By Eliza Barclay, NPR

To feed all 7 billion of us, address climate change and live longer, we all need to eat less meat. From Al Gore to the Meatless Monday movement to Harvard epidemiologists, that’s been the resounding advice offered to consumers lately.

But hold up a minute, says Mario Herrero, the chief research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO. Writing off food animals as greedy, inefficient polluters of land and water, artery cloggers and robbers of food from the mouths of hungry babes is perhaps a bit brash, he says.

Instead, it’s important to see the global livestock sector as a super diverse system of tiny backyards and massive feedlots that defies generalizations, Herrero tells the Salt. Shifting to this view is becoming more and more important as we plan for a future of 9 billion people on Earth by mid-century.

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