Our national broadcaster is doing serious public harm by misinforming us about the importance of and the science behind moving to plant-based diets

When it comes to coverage of the effects of our food choices, the CBC has a big problem. Instead of accurately reporting on the clear environmental advantages of plant-based diets, they seek a false ‘balance’ – between the very strong scientific evidence that animal agriculture does immense environmental harm and the highly dubious counterclaims of those with an economic interest in that very damaging industry. Our national public broadcaster is certainly not alone in this, but one would hope and expect that the CBC would meet a far higher standard.

Take their recent article, Canadian universities aim to boost plant-based options on menus in 2024 to meet student demand, for example. The report starts out fairly reasonably, describing the push at Canadian universities to replace animal products with plant-based alternatives in their dining halls. They note, for example, “At the University of British Columbia, 55 per cent of the food in dining halls is plant-based, and the Vancouver school hopes to reach a goal of 80 per cent by 2025. Also that year, Concordia University in Montreal plans to reduce its purchase of meat, dairy and eggs by 30 per cent.”

Laudably, the CBC goes on to note the environmental rationale for this move, citing one of the plethora of studies clearly demonstrating the outsized contribution of animal agriculture to global warming. But they cite only the one, and fail to mention that there is a strong scientific consensus on the point, supported by enormous volumes of evidence. They completely ignore the even more severe damage animal agriculture does to biodiversity.

In failing to note the enormity of the evidence supporting the universities’ rationale (the introduction to this open access recent study summarizes important elements of that evidence succinctly), the CBC leaves the naive reader ill equipped to deal with what the article serves up next. Citing a supposed expert who ignored much of the relevant scientific literature, they tell us that “he doesn’t think that eating more plant-based foods will significantly reduce the agricultural sector’s contribution to climate change in Canada.”

The expert cherry picks to a shocking extent! While he tells us accurately that “turning grasslands into farmland for crop cultivation releases a lot of carbon. A significant portion of fruits and vegetables found in grocery stores is also imported, with transportation costs for the environment,” he fails to note that both would be greatly outweighed by the positive effects of moving away from animal agriculture.
Were he to outline the full evidence, he would note that a major move towards plant-based diets would result in dramatic reductions in the amount of land we cultivate. The great majority of cropland in North America is used to grow crops to grossly inefficiently feed farmed animals or to produce biofuels; for the world as a whole, 43% of croplands are used to feed farmed animals. Feeding animals is outrageously inefficient. We lose ~90% of the calories we could get for ourselves when we cultivate land to produce crops for animals. Thus, we would need only a small fraction of the land currently used for that purpose to feed ourselves just fine – if we moved to plant-based diets.

The expert, were he providing the proper context to his claims, would note also that transportation is but a tiny fraction of the global warming footprint of our foods. It is an even smaller fraction of their biodiversity impacts, which are almost entirely due to their land use impacts.

The CBC, by quoting such an ill-informed ‘expert’ seriously watered down the essential message behind the universities’ positive actions: that we must dramatically reduce animal agriculture to avoid global catastrophe. Already, humans and our farmed animals dominate both mammalian and avian biomass on this planet. Go much further on our current path, and we’re looking at a serious likelihood of ecological collapse.

We must make the shift for our own sake and for the sake of the whole ecosphere. CBC’s coverage makes the move towards plant-based diets seem like some sort of mild curiosity, with little importance at all. Yet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Environment Programme and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services have all asserted that we must move rapidly towards diets centered much more on plant-based foods.

Let’s hope the CBC wakes up to its responsibilities some time very soon. As things stand, their failure to fairly report on the science behind the crucial need for us to shift to plant-based diets is doing the public an enormous disservice.