The United Nations is in the news again, offering mankind guidance and advice, and looking for a way to make it mandatory. Their advice isn't completely new. Back in 2008 -- a year after he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with that other Eminence and scientific Luminary, Al Gore -- Rajendra Pachauri recommended that mankind eschew animal flesh one day per week. (You remember Pachauri, surely, of IPCC and global-warming-scandal fame.) He claimed that this would alleviate a laundry list of world problems.
More recently a new UN report has tightened the screws on mankind. We are now to become vegans, rather than mere part-time vegetarians.
Rather than flail around in policy-wonk mode, let's place the matter in a wider historical context. How can we fit this into Toynbee's classic "A Study of History?" (I use the abridged version because it has a drastically lower carbon footprint.) Consider Chapter VII, Universal Churches; section (2), Churches as Chrysalises, which tries to explain the evolution of civilizations from Old civilization, to religious chrysalis, to New civilization:
"[Every one of the extant civilizations] had in its background some universal church through which it was affiliated to a civilization of an older generation."
In the chrysalis stage, a civilization might seem static or arrested. But internally it is going through fundamental creative changes. One day, the new civilization emerges as a butterfly.
Before 1968, European civilization was post-Christian, materialist, industrial, scientific, expansionist, and nationalist. Then it went into the hippie-dippie chrysalis for a few years. What emerged was New Age Hindu/Buddhist, Green, chemophobic, anti-growth, and internationalist. No longer was Western Civilization pushed by hard, physical sciences; now it was centered around squishy social sciences; around the touchie-feelie. The new post-industrial economy saw the Manufacturing sector go into a long decline, hounded by government regulations and environmentalists every step down the slope. The economy was now to run on finance (read, debt), services, raising llamas, government mandates, and teaching yoga.
If this analysis is correct, the UN's ostensible reasons against meat-eating are just thinly disguised kultur-kampf. Although vegetarianism was not completely unknown to European civilization prior to 1968, it became much more hip and trendy afterward. Let's just hope that UN technocrats, working on complex computer models of Global Sustainability, haven't found a rationale for bringing back the Nehru jacket.
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