What is a plant-based diet, and why does it matter?

By Ingrid Steinberg   SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

For most Americans, transitioning to a plant–based diet is the single most impactful change we can make to reduce our environmental footprint. Transitioning to a whole-food plant-based diet, may also be the biggest positive change we can make for our health, vitality, and longevity.

A plant-based diet is exactly what it sounds like. It involves eating mostly or exclusively plant foods. (Fungi, even though they aren’t technically plants, are included.) Animal products, including red meat, dairy, poultry, eggs and fish are to be excluded or minimized. In a pithy phrase introduced by Michael Pollan, a recipe for good health for yourself, your community, and the planet is this: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By “food” Pollan has in mind unprocessed or minimally processed foods – the kind of foods your grandmother or perhaps these days, great-grandmother would recognize as food. In other words, whole foods rather than industrially processed foods. Highly processed substances that provide poor nutrition and harm our health and the environment are, according to Pollan, not actually food. We should think of them instead as “edible food-like substances.”

 Many people do not realize just how damaging our industrial meat system is to workers, surrounding communities, consumers, animals, and the planet itself. Industrial animal farming and our excessive consumption of animal products is harming our world in a number of different ways:

• Three out of four new infectious diseases in humans, including Covid-19, arise from our contact with (and consumption of) both wild and domesticated animals. The rise and spread of animal infections is intensified in industrial conditions where animal immunity is low due to poor conditions, and spread is rapid due to crowding. In addition to closing down wet markets, curbing the intensive industrial production of animal products will reduce the number of new infectious diseases that cross over to humans.
• Livestock emissions account for 18-20% of greenhouse gas emissions and include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
• Animal agriculture accounts for more than 50% of the fresh water we use.  
• Industrial animal agriculture leads to the clearcutting of rainforests and a resulting decimation of wild animal species in the name of land for animal farming, and for growing the grains used as animal feed.
• Our animal farming industry results in unimaginable suffering for animals.
• CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feedlots) are industrial animal feeding locations where very large numbers of animals are fattened up in cruel and crowded conditions, resulting in significant air and water pollution, including pathogens, particulate matter, and antibiotics, which damage environments and poison the water supply for nearby and downstream communities, as well harming aquatic life. As with other sources of air and water pollution, research suggests that the pollution from CAFOs disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities.
• Slaughterhouse and meat packing workers suffer psychological trauma in addition to often terrible working conditions, which are made even more dangerous by the pandemic.
• Industrial animal farming is underpinned by the Standard American Diet, which consists of a high proportion of animal products and highly processed foods. This diet contributes significantly to our epidemic of lifestyle diseases.

At a time when there is so much bad news, it is encouraging to learn that with one simple and often delicious change in habits — a change that can be undertaken from the socially distanced safety of our homes — we can resist the damage inflicted on our environment, on our fellow creatures, and on each other by a flawed and increasingly fragile food system.

Eating a whole food, plant based diet is associated with a lower incidence of heart disease, type-2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, hypertension, and obesity. It has been shown to arrest, and in some cases even reverse some of these disorders. At a time when chronic and pre-existing conditions are associated with higher mortality rates from Covid-19 infection, when the supply of animal products is unreliable, and when workers are being put at even higher risk in meat processing plants, now seems a perfect time to give this new way of eating a try.