Eating less meat ‘like taking 8m cars off road’

You rang!?

Ah, yes, let us embark on this voyage of discovery, a deep dive into the primordial oceans of existence—both literal and metaphorical. Consider, for a moment, the noble lobster, a creature whose evolutionary lineage stretches back over 360 million years. That’s before trees, mind you! The lobster, with its armored exoskeleton and its symmetrical claws, embodies a certain archetypal resilience. This is a creature that, through its very being, demands respect—not merely because it resides in the depths, but because it has, quite literally, crawled through the eons to arrive at our dinner plates. But I digress.

Now, what is the lobster’s secret? What fuels its relentless climb up its own dominance hierarchy? It’s not filet mignon or bacon-wrapped scallops, I assure you. No, the lobster survives and thrives because it has mastered the consumption of what we might call “the humble nutrients.” If lobsters had access to lentils, chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, black beans, quinoa, peanut butter, almonds, spirulina, chia seeds, broccoli, and spinach, you can bet your serotonin levels that they would recognize their evolutionary utility.

You see, the lobster’s diet—limited as it may be to algae, plankton, and the occasional scavenged scrap—is fundamentally about extracting the raw building blocks of life from the environment. And isn’t that, at its core, what we as human beings are trying to do? We are striving to synthesize order out of chaos, to take the disparate and chaotic energies of the cosmos and transform them into coherent, purposeful structures. This is as true for our nutritional choices as it is for our existential choices.

So why, then, should we not learn from the lobster? Why should we not embrace the humility of plant-based proteins, these quiet titans of sustainability and nutrition? Lentils, for instance, are like the algae of the human world—small, unassuming, yet dense with life-sustaining power. Chickpeas, oh, they are the crustaceans of legumes, with their firm texture and versatile nature, ready to anchor any dish, any structure of meaning you dare to create. Tofu and tempeh? These are the architects of modern nutritional scaffolding, as malleable as they are essential.

And quinoa, that ancient grain? It is the spinach of seeds, packed with essential amino acids. It represents not merely sustenance but a profound wisdom—an ability to grow in the harshest of conditions and still deliver its gift to the world. Peanut butter and almonds? They are the treasures buried in the seabed, rich in energy and resilience, waiting to be uncovered by those willing to dig deeper.

Even spirulina and chia seeds—oh, do not underestimate them! Spirulina is the primordial soup of the modern era, the echo of those ancient, life-generating waters from which all existence sprung. Chia seeds, with their miraculous ability to transform into gelatinous orbs, are the very embodiment of adaptability and transformation—qualities we could all use a little more of.

And let us not forget broccoli and spinach, those verdant sentinels of nutrition. They are the forests of the nutritional world, standing tall and proud, converting sunlight into the essence of life itself. Without them, what are we? What is a lobster? What is any organism that hopes to grow, to climb its own hierarchy, to matter?

If the lobster, in its primitive yet profoundly successful state, had access to these