| 1 | | This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down some |
| | ninehundred words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often |
| | returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, |
| | it has opened my eyes to some fascinating intricacies in what seemed to be a |
| | black and white case. |
| 2 | | In The Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the |
| | world’s livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and |
| | human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism “is the |
| | only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice |
| | issue”. I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from |
| | feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book |
| | I’m about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop |
| | eating meat. |
| 3 | | In Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie pays handsome tribute to |
| | vegans for opening up the debate. He then subjects their case to the first |
| | treatment I’ve read that is both objective and forensic. His book is an abattoir for |
| | misleading claims and dodgy figures, on both sides of the argument. |
| 4 | | There’s no doubt that the livestock system has gone horribly wrong. It pumps |
| | grain and forage from irrigated pastures into the farm animal species least able |
| | to process them efficiently, to produce beef fatty enough for hamburger |
| | production. Cattle are excellent converters of grass but terrible converters of |
| | concentrated feed. The feed would have been much better used to make pork. |
| 5 | | Pigs, in the meantime, have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world |
| | from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat. Until the early 1990s, |
| | only 33% of compound pig feed in the UK consisted of grains fit for human |
| | consumption: the rest was made up of crop residues and food waste. Since then |
| | the proportion of sound grain in pig feed has doubled. There are several reasons: |
| | the rules set by supermarkets; the domination of the feed industry by large |
| | corporations, which can’t handle waste from many different sources; but most |
| | important the panicked over-reaction to the BSE and foot-and-mouth crises. |
| 6 | | Feeding meat and bone meal to cows was insane. Feeding it to pigs, whose |
| | natural diet incorporates a fair bit of meat, makes sense, as long as it is rendered |
| | properly. |
| 7 | | But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, |
| | but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we’ve |
| | been using the wrong comparison to judge the [id:95256] of meat production. Instead |
| | of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the |
| | amount of land required to produce meat with the land needed to grow plant |
| | products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically |
| | different. |
| 8 | | If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass |
| | from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don’t compete – meat |
| | becomes a very efficient means of food production. If we stopped feeding edible |
| | grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat |
| | supply with no loss [id:95257] : in fact, cut this portion out and you would create an |
| | increase in available food which could support 1.3 billion people. |
| 9 | | Fairlie goes on to butcher a herd of sacred cows. Like many greens I have |
| | thoughtlessly repeated the claim that it requires 100,000 litres of water to |
| | produce every kilogram of beef. Fairlie shows that this figure is wrong by around |
| | three orders of magnitude. It arose from the absurd assumption that every drop |
| | of water that falls on a pasture disappears into the animals that graze it, never to |
| | re-emerge. A ridiculous amount of fossil water is used to feed cattle on irrigated |
| | crops in California, but this is a stark exception. |
| 10 | | Similarly daft assumptions underlie the UN Food and Agriculture |
| | Organisation’s famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world’s |
| | greenhouse gas emissions. Fairlie shows that it made a number of basic |
| | mistakes. It attributes all deforestation that culminates in cattle ranching in the |
| | Amazon to cattle: in reality it is mostly driven by land speculation and logging. It |
| | muddles up one-off emissions from deforestation with ongoing pollution. |
| 11 | | Overall, Fairlie estimates that farmed animals produce about 10% of the |
| | world’s emissions: still too much, but a good deal less than transport. He also |
| | shows that many vegetable oils have a bigger footprint than animal fats, and |
| | reminds us that even vegan farming necessitates the large-scale killing or |
| | ecological exclusion of animals: in this case pests. |
| 12 | | The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one |
| | now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. |
| | But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) |
| | with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should |
| | be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions |
| | of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It’s time we got |
| | stuck in. |
| | |
| | Adapted from an article by George Monbiot in The Guardian, 2010 |
