In a landmark report from 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations proclaimed a transcendent truth of our time: “climate change is the most serious challenge facing the human race.” Less familiar was the report’s demonstration that global livestock production is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global” (p. xx). Here I cannot begin to summarize the cascading environmental catastrophes predicted to occur as the result of climate change in the coming decades. I will address only one major driver of climate change in relation to one of the most personal and culturally significant decisions we make every day: what food we eat in order to live. I will examine the Spanish agri-food system and Spain’s emblematic role in a global dietary shift that threatens the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human animal life. I will argue that in Spain, as in other high-income countries, an ethically rational response to climate change demands a rapid shift away from animal-source foods and toward plant foods or, as two of the greatest authorities on Spanish agroecology recommend, a “revegetarianization” of the national diet. I will link my environmental critique of the corporate-industrial agri-food system to a compassionate plea on behalf of one of the primary victims of Spanish agroindustrial efficiency: the pig. Finally, I will conclude with an homage to Spanish animalista (animal-rights) activists who have fought to reveal what most consumers strongly prefer to ignore and what meat producers increasingly fight to conceal: the misery of billions of factory-farmed animals worldwide who are enslaved by an environmentally devastating industry.

A vast scientific consensus now recognizes the unsustainability of current Western diets that are high in animal-source foods produced by intensive industrial farming systems. In a major 2020 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized the conclusions of systematic research reviews by stating that the diets high in animal-source foods have a much higher environmental impact that those containing few or no animal-source foods, and that plant-based diets also produce significantly better human health outcomes.