2021

Oksanen, M.; Kortetmäki, Teea

The purpose of the paper is to look at the linkages between diets, biodiversity, and food system from the vegan angle (without however committing to veganism). Food production and consumption are important drivers of biodiversity loss both directly using components of biodiversity as a harvested resource and indirectly through the land-use impacts (and pollution and climate change to a slightly lesser extent). For a vegan, the destruction of non-sentient biodiversity can be wrong through the loss of well-being it causes to sentient animals and humans. Since the primary reason for agriculture related clear-cutting is the need for increased feed production and thus to support the animal agriculture, there are strong and obvious indications that a vegan diet is more biodiversity-friendly than average omnivorous diets. The paper consists of the following sections. First, we identify four assumptions that instruct the analysis. Second, we describe how the biodiversity concern for animals has historically been resource-motivated. Third, we compare the idea that meat-eating generates an enormous number of sentient animals (the so-called logic of the larder) with the idea that the conservation of biodiversity rests on resourcist ideas (what we call the logic of the ostrich). These logics are discussed with relation to how they link biodiversity conservation to diets and food ethics, a linkage that is also shortly addressed from vegan and vegetarian angles. Fourth, after characterising the previous approaches as anecdotal, we take a broader, a food-system perspective and consider how the systemic approach differs in linking biodiversity, diets, and food ethics. Our analysis is empirically informed philosophy.