Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron have been tapped by Chinese officials to help lead a campaign encouraging Chinese to eat less meat.
The Hollywood celebrities’ photos will appear on billboards across China alongside Chinese actress Li Bingbing, and they will appear in commercials urging people to eat less meat, according to environmental advocacy group WildAid, which has partnered with the Chinese Nutrition Society in this campaign.
The government’s new dietary guidelines, released in May, suggest that Chinese people eat between 40-75 grams of meat per day — reducing their current meat consumption by half.
By comparison, Canadians eat about 237 grams of meat per day, according to 2014 statistics from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
In a video produced by WildAid, Cameron says that he supports eating less meat for environmental reasons. “How can I call myself an environmentalist if I’m contributing to environmental degradation by what I eat?”
In one of the commercials, Schwarzenegger staggers through a desert, presumably blighted by the environmental effects of meat agriculture.
“Less meat. Less heat. More life,” says the sweaty celebrity in the commercial.
Like the American food pyramid, China’s new “dietary pagoda” has a base of grains, followed by fruits and vegetables, meat and fish, dairy and sweets.
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