Meat. To Eat, Or Not To Eat?

If you had asked me one year ago about my thoughts on veget­ari­an­ism, I would have replied that there was no argu­ment that would con­vince me to give up eat­ing meat. It con­sti­tutes a neces­sary part of our diet, we are all born omni­vor­ous, and I would hap­pily go out and hunt my meal if I had to earn my moral right to eat animal flesh.

Well, it’s amaz­ing how trav­el­ling, read­ing and a bit of curi­ous, open-minded inquiry can trans­form even the most previously-stalwart carnivore.

I love eat­ing meat. It is the centrepiece of every a la carte main course. Cooked prop­erly, it is abso­lutely deli­cious. Bal­samic roast lamb shank… char-grilled bar­be­cue ribs… fil­let steak (rare) with pep­per sauce… I sal­iv­ate even as I type! If you watch the pod­cast, you’ll see me rant­ing about great spicy chunks of meat on reg­u­lar occa­sions. Before I left, and for the first few weeks of the trip, it would be bread and jam for break­fast, sand­wiches for lunch, and some form of meat dish for din­ner. Veget­ables would fea­ture as an accom­pani­ment or as an ingredi­ent for some elab­or­ate sauce or flavouring.

If you skip back in the blog to Novem­ber last year, you’ll see that Andy, Mark and I con­verged upon the city of Lon­don to demon­strate against apathy towards the prob­lem of cli­mate change. I was assaul­ted by pamph­let­eers on the way into Tra­fal­gar Square. One of the fly­ers that res­ult­antly fes­tooned my being was a preach­ing of the reli­gion of vegan­ism. I read it, and found myself offen­ded by its derog­at­ory tone. I was emo­tion­ally black­mailed into feel­ing guilty about my diet. So I binned it. But my mind did keep drift­ing back to its mes­sage — that our coun­try is eat­ing meat at a rate that is unsus­tain­able and unnecessary.

I’d never really thought of that before. It dwelt on the outer fringes of my con­scious­ness while I went about my life, build­ing a little house of concern.

Arriv­ing in Geneva to meet our con­tact at the WWF, I ques­tioned him about it over lunch, as I knew he was a long-time vegetarian.

By the end of the dis­cus­sion, Mark, Andy and I had resolved to cut meat out of our diet almost completely.

Some fig­ures to digest, as it were:

• Anim­als raised for food in the U.S. con­sume 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop, and 70% of its grain [1].
• The U.S. could feed 800 mil­lion people with that same amount of grain.
• Accord­ing to the veget­arian author John Rob­bins, it takes roughly takes 60, 108, 168, 229 pounds of water to pro­duce a pound of pota­toes, wheat, corn and rice respect­ively. He reports that a pound of beef how­ever, requires 12,000 gal­lons of water.
• A per­son in the United States who switched from the typ­ical diet to a vegan diet would, on aver­age, reduce CO2 pro­duc­tion sig­ni­fic­antly more than switch­ing from a Toyota Camry to a hybrid, Toyota Prius.

While these fig­ures relate to the U.S., the story is the same through­out the West­ern World. Have a look at the Wiki­pe­dia art­icle on envir­on­mental veget­ari­an­ism if you’re inter­ested to learn more.

It’s no secret that our meat con­sump­tion has increased in the post-war era. I asked my par­ents about their diet when they were grow­ing up. Meat on a Sunday (roast beef — the poor man’s choice), and leftovers, sea­sonal veget­ables, pota­toes and the like for the rest of the week.

Meat on spe­cial occa­sions alone? Surely not!! But this is how things appar­ently used to be before the post-war rise in liv­ing stand­ards and levels of dis­pos­able income. It was more eco­nom­ical to keep a veget­able patch or go to the local mar­ket — before super­mar­kets came along, and made meat eas­ily avail­able to all, every day of the week.

I’m not becom­ing a veget­arian, but I can save meat for spe­cial occa­sions. We now get our pro­tein from beans, pulses, len­tils, cheese, and the like. It’s incred­ible how much money we save, and it means that once in a while I can treat myself to a spicy meaty kebab without my con­science spoil­ing the taste.

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