How are these well educated people getting this so utterly wrong?

There is no deathless food system. This sentence was a light bulb moment for me back in 2022. I’d been vegan for three years. At first it was simply because I didn’t agree with eating animals. It soon evolved in to saving the planet, and I became that righteous vegan person.

Some might say that I am now that righteous meat eating person. Many still remind me of the time when I was vegan especially now I am the founder of a bone broth business, eat a diet that is 90% carnivore and seem to spend the majority of my time at farming conferences. I’ve been to a couple recently and to be quite honest, I was shocked at how many people were walking around as if they were wearing a gold star for eating less meat for the planet. We have been brain washed by government into thinking that cows are causing climate change and that eating less meat is the answer. Even David Attenborough is jumping on the band wagon.

And I ask myself, how are these well educated people getting this so utterly wrong. But then I remember, I was that person. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Whilst at Groundswell last week, I went to the Doughnut Economics workshop on the last day. I’d studied Doughnut Economics during what I now jokingly call my "360 life flip" while living in London. One of the questions we were posed was “How can we connect farmers to Londoners?” There were lots of suggestions, but one response stuck with me. The idea was that farmers needed to spend more time in London because they were disconnected from city life. I couldn’t help wondering whether we’d got the problem the wrong way round. Perhaps it isn’t farmers who are disconnected. Perhaps it’s the rest of us.

We were never meant to be living in concrete jungles. It wasn’t until I moved out of London that I realised how disconnected from nature I had become. How disconnected from what my body needed had become. I had never felt more lonely even with the millions of people around me. Some Londoners will never leave London due to social and economic reasons, and I get that. This requires a huge system change because the challenge is much greater than individual choices.

So, how do we tackle some of the most pressing global issues?

Chronic disease is sky rocketing, the NHS is diagnosing an overwhelming number of mental health labels, people are more insecure than ever about the state of the world both from a climate and a socioeconomic lense, and governement are failing.

So, I take you back to the beginning. The light bulb moment I had when I realised there was no deathless food system. Sometimes we know things need to change or they don’t quite make sense, but we don’t really KNOW. It requires an insight to make real lasting change so that we can see past our limited thinking and find leverage points in our lives and the world around us. Insights happen when we are not boxed in, when we are open to change and debate, and are able to zoom out from our own repitive thinking.

Once I’d truly understood what it meant, I couldn’t unsee it.

And freedom, I’ve realised, comes from knowing that at any moment we're capable of seeing something new.