I have a loaf of bread in my cupboard. Let’s say that, in order to stay alive, I need to eat five slices of bread a day, and a typical loaf of bread contains 20 slices. I can survive for 4 days on that single loaf of bread, and when it runs out I need another loaf. Suppose I am only allowed 2 loaves of bread a week; so at the end of the week I will have 5 slices of bread to spare, which I can keep aside just in case their isn’t any bread available for a day.

Now, let’s say that instead of eating the bread I feed it into my bread converter, which turns bread into cake, but in order to give the bread converter enough energy I have to feed twice as much bread into it as I get back cake. My two loaves of bread will now only last me 4 days, but at least I will have cake — which is what rich people eat — and I can always give the poor people down the road some money for their bread. Ok, so they will have less bread to eat, but they will have some lovely money with which to buy bread from the poorer people even further down the road…

When I wrote the article, “What If…We All Became Vegan?” in 2006, I was writing from an environmental point of view: I knew that huge areas of the world’s richest natural habitats were being lost in order to produce animal feed; I knew that the growing number of cattle were producing a growing amount of methane; I knew that the carbon emissions from food transportation and production were going through the roof. I didn’t realise we would be facing a world food shortage in less than two years time.

Instead of feeding bread into the bread converter, we are feeding grain into grain converters, grubbing up vast areas of forest and grassland, draining paddy fields to grow wheat to feed to animals to produce meat…we are doing this in order to feed an absurd egalitarian myth that, somehow, eating meat is a way of showing that you are civilized. A myth that is being perpetuated by the transnational agricultural corporations who rub their hands together every time another group of people decide to buy globally-traded grain with which to feed animals, rather than “just” eat the food they have grown themselves.

So, in case you didn’t see it first time, here is the headline statement — plaster it over your web sites, and tell everyone who thinks we have to grab more land for farming, use more technology, genetically modify everything in sight, in order to keep the world from going hungry:

If we all went vegan we would need only one third of the cropland we use now.

Sorry it’s so simple. The act of going vegan is a major life change — I’m nearly there but not completely — but it’s one of the most ecologically and socially significant things you could possibly do. Or maybe we should just close our eyes and submit ourselves to market forces; just like we have done ever since we were helpless, innocent babies who just wanted to be fed.