Jeremy Corbyn’s dietary habits made headlines recently when he said he was considering going vegan. This would represent a next step for the Labour leader, who has long-been a committed vegetarian. It is welcome that Corbyn is open to having the conversation about cutting down on meat and animal products more generally. As for the rest of us, we can’t keep putting it off. Not if we want to tackle climate change.

Campaigners have of course been trying to persuade the public to eat less meat for ages. It’s more than four decades since Peter Singer’s consciousness-awakening book Animal Liberation was published. The Vegetarian Society has been going four times as long. Over those years, there have been countless exposés of cruelties in factory farms and of the damage that farming can do to the local environment, and doctors increasingly warn of the risks of eating too much meat.

But if the aim of all this was to reduce meat consumption, those efforts have failed. Vegetarianism might now feel like a part of mainstream culture, rather than the eccentricity that it once was, but there’s little sign that more people are quitting meat. Nor is there evidence that many people are reducing the amount they eat. In the US, meat consumption per person fell during the Great Recession but it is now rising again. It looks like economics was the driving force, not ethics. In the EU, meat consumption is steadily increasing.

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