After a year of terrible heat, floods and other effects of climate change, the annual UN Climate Conference was just held in December. A year earlier, the conference for the first time began to address food, which accounts for a third of global emissions, and drives the bulk of our crises around land use, water, biodiversity and antibiotics. This presentation will introduce this thorny problem - mostly tied to the meat and dairy humans eat - and some solutions. 

Compared to 1961 - to when I was in junior high - our human population has nearly tripled, and per capita we also eat over twice as much animal food. These stories, population growth and our per person eating much more animal food, are directly related. And told together, it was a tale of human achievement - until we began to experience the environmental consequences. Also, it is a story in which 1960s Mexico played a key part. While the talk will explore this, the data shows today’s Mexicans, per capita, eating three times the meat and four times the eggs as they did in 1961. So the meals we eat here now are a long way from traditional Oaxacan cuisine. And yet, compared to Americans and Europeans, Mexicans still eat 40-45% less meat and dairy.

Speaker Bio:

Larry Gussin was a co-founder of Nest, which in 2011 modernized building heating and cooling with the energy-saving Nest Thermostat. Since 2013 he has been both a climate educator and an activist working on policy campaigns and the Gussin Climate Action Fund donor. This is Larry’s fifth OLL climate solutions talk, dating back to 2013.

Larry Gussin will be joined by Juan Carlos Villegas Cuevas who is the head of the sustainable food lab Etnofoods, at Murguia 407.

https://www.etnofood.com/en/philosophy