Meat

Meat eating is a controversial thing these days, it seems. Vegetarians and vegans seek the moral high ground over both practical issues of welfare and ethical issues of raising animals for meat. Meat is even criticised as inefficient – it is often said that one can grow far more more soy protein per acre than one can raise as beef. However we might argue the ethical point (not something I want to address right now), the other two points are spurious.

First off, welfare. Eating meat does not necessarily involve cruelty to animals – the real enemy here is intensive farming that rears animals in hugely overcrowded conditions, feeds them unnatural food, denies them natural behaviour and even breeds them for obesity so that they put on weight faster and can be slaughtered earlier. This approach is nasty and to be condemned. But it’s got nothing to do with meat eating versus vegetarianism; it’s about good animal husbandry versus exploitation, and I’m completely on the side of good husbandry. When buying meat, look for free-range or (preferably) organic labelling – “free range” can mean little, so check with your supplier, but proper organic certification is a guarantee that the meat has been reared, transported and slaughtered as humanely as possible, over and above the actual “organic” portion of the certificate (the use of natural feeds and rejection of pesticides, herbicides and growth promoters).
As for the second spurious objection (efficiency), this misses the point. Meat animals were (and to some extent still are) raised precisely because not all land is suitable for growing crops. Sheep naturally graze mountainous areas, cattle graze waterlogged meadows and rough ground, pigs love woodland areas and orchards. Meat is a way of extracting high-quality food from low-quality land. The fact that some meat is now grown on land that would be perfect for arable farming is a step away from the ideal. When meat animals are reared properly, they get much of their sustenance from the land they are on – there should be far less need to grow huge amounts of fodder crops than is true in intensive farming methods. No vegetarian arguing against bad farming on these grounds will get disagreement from me! But this is still not an argument against meat eating, merely against bad farming. If we are concerned about these issues, our strongest means of changing the situation is by buying good meat rather than bad, instead of merely rejecting all meat.
I’m thinking about these issues at the moment because I’m reading The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This (as the name suggests) is a cookbook about meat. However, it’s not so much a recipe book as a polemic for good meat – for good conditions for animals to grow in, for good slaughtering practice, for good butchery and for good cookery. If you eat meat happily, or are plagued with doubt about whether you should, it’s an excellent book to make you think about the meat you buy and eat, and to help you get the best meat and to do it justice. After all, when we eat meat, an animal has died for us. We should respect that.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:30am on 08 October 2004
Category: Books, Food, Musing, Politics, General