UNITED KINGDOM, September 27, 2020 (The Guardian): Carried out by teams of researchers from Berlin, Bath and Franche-Comte in eastern France, it found that out-and-proud omnivores, those who eat meat without any restrictions, are for the first time a minority in Germany. Around 42% of those questioned said they were deliberately reducing their consumption of meat in some form, by keeping to a diet that was either vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian or “flexitarian,” meaning centered around plant food with the occasional piece of meat on the side. A further 12.7% of respondents said they “don’t know” or would “prefer not to say.” The flexitarian approach has considerable support among environmentalists: a recent report by the UK Climate Assembly advocated people changing their diet to reduce meat and dairy consumption by between 20% and 40%, rather than cutting them out altogether.
France, the other great European carnivore nation surveyed in the project, trailed behind its neighbor, with 68.5% of respondents claiming to eat meat without restraint. In both countries, those who have curbed their meat eating said they had done so out of concerns for animal welfare and the environment. “The social implications [of the German numbers] here are potentially quite profound,” said Bryant, a Bath University psychologist who worked on the study. “The view that being a carnivore is ‘normal’ is part of the lay moral reasoning for continuing to eat meat. But once that is a minority view, and meat replacement options become cheaper and tastier, the trend is likely to continue in one direction.” Overall, meat consumption in Germany and France remains higher than in the developing world, and any declining tendency is expected to be outweighed by developing countries becoming more carnivorous as their purchasing power increases: global production of meat is forecast to increase by 15% in the decade to 2027.