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In my food culture class, we had a guest speaker, Nadia Mckechnie. On this page, I'll write about what I learned from the special lecture.
Nadia Mckechnie is originally from London UK, and is the organizer of Tokyo Vegan Meetup, the biggest vegan group in Japan with over 8,700 members. She established Vegan Consulting Japan Co., Ltd with the aim of helping Japanese companies join the growing worldwide vegan market.
The main topic of the lecture was how veganism and SDGs correlate to each other. She showed some of the SDGs and talked about how veganism is good for those goals.
One of the things that I was really shocked about was that eating animals is related to a future pandemic. Humans eat animals a lot, so they need to produce livestock to sell and eat, so livestock farmers put them into a narrow space. To keep the stability to produce meat, humans use antibiotics for animals to prevent infectious diseases. Humans eat those animals that had had antibiotics. That is the problem. Virus are improved to win with antibiotics because tons of animals on the globe have antibiotics. Getting more and more antibiotics seems like a good thing for humans. However, once the virus wins with the rapidly developed antibiotics, humans will easily lose to the virus because vaccines or medicines that humans developed will be invalid to the virus.
We need to think about what we eat in everyday life.
It's clear from your blog entry that you listened to Nadia's talk very carefully. Unfortunately, it seems that humans learned little from the pandemic and the dangers of intensive farming methods are still not taken seriously. In the US, there was much criticism of so-called "wet markets" but, in fact, factory farms pose just as many, if not a greater number of, dangers since they are also breeding grounds for new viruses that can spread to other animals and then to humans.
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