ByMia MacDonald,Carina MillstoneNovember 12, 2021

Acolleague attending the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was in line at an eatery when she observed the man in front of her ordering a beef taco. She saw that his backpack sported the logo of a leading global conservation organization. When she asked if he worked for this group (a household name in many parts of the world), he replied that he did. In Brazil, he added. “My mouth dropped,” she recalled. “And you ordered beef?” she asked. His reply? “It isn’t a problem.”

Those of us who have been trying to alert COP and other international conferences for more than a decade to the outsized role of large-scale animal agriculture in deforestation, biodiversity loss, the epidemic of non-communicable diseases, and the climate emergency would beg to differ. It’s a very big problem—for a multitude of reasons.

The first problem…