- They're everywhere. They're multiplying.
There could be one already living
inside your house. (dramatic music)
It's the invasion of the vegans and vegetarians.
According to the Vegan Society,
the number of vegans in the UK quadrupled
between 2014 and 2019. (gentle music)
They now make up around 1% of the population.
Even Sainsbury's predicted that a quarter of the UK
will be vegan or vegetarian by 2025.
Today, we're gonna be looking at one aspect
of the vegan and vegetarian diet
that's caused a lot of controversy,
as more and more people have gone meat-free, soya.
Since the 1950s, global soybean production
has increased 15 times over,
and almost 50% of those soybeans are produced
in South America, specifically in Brazil,
Paraguay and Argentina.
What a thrilling time to be a soybean.
Unfortunately, this has come at a huge cost.
Massive areas of South American forests
have been destroyed to make way for fields of soya.
This isn't just bad news for the wildlife living there.
It's bad news for the climate,
and pretty much our entire planet.
Agriculture and deforestation make up a quarter
of global greenhouse emissions,
because converting forests into fields
to grow crops like soya releases greenhouse gases,
and removes trees that help rid the atmosphere
of carbon dioxide in the first place.
Soya imports represent a whopping 47%
of Europe's deforestation footprint.
And the soya industry is also linked
to violence and human rights abuses in Brazil,
where communities are being threatened and intimidated
in attempts to seize their land to expand soya empires.
So who's the culprit,
why are we producing such large amounts of soya,
and who's eating it?
It's those damn vegans and vegetarians, ain't it?
They love their tofu, their soya burgers,
soydogs, soymilk, tempeh,
Tofutti- - What's Tofutti?
- It's like a cream cheese. Uh, best not to ask.
Meat-free diets in the West, East Asia, and Southeast Asia
often tend to include soya products as a source of protein
or as a meat replacement.
So there you go!
Vegans and vegetarians are the cause
of all this deforestation, case closed.
Don't look at that.
As it turns out, 90% of all soya is grown for animal feed.
That's the food eaten by cattle, chickens, and pigs.
Just 6% is grown for human consumption,
and the rest is used industrially for things
from pet food to biofuels.
That animal feed is being grown in such large quantities,
because it's now estimated that 60%
of all mammals on the planet are livestock.
27% of the world's land is used for livestock.
That's for growing their feed and for them to graze on.
Thanks to this handy chart from Our World In Data,
we can see that's the size of North
and South America combined.
Fun fact, people often think that chicken
is much more environmentally-friendly than beef.
But global chicken consumption has doubled since 1990,
and chickens are the ones eating most
of the soya we import into the UK.
Okay, maybe that was more depressing than fun.
It takes an area the size of Northern Ireland
just to produce the UK's annual soya demand.
And the thing is, animal agriculture is actually
a really inefficient way to produce enough food
for all the people living on the planet.
For every hundred calories of grain crops fed to animals,
we get 40 calories of milk, 12 calories of chicken,
and just three calories of beef.
Imagine how much more efficient it would be
to feed all that grain to people directly.
Well, not directly.
We'd probably turn it into something
you'd actually want to eat, first.
So as it turns out,
vegans and vegetarians probably aren't solely responsible
for destroying the planet through their soya consumption.
Bring the Tofutti back. I'm so sorry, Tofutti.
To stop this cycle from continuing,
we need to change the way we think about food!
And yes, that means reducing our meat
and dairy intake on a global scale
and turning towards a more plant-based diet.
We need supermarkets and food companies
to introduce meat reduction targets year on year,
and to make plant-based alternatives both appealing
and affordable to make this possible.
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