An Urban's Rural View

There's a wonderful moment in the 1973 movie "Sleeper" when Woody Allen's character is wakened from a 200-year cryogenic nap and asks for food.

"He requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk," one of the scientists from 2173 says.

"Oh yes," another replies. "Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties."

"You mean," says the first, "there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?"

"Those were thought to be unhealthy. Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

It's a great vignette, no? What brought it to mind was a just-released study of the diets of 1,918 French people. It's abstracted at http://bit.ly/…; a Reuters report on it is available at http://tiny.cc/…. The study looked at the greenhouse-gas emissions of the diets based on the GHGEs of 391 foods.

It's just one study, of course, but if other studies bear it out, we someday soon may be saying a plant-based diet produces more greenhouse gases -- "precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

OK, that's an oversimplification. But it's close. The abstract puts it this way: "Despite containing large amounts of plant-based foods, self-selected diets of the highest nutritional quality are currently not those with the lowest diet-related GHGEs."

In Reuters' version, when the scientists conducting the study "looked at what people actually ate to get a certain amount of energy from food every day, they found that the 'highest-quality' diets in health terms -- those high in fruit, vegetables and fish -- were linked to about as much, if not more, greenhouse gas emissions as low-quality diets that were high in sweets and salts."

How can this be? Aren't all those cows that help make the "low quality diet" low belching and otherwise emitting, well, gas, into the atmosphere? Aren't they consuming grain that was planted and harvested by machines burning fossil fuels?

The answer, according to Reuters: "People who eat a plant-based diet need to eat more produce to get the amount of energy they'd have in a piece of meat."

Reuters sought reaction from a scientist not involved in the study. She expressed skepticism, politely. The study, she said, suggests people would eat nine pounds of fruits and vegetables to make up for a smaller portion of meat. But it raises "a lot of important questions" that deserve more investigation.

I'm not sure I believe it, either. But isn't the thought that today's accepted wisdom is wrong delicious?

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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