Reports that Thomas Cook Airlines Scandinavia has been bought by a consortium led by Petter Stordalen “exposes complete hypocrisy and hidden agendas”, according to the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA).
ICSA president Edmond Phelan said the buy-out “exposes the hypocrisy” behind the EAT Lancet report which earlier this year advocated a global switch to a plant-based diet on climate change grounds.
Commenting on this, Phelan said:
“How can the EAT Lancet report have any credibility when one of its major backers is now buying an airline specialising in discretionary tourism travel?
It is hypocritical in the extreme to have a multi-millionaire investor lecturing ordinary people that they have to virtually eliminate livestock products from their diet while he resurrects an airline company owned by Thomas Cook which went into liquidation recently.
“This is part of a wider pattern where the climate change debate has been hijacked to divert attention from fossil fuels and blame meat instead,” the president claimed.
The EAT Lancet report suggested that moving to an overwhelmingly plant-based diet would be a major game changer on climate change and that this was an urgent challenge for humanity, Phelan noted.
“Now it turns out that Thomas Cook Airlines Scandinavia has been acquired by a trio of investors including the Strawberry Group which will hold 40% of the business.
The Strawberry Group is a fund controlled by Petter Stordalen who, along with his wife, is behind the EAT Foundation which is responsible for the EAT Lancet report.
“It is now more clear than ever that people should ignore the extreme vegan ideology and the anti-meat agenda.
“It is obvious that someone who invests in an airline is not fit to lecture people on giving up meat nor should they be allowed undermine livestock family farms, where farmers produce healthy, nutritious food to the highest animal welfare standards,” Phelan concluded.
