Denmark is tiny. Its ambition to make its food system more climate-friendly is huge.

Climate scientists agree on at least one necessary change to our food system: People, especially those in rich countries, ought to be eating more plants and fewer animals. 

Globally, livestock production accounts for some 15 to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and accelerates a host of other environmental problems, from deforestation to freshwater depletion to air pollution. And yet virtually all Western governments have designed their food policy to churn out more and more meat, milk, and eggs. 

The idea that we need to eat more, not less, meat is also baked into many nations’ cultural psyches, with both subtle and overt messages that meat equals masculinity and prosperity. Meat has been dragged into many countries’ culture wars, stifling civil discussions over how to make food systems sustainable.

One country, though, far more than any other, has heeded the climate scientists’ advice: Denmark, the small Scandinavian nation of 6 million people known for its intensive factory farming system and resulting pork and dairy exports.

In 2021, the Danish Parliament and government made a deal to shift its food system in a more plant-based and organic direction, and has set aside around $200 million US to do it. About $85 million is going to farmers who grow plant-based foods. The rest is being used to fund new projects, like experimenting with “nudge theory” — redesigning cafeterias to subtly encourage consumers to choose more plant-based options — and launching a startup incubator for plant-based companies at the Technological Institute of Denmark. 

Many people have labored to turn these ideas into policy, but Rune-Christoffer Dragsdahl, the secretary-general of the Vegetarian Society of Denmark, has unquestionably been the leader.

Dragsdahl became the society’s first employee in 2016, when he went unpaid for the first year or so. Since then, the organization has grown to employ 22 staff members. 

How exactly did a tiny organization with little political clout blaze a trail toward a more sustainable, humane food system? I spoke with Dragsdahl last month to find out.

His secret, it turns out, is diplomacy. 

Dragsdahl and his vegetarian society colleagues spent years building a coalition of farmers, scientists, and organic food advocates, emphasizing shared values — sustainability and food innovation — instead of differences, like the merits of vegetarianism. This big-tent approach appealed to politicians, including not just members of left-wing parties but also politicians on the right, one of whom called the country’s plant-based action plan an “intelligent idea,” according to Dragsdahl.   

“That, I think, shows the fact that we and other stakeholders have somehow managed to mainstream this,” he told me. “There are still ideological battles and clearly we’re not done, but we have to a large extent managed to get many people to see that this should also be a part of Danish agriculture and that it should be stronger. That there’s actual potential in this. That there’s no need to fight over more plants.”

My conversation with Dragsdahl has been edited for length and clarity.

What role does meat play in Danish society?

It’s really a centerpiece of food culture, of Danish culture. There are many social events, whether it’s football events — people will have their hot dogs — and when they’re grilling in the summer. 

Apart from food culture … Denmark is a very agricultural nation. We are the most cultivated country in the world, together with Bangladesh, in terms of the [percentage of the] surface of the land being cultivated, because the country is very flat, so you can say it’s suitable for this. 

Even though the country might be suitable, you can over-cultivate it. And that is the problem — we have severe biodiversity loss here, severe eutrophication. … So it’s definitely damaging the local environment here. But for many decades, it has been difficult to do anything about it because at least some people have felt we are an agricultural nation. It’s in our blood, that’s who we are. And livestock is an integral part of that. 

So there are things here, both culturally but also politically. And there’s this universal pride for people — that Danish dairy, Danish butter, is being exported to the whole world… But also, of course, bacon and pork products. But that has been increasingly questioned in the last 10 years. 

What happened to lay the groundwork for the plant-based action plan?

In 2019, we got the idea to start something we call the Danish Network for Plant Proteins. You make such a network, really, to make people feel welcome no matter where they’re from. … We had hard-hitting scientists, we had inspiring startups, we had interesting content — but always in a friendly and warm and pragmatic tone. And that meant that even the farming association [the Danish Agriculture and Food Council] attended. They later came back to us a month later and told us that they liked our approach. We don’t agree about scaling down livestock production, but they did agree that we could work together on how to look more into plant-based [food production] to diversify Danish agriculture. 

When they did that, it almost immediately eliminated any opposition from a large part of the political spectrum. So maybe some of the resistance in the right wing became neutral, and some of the hesitance among the parties in the center of Danish politics became slightly positive. And that was extremely helpful because you move the entire playing field. And then, of course, the parties which are even more progressive on the center and center-left wing, they can push even harder for it and get the middle parties on board without the right wing making a big fuss about it. And the farmers’ association was definitely important for that.

I think we have really successfully been insisting that plant-based is both the whole foods plant-based and the processed [foods] and everything in between. And by insisting on that, we’re getting less opposition between the people who just want everything to be home-cooked and believe children should be taught how to cook their own vegetables again.

These solutions are both needed, and there [are] also places in between. There might be processed products that imitate meat but that are processed in milder ways. I think many of the Danish startups in this space are actually trying to find these kinds of solutions. So that has been a way to get many different kinds of people on board. 

What kind of plant-based projects have been awarded funding? 

So far, around 35 projects have been granted [in each of two rounds]. 

In the first round, the Hospitality School of Copenhagen got funding for a vegetarian chef’s degree. They got the funding for developing a curriculum that the government could then approve as acceptable for a new chef’s degree — which does not have any meat — and that degree becomes part of the government system, so it becomes a formal government education. But they could not have done it without getting funding to develop the curriculum.

In the second round, some [agricultural] schools applied for funding for developing a curriculum on legumes, but also to teach the professionals in the kitchens at the farmer schools how to include more legumes in the foods eaten by the young farmers.

What else should people know about Denmark’s efforts to build a more plant-based food system?

Denmark is not paradise. [People] will have this excuse — they’ll say, “This is just Denmark, Denmark is always ahead on everything.” But that’s not the full story. And I think that’s the important part to be told here. This happened in the country with the largest livestock production per capita and with a very powerful livestock lobbying sector. So when we can succeed on that in Denmark, there will be pathways to that in other countries. And for me, that is a really important message that we should not give up — that there is actually hope.