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"Agenda-driven Science" at the UN Food Summit; Harvard Resorts to Lone Polish MD to Legitimize Anti-Keto Drumbeat; Can an Animal Rights Group Do an Unbiased Test of a Vegan Diet?

This is “Agenda-Driven Science,” says participant at UN Food Summit

Highly-organized and well-funded groups are working closely with the United Nations to drastically reduce—or even eliminate—human consumption of meat and dairy. Since disrupting the world’s food supply at this magnitude would almost certainly cause mass starvation and malnutrition, we’d love for this to be nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, this agenda is very much alive, as part of the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” to fight climate change. 

Over the past five years, events unfolding under the UN’s “Decade of Action” to create more sustainable food systems by the year 2030 have seemed surreal. Most notably, the creation and widespread dissemination of the “planetary health diet,” by the EAT-Lancet Commission in 2019, recommending that everyone – sick and healthy, young and old – get 37% of their calories from grains and sugar¹ with no more than ½ ounce of red meat a day. (The diet is incapable of sustaining human life without extensive supplementation, since it is deficient in multiple essential nutrients, including potassium, calcium, iron, and vitamins D, A, and B-12.) Now, a food industry analyst with a front seat to this policy process has written a first-hand account, with granular detail, about what he sees as agenda-driven actors undermining basic scientific integrity.

The author, Peer Ederer, is the founding director of Zurich-based GOAL Sciences, a company that provides policy-oriented research for the food industry, particularly the livestock sector. Ederer favors sustainably raised livestock, a bias to account for when reading his recent article in Animal Production Science. Ederer has a PhD in economics and the focus of his piece is the declining quality of animal-related science—among sciences in general. He also presents case studies, of which the UN Food Systems Summit is one.

In 2019, UN Secretary General Anthony Gutierrez announced the summit and selected the Davos-based business group, the World Economic Forum (WEF), for its launch a year later. Billionaire Gunhild Stordalen, chair of the EAT Initiative which had produced the EAT-Lancet diet, was placed at the helm of “Action Track 2” (AT2) and tasked with creating a plan to shift to “more sustainable” food systems. Ederer writes that the entire AT2 leadership was composed of “persons closely associated with the EAT Initiative,” aligned with Stordalen’s goal of “significantly reduc[ing] the amount of meat consumption, accompanied by a corresponding reduction of livestock.” 

I paid to join the WEF—the only way this online summit could be attended —and can attest to the fact that virtually all the speakers were promoting a quasi-vegan diet. Although Stordalen allowed herself to be photographed hugging baby lambs, the summit she led seemed designed to steamroll through a radical view of future food systems largely depopulated of livestock.

As Ederer tells it, other “stakeholders,” including farmers, nutritionists and citizen groups, refused to approve this goal and, in mid-2021, the summit had arrived at a “major impasse.” This is when Ederer was invited, in his capacity as a (non-remunerated) member of the World Farmers Organization, along with other previously excluded groups to the summit. The goal was to help “unblock the situation.” 

The solution involving bringing in groups from the multiple food action tracks to focus exclusively on livestock, resulting in a two-page document, approved by all 70 stakeholder groups. “Its tenor,” writes Ederer, “could be paraphrased with ‘Much improvement is necessary, but livestock is part of the solution, not part of the problem.’”

Stordalen’s alliance, not surprisingly, disagreed and successfully held up the Summit to give “additional input.” (The alliance included representatives from Chatham House, Wellcome Trust, Oxford University, New York University, the Good Food Fund, 50by40, the Good Food Institute, Compassion in World Farming and FAIRR.²)

Feedback from the alliance, in widely-shared emails that Ederer quotes, included the following: “‘It is absurd to proposition a growth in the livestock as a solution’, ‘It is irrelevant that livestock farming has provided food, clothing, power, manure and income and acted as assets, collateral and status. Fossil fuel has done many of the same things.’”