They want to curb the planet’s climate change, and they want to do it for the plate. Climatrists are the new face of food activism: those who believe that what we eat (or not) is decisive in changing the world.
In their case, trying to reduce as much as possible the environmental footprint that society has left in their path in recent decades.
They are not exactly vegetarians, even though they preach that we should drastically reduce the consumption of animal foods – especially beef, which is proven to be one of the animals that most contribute to the increase in the greenhouse effect, since they generate a large part of the gas emissions that contribute to the phenomenon.
“Climate is a healthy diet, friendly to the climate and nature. With a simple change of diet, everyone can save a ton of CO2 per year”, argues the Climatarian.com website, a kind of portal for the movement, which brings together the commandments of food to reduce the impacts of the planet’s natural resources.
These include choosing organic foods, eating only those produced with “efficient energy sources” and eliminating “intensive farm-raised” animals altogether.
New Times
The term itself is not new: in 2015 it had already appeared in “Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy”, a kind of food dictionary created by Josh Friedland, who argues that we need “more words to give voice to our obsessions and food anxieties”. The word entered the Cambridge dictionary the following year.
But the climate diet gained more followers with the pandemic, which showed that the impacts of what we eat (from food produced in monocultures to wild animals in wet markets) are devastating to the planet.
And, in a way, irreversible: in August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented a report that proves the unmistakable human influence in warming the atmosphere, oceans and continents. And agriculture and livestock are among the main sources of emission of harmful gases.
For climacters, the act of eating has an even more important role in this regard because it concerns billions of people eating about three meals a day. That is, even though the gases emitted by planes, for example, cause more considerable damage to the greenhouse effect, proportionally we eat much more than we travel.
Therefore, many of them also declared war on imported foods, from avocados to truffles, for example, which have to travel long distances to reach our plate. Reducing the distances for transporting our food can help mitigate climate catastrophes, say supporters of the movement.
“It makes a lot of sense that the flag of this group is food. It is impossible to address the environmental footprint without talking about food, since the food chain is one of the biggest impacts on the climate issue today”, says Gustavo Guadagnini, from The Good Food Institute, which promotes the consumption of plant-based foods to replace those of animal origin.
Mainly in animal production, according to him. “There is growing social pressure that reinforces this idea that it is impossible to ingest animal products in the same quantity when you know of the harm that livestock causes to the environment”, he points out. Livestock farming uses more than two-thirds of all our land and is the biggest source of water pollution, according to data gathered by the FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Agency).
an ethical question
It was by having more information about this intrinsic link between the food chain and environmental damage that baker Liliana Trindade Guimarães realized that her relationship with food has recently begun to change.
“I’m not naive to think that the fact of not consuming meat or fish will save the planet, but ethically I can no longer eat animal meat, for example, without knowing where it came from or how it was raised”, he says .
Food waste –one of the main themes raised by climate changers– is also something that started to bother her even more. “I worked in kitchens and I know how much food ends up in the trash. Today, I have been much more attentive to the quantities I buy and consume, I was more annoyed with it,” she says.
It’s simple math: the less food is wasted, the less food needs to be produced and the fewer impacts on the planet. Like her, many people have tried to adapt their diet to their daily lives, keeping an eye on the pressure that wrong choices can have on the planet’s resources.
As in the case of climacters, food activism is nothing new: over the last few decades, groups of people have believed that it is possible to promote purposeful changes through food, against the growth of ultra-processed foods in our diet (as in the case of the Slow movement Food) was with a look at family farming of small producers (as foreseen by a practice called locavorism).
table conscience
“Food is a good way to become more aware of our impacts on the world”, believes Wagner Ramalho, creator of the Sustainable Green Plate project, which produces organic food for low-income peripheral population in Jardim Filhos da Terra, north of São Paulo. Paul.
For him, the proximity to our daily diet imposed by the recent months of confinement has made people develop a more conscious view of food (from scheduling daily meals to optimizing shopping lists) and developing more awareness of the inconveniences related to it. .
“The pandemic highlighted the food deserts that we have in the suburbs and many of our food problems. But above all it showed that even in the least assisted layers, people want food that kills hunger, but that is also healthier, more balanced and fairer with planet,” he says.
With higher food costs thanks to greater global demand and rising inflation in Brazil, the project wants to give more vulnerable people the opportunity to grow their own food and encourage it to be able to produce and buy from ecological agriculture. also on the outskirts of cities like São Paulo. The project produces more than eight tons of ecological food every year.
“Planting your own food makes you more active in the food chain, of course. But eating more consciously too, as what we choose to consume can play a very important role in this regard,” he says.
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