Giving Compass' Take:

• The author discusses the benefits for our planet if everyone made one dietary change: substituting beans for beef. The effects of this one choice would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

• Would something like this be possible?  Are there other changes we can make that will contribute to food system sustainability?

• Read about investing in insect-based diets in order to help the food system. 

Eco-anxiety is an emerging condition. Named in 2011, the American Psychological Association recently described it as the dread and helplessness that comes with “watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later generations.”

I think there’s genuinely a lack of awareness about how much impact this sort of change can have.

For people who experience climate-related anxiety, this all serves as a sort of exacerbation by presidential gaslight. The remedy for a condition like this is knowing what can be done to mitigate environmental degradation, from within in a country singularly committed to it.

Recently Harwatt and a team of scientists from Oregon State University, Bard College, and Loma Linda University calculated just what would happen if every American made one dietary change: substituting beans for beef. They found that if everyone were willing and able to do that—hypothetically—the U.S. could still come close to meeting its 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals, pledged by President Barack Obama in 2009.

That is, even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target.

Read the full article about substituting meat by James Hamblin at The Atlantic