What would you rather look at: a factory filled with vats of protein ‘broth’ in which pale, slimy lumps of cells are replicating into lamb chops and chicken nuggets, or a green pasture full of beef cattle?
However contradictory it may seem, people who eat meat, and are comfortable with the slaughter of animals, nevertheless generally love cows, and sheep, and pigs. Whenever we went to the local open farm it was always teeming with people. They couldn’t have all be vegetarians!! These visitors pat the cows and bottle feed the lambs and then go to the pub for a Sunday roast. These two things are not incompatible.
Thousands of years ago when we lived pretty much as one with the natural world, we killed and ate animals and felt no guilt. It was a time when we could not have been more in harmony with nature and yet no people, not even 1% of ancient man, shuddered at killing their food.
The farm visit followed by a plate of roast beef, is not some denial of the realities of meat-eating. It is just proof that love and care for animals is not incompatible with meat-eating.
Of course there are some people who are distressed at the thought of eating something that was once a living animal. Our vegetarian and vegan friends give concerns for animal welfare as the main reason for not eating meat. Whilst I do not share that point of view I understand it. But recently a new reason has crept into their explanation of their restrictive diet. It is not animal welfare, it is not even their own health, although that is also sometimes mentioned. The new reason is concern for the environment, worries about ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions and ‘global warming’ .
Until recently the idea that you would become vegetarian in order to protect the environment would have been an odd one. Now it is widely accepted, in large part because of a concerted media push of this angle over recent years. But is it really true that a vegetarian diet, farming vegetables, or growing cultured meat, is more environmentally friendly than farming animals?
At any given time around 5% of Americans are vegetarian, and about 4% of Brits. Over the last several years there has been a noticeable push in the media towards vegetarian or vegan eating. This has been present in the ‘health’ pages, the food and recipe content, the mainstream news, and in recent years, in the environment supplements of various publications.
The idea that eating less meat could be good for the planet as well as your personal health used to be novel and a bit strange, but it has been increasingly accepted. In fact, the claim that eating less meat is good for your health is pretty baseless. Firstly because just eating less meat alone will not improve your health. You can eat less meat and more donuts, or eat less meat and drink more vodka, neither of which would be better for your health, although in both cases you have eaten less meat. Secondly because we have eaten meat throughout the whole of our existence and evolution on the planet, meat contains all the nutrients we need, and animal fat is actually good for us rather than the reverse. The ‘eat less meat for your health’ message has always seemed strange to me.
There have been many books published in recent decades about the catastrophic effect sugar has on our health, including Sugar Nation, and Pure, White, and Deadly yet there has been considerably less mainstream media coverage on the damage sugar does to our health and also the environment, even though sugar
may be responsible for more biodiversity loss than any other crop due to its destruction of habitat to make way for plantations, its intensive use of water for irrigation, its heavy use of agricultural chemicals, and the polluted wastewater that is routinely discharged in the sugar production process.
‘Sugar Produces Bitter Results for the Environment’, Earth Talk, August 5, 2018
Arguably sugar is a greater cause of damage to the environment than responsible livestock farming. There has also been pushback on the idea that meat is damaging to our health, and attempts to expose the way in which the sugar industry deflects attention from its own part in humanity’s ill-health onto meat and fat.
Although I believe it is everybody’s free choice to eat what they choose, I would be more amenable to attempts to limit sugar consumption, through the most effective information campaigns money can buy, and to improve people’s health by pointing out how protein and fat consumption can reduce sugar-cravings. Although there have been discussions in various parts of the western world about trying to reduce obesity and diabetes through discouraging the consumption of sugar, a sugar tax being a favoured method (governments love a tax!) this has generally failed to develop into anything meaningful, and yet the anti-meat campaign is gathering pace.
Attitudes towards sugar and meat consumption may differ because of the value and scale of the two industries. Sugar is a multi-billion dollar industry. Associated British Foods Plc, a UK sugar company established in 1935, has annual sales of US$17.5bn, has operations in 53 countries and employs 138,000 people. Its subsidiary British Sugar processes the entire UK sugar beet crop.
By comparison British meat processing employs 75,000 people, and is worth £8.2bn a year to the British economy. In total agriculture in the UK adds £9.5bn to the economy.
The sugar industry for size, power, and wealth beats the UK meat industry hands down. Sugar is used in almost all, if not all, processed food, and many pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. In recent decades it has found another market in vegetarian and vegan processed foods, and will no doubt find another, should the need arise to process synthetic meat into something palatable, and not too expensive, to stock the supermarket shelves.
So economic reasons alone could explain the push against real meat. Synthetic meat will, of course, further bring food production under the control of industry and huge companies which have the wealth to pursue the science required. The precise factory process for growing the meat will be the intellectual property of the company, which can be sold at great profit. As yet growing meat in labs is slow and prohibitively expensive. Hopefully this will continue, but we can not know for how long, and as venture capitalists rush to invest in this new market, creating unicorns along the way, vast amounts of money are being channelled towards finding the technology that can push aside real farming. Not a pleasant thought!
In recent surveys about 79% of people did not think they would ever eat insects, but about 65% of respondents said they would at least try synthetic meat, although only a third said they would eat it regularly. Farming livestock, and eating meat, are not bad for the environment or people’s health, so why and how are so many people being persuaded to look indulgently upon the possibility of lab-grown meat?
Farming is not just a way to produce meat, it is a traditional way of life which began at least 11,000 years ago. How much do the massive factories that already exist all over the planet enhance our lives? I would venture not at all. They are eyesores, usually pumping out some kind of emission or pollutant, although this may be hidden from the public.
In many countries all over the world agriculture has shaped the land in which people live. This is not mere nostalgia. If all our meat is grown in factories, what will happen to the land all around us? Where will we go to find solace, peace, and recreation? Will it all become theme parks? Will it fall into the hands of the massively wealthy who already have a penchant for buying huge ranches where they can live out their rural fantasies whilst dreaming up ways to make us eat cultured cells, and insects? Or instead will we reject the propaganda and focus on ethical farming, agro-ecologies, and harnessing thousands of years of knowledge and skill.
Farming may not be perfect but it is almost certainly better to concentrate on how farming can be improved through all the newly re-discovered wisdoms such as using leys to improve soil structure, no-till farming, and a myriad other ways of improving productivity without compromising on welfare or quality. Leaner pig breeds require more food, so we could return to fatter types. As animal fat is increasingly being shown to be healthy for us, this would be a win-win.
There is much more to discover in this issue. Next I’ll be investigating the lab-grown meat itself, the process and chemicals involved, the companies entering this market and their investors.