINKS:

• download the 47-page EAT-Lancet report here
• Lucas & Horton’s editorial is here
• Georgia Ede’s EAT-Lancet’s Plant-based Planet: 10 Things You Need to Know
• my previous commentary: Lancet EAT Report Promotes Activism Over Science
• Anthropocene: The Media’s Fake Geological Epoch

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