Reply To: Meat eating and the flexitarianism
In Britain, we expect food to be cheap. We spend an average of 8% of household expenditure on food to eat at home. That’s lower than any country except for the US and Singapore, go back 60 years and Britons spent twice as much on food, in relative terms, as we do now… Already, lower-income households in Britain spend more on food, as a percentage of their income, than the better off: 14% of their annual spend.
Vegans make up 2% of the population, vegetarians are 7% and flexitarians – those choosing not to eat meat for one or more meals a week – hover around 20%. Still, nine out of 10 British households regularly buy red meat.
A report from 2017 found there were at least 789 megafarms in the UK, many of them owned by foreign multinationals. (A megafarm, by the US definition, houses at least 125,000 broiler chickens, 82,000 laying hens, 2,500 pigs, 700 dairy or 1,000 beef cattle; in the UK, a farm is described as “intensive” if it has at least 40,000 poultry birds or 2,000 pigs grown for meat or 750 breeding sows.) Two of the biggest operators in the UK are the US-owned Cargill, with more than 100 farms, and Moy Park, based in Northern Ireland but backed by a Brazilian company. Another investigation last year discovered that American-style intensive cattle farms, where livestock have restricted or no access to pasture, were becoming more common in the UK. The largest farms fatten up to 6,000 cattle a year on “feedlots”.
Simon Fairlie has spent much of the past three decades thinking about our consumption of meat and asking whether it can ever be ethical and sustainable. He was a co-editor of the Ecologist and now edits a magazine called The Land; he’s also the author of a book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance, a thoughtful and rigorous trawl through the evidence. For Fairlie, it’s inarguable that we should all eat less meat: it’s not a great cornerstone for a diet and it’s harming the planet. But none? He doesn’t think so.
“The main problem we face is climate change and over two-thirds of global warming is caused by fossil fuels and industrial processes,” says Fairlie, citing US Environmental Protection Agency figures from 2014. “If the whole world went vegan it wouldn’t stop global warming. To do that, we have to stop using fossil fuels; and when we do we almost certainly won’t be able to produce as much meat as we do now, because of a lack of artificial fertilisers and the need to use land for biofuels, and diets will change accordingly.”
“Technically, a vegan diet probably is sustainable, but it is not sensible,” says Fairlie. “A diet with modest amounts of dairy, fish and meat requires less land than a completely vegan diet because a substantial proportion of livestock are fed on waste products. We also keep grazing animals for maintaining biodiversity, preventing forest fires, and keeping land clear for amenity use or renewable energy generation. Their populations have to be controlled, and if we are to cull them, we might as well eat them. A vegan diet is wasteful because it cannot use this valuable source of protein; whereas a high-meat diet is wasteful because it relies on feeding livestock inefficiently with grain that humans could eat.”
“…if you look at history, the biggest changes in our diet have come through things like war or natural disasters,” says Glencross. “It’s interesting to think: ‘Unless something really big happens, are we drastically going to change?’” She shakes her head and sighs, “Which is slightly worrying.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/16/peak-beef-ethical-food-climate-change