‘Less But Better’ Meat for Food System Sustainability - Exploring Meanings & Characterisations

Sammanfattning: Livestock systems are key drivers behind a range of pressing sustainability issues; but with that, also present central opportunities for leveraging positive food system change. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to increased understanding of what more sustainable meat production and consumption is, using ‘less but better’ as a framework. This Licentiate thesis (and overall PhD project) thus address two key questions; how much is ‘less’ and what is ‘better’ meat? The thesis is structured in the following way: Part 1 provides an overview of ecological, social, economic and governance-related sustainability matters related to livestock production and meat eating, and argues that to tackle known trade-offs between priorities, a holistic sustainability perspective is necessary. Part 2 presents the objectives of my research, the research questions in the two papers that are included in this thesis and the conceptual overview of the larger PhD project. It also discusses the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of my approach and reflect on the ethical dimensions of the research.Part 3 then provides a brief background to the ‘less but better’ concept and links it to existing theory on describing the sustainable room for meat production and consumption. It also recapitulates key findings from Paper 1, in which we systematically reviewed peer-reviewed scientific literature published in English that explicitly use the ‘less but better’ meat concept. We analysed how it is currently used, defined and interpreted and found that it increasingly used, however only in some geographical settings. Few studies include quantifications of ‘less’, but there is some agreement that ‘better’ should deliver environmental sustainability, improved animal welfare and better health or nutrition, however without any clear principles for, or detail on which practices would deliver desirable outcomes.  Key contributions of this paper include providing state of the art knowledge of scientific use and interpretation of the ‘less but better’ concept, generation of theory on the concept and articulation of key research gaps such as that social and economic sustainability aspects are missing and that the concept lacks links to description of desirable livestock futures. A key conclusion in Paper 1 was that descriptions of ‘less’ are few and often vaguely formulated. Part 4 thus reviews some existing theories on how to characterize ‘less’ and summarises existing knowledge of quantifications of ‘less’ at global and regional scale. It also describes key findings from Paper 2, in which we quantified the global, regional and national potential to produce ruminant meat and milk when ruminants are limited to land areas and practices where grazing can preserve grassland biodiversity; thus describing ‘less’ from a grassland biodiversity perspective. We found that such production would only provide around 2 and 7 percent of current total global ruminant milk and meat production, and our results thus imply a total transformation of this livestock production sector. This first quantification is a key contribution of this study, along with its development of new methods to study the sustainable room for livestock, for example by combining historical land use maps with knowledge on grazing-biodiversity relations. Part 5 then discusses the findings of the two studies, and the ‘less but better’ concept in relation to existing theories more broadly. Lastly, Part 6 contains some concluding remarks and brief notes on the next steps within the larger PhD project.