Betraying future generations

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I’ve just watched a programme on TV predicting two main things, a huge increase in population and a huge decrease in food and water. With the ability to avoid the main childhood killer-diseases there’s no longer any reason for big families. In that programme we saw how educated women (in India) with access to birth control chose to have only two children, indicating that this may be a breakthrough to the problem of world overpopulation. As to keeping people fed, we saw how food technology and water conservation was providing more food with less waste of water. But this is a stop-gap solution. The main problem lies elsewhere and isn’t being addressed at all.
It seems that humans will fiddle at the edges but never face up to the need for each individual to take responsibility for the whole - in this TV programme there was never a mention of the more permanent solution - the promotion and adoption of widespread plant-based diets.
The world of today is made up of omnivores who can’t seem to understand how wasteful it is to use crops and water to feed animals to provide meat and by-products ... when none of it is necessary. And still there‘s no mention of the animals’ part played in producing vast amounts of greenhouse gases.
Future generations will ask why the cruelty, why the waste and mostly why the conspiracy of silence against such an obvious solution to today’s feeding problems ... and they’ll have to conclude that humans of today could only be seen talking about solutions without actually implementing them. It seems we are incapable of facing the truth of cruelty and waste, and only ever concerned with the present and not with the future. And the reason for this - that those alive today will be dead before the world undergoes the worst of the consequences of today’s neglect. We are speaking brave words to the people of the future, but showing them that our care and concern and sophisticated thinking is a sham, and that we are really rather primitive and self-centred.
Even if the planet can maintain a zero increase in population growth, there is no way we can sustain our present seven billion on an omnivorous diet without causing harm to the planet and human health, not to mention animal welfare. The solution is simple but there’s a reluctance to bite the bullet. If there’s obscenity in treating animals like convenient food-producing machines then a worse obscenity is the avoidance of the obvious alternative.
Once you’ve acknowledged the simplest of solutions, concerning the use of a plant-based diet, but have then gone on to ignore it, you’ve adopted an ‘I’m alright Jack’ approach to life. If we shirk responsibility here we doom future generations to starvation.