Written for and originally published on aeon.co on 19 June 2023

Having lived nowhere other than the western coast of India for the first 21 years of my life, seafood was an indispensable part of my diet growing up. When the family business was prospering, we’d feast on plump pomfrets and juicy tiger prawns. When it wasn’t, there’d be smaller, bonier fish like anchovies and sardines. Or the less popular bycatch at least. If nothing else, my mum would bring out wares she’d stashed away for the greyer days; a jar of spicy pickled shrimp or salted, sundried mackerel perhaps. But fruits of the Arabian Sea always featured prominently in most meals. In fact, the act of procuring seafood was almost as delightful as consuming it. My Saturday mornings were often spent at the fish market with my mum, watching her negotiate with Hira – our family’s favourite fishmonger. ‘I saved these for you, I know your kids enjoy them,’ I remember Hira saying, trying to sell us her most formidable pair of mud crabs. She wasn’t wrong, I do love a good mud crab curry.

These days, my Saturday mornings are spent shopping for the week’s groceries at the supermarket in my neighbourhood in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Every week, I spend several minutes eyeing squeaky-clean salmon steaks and delicate basa fillets packed in the most sterile-looking plastic boxes I’ve ever seen. The stickers on the box tell me so much about the fish – freshness, origin, environmental impact, recyclability of the packaging. Yet I long to run my fingers through its non-existent scales and inspect its long-discarded gills for tactile cues about quality. Without the sights, sounds and serendipitous communal life of a coastal fish market, buying seafood has lost its allure for me. I guiltily move to the meat section to check for other protein options for the week.

Like me, many have ‘upgraded’ to consuming more meat than previous generations did. By factory farming livestock, we are now able to produce meat at unbelievably low costs. We also have more money to spend than we ever did. Data show a strong positive correlation between a country’s GDP per capita and the amount of meat the average citizen consumes in a year. Collectively, we eat three times the meat we did just 50 years ago. In rapidly industrialising countries like China and Brazil, meat consumption has doubled in a span of two to three decades. Meanwhile, developed countries continue to consume meat in even more copious amounts than they did before. For many, eating more meat means improved food security and nutritional status. But it also pushes against our planet’s boundaries like few other anthropogenic activities do. With cow flatulence enveloping Earth in temperature-raising gases and the Amazon losing its cover to cattle feed, the current ways of producing and consuming meat have been pronounced detrimental to the planet’s health. In fact, it isn’t particularly good for human health, either. Consuming meat excessively, especially the red and processed kinds, exposes us to higher risks for various lifestyle-related diseases.