Edouard Getaz

I am realizing that this commitment would force me to giving up two of the things that I absolutely love: chocolate and coffee. I have take the step to give up meat almost entirely about a year and a half ago. This turned out to be much easier than I had thought. For some reason, giving up on chocolate and coffee is a much harder thing for me. I won't give up entirely, but I have reduced my consumption drastically.

Raising animals to eat them at massive scale is one of the most absurd undertaking one can think of nowadays: most of the meat economy is highly subsidized, the carbon footprint is huge – not to mention all the other forms of pollutions caused by meat production – and the impact of eating meat on people's health is huge (most cardio-vascular issues are caused by eating habits involving a high-consumption of meat). We gave up meat almost entirely not because we don't like eating meat (we used to love it), but by conviction, when we realized that this is one of the most consequential actions we can take at our individual level to reduce our own impact on the planet. We thought it would be hard, we thought we would miss it – the contrary happened: our health condition improved, we feel much more energetic, sleep better, etc. 

The long-term consequences of the various crises currently playing out will change the status of the sharing economy in the Western world: from a nice-to-have option, it will become a must-have for many people. The benefits? The rebirth of a more local economy, less dependent on the forces that control the mechanisms of capitalism, more human and with a lower footprint on the environment.