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Let Them Eat Meat – But Farm It Properly
The ethical case against eating animal produce once seemed clear. But a new book is an abattoir for dodgy arguments
This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 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 complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.
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.
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.
There's no doubt that the livestock system has gone horribly wrong. Fairlie describes the feedlot beef industry (in which animals are kept in pens) in the US as "one of the biggest ecological cock-ups in modern history". 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.
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.
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. The same goes for swill. Giving sterilised scraps to pigs solves two problems at once: waste disposal and the diversion of grain. Instead we now dump or incinerate millions of tonnes of possible pig food and replace it with soya whose production trashes the Amazon. Waste food in the UK, Fairlie calculates, could make 800,000 tonnes of pork, or one sixth of our total meat consumption.
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 efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.
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. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain.
It's the second half - the stuffing of animals with grain to boost meat and milk consumption, mostly in the rich world - which reduces the total food supply. Cut this portion out and you would create an increase in available food which could support 1.3 billion people. Fairlie argues we could afford to use a small amount of grain for feeding livestock, allowing animals to mop up grain surpluses in good years and slaughtering them in lean ones. This would allow us to consume a bit more than half the world's current volume of animal products, which means a good deal less than in the average western diet.
He 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.
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, a higher proportion than transport. 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. It makes similar boobs in its nitrous oxide and methane accounts, confusing gross and net production. (Conversely, the organisation greatly underestimates fossil fuel consumption by intensive farming: its report seems to have been informed by a powerful bias against extensive livestock keeping.)
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. On the other hand, he slaughters the claims made by some livestock farmers about the soil carbon they can lock away.
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.
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44 Comments so far
Show AllOh George, have you sold your soul to the corporates? I have never, ever read such apologetic hair-tearing shill from you.
Surely not! I accept that much of the financial and statistical Green argument against meat-eating is flawed, as you state in your article. That's one argument, but it is smoke and mirrors to the real horror.
What about the ethics of eating meat? That as a supposedly compassionate, highly intelligent species, humans should be morally against eating animals? Especially animals like pigs which are more intelligent than dogs. And anyway - that argument is absurd - as if eating some animals was better than eating other animals.
Humanity shall never evolve out of the cave within us until we stop eating meat. This is plain and simple. It breaks my heart to see a respected Green protagonist sell out on such a basic issue.
What's next - nuclear power done properly is actually OK? Clean coal does exist? Fascism with pink ribbons is actually good for the planet?
ALL living beings are sentient, including plants. Whether it has a "face" or not, it can feel pain, joy, and has opinions and preferences. No matter what you eat, you are going to be consuming something that gave up its life for you to continue yours. But this doesn't have to be a sad or bad experience. It's just a fact of living on earth.. The important thing is to treat whatever is around you well, and if you consume something, do it with respect and a glad heart - from plants to meat to symbiotic organisms and yeasts. These beings give up their life for you to continue on, so my feeling is why not say thanks and live joyfully as a tribute to them.
I agree with your general point. But.
Most humans do not look at the world in black and white (ie, sentient or not sentient). They look at the world in many colours. Despite the fact that debates on meat eating tend to devolve into manichean black or white arguments, from the extremists on both sides.
It isn't a case of sentient or not. Is is a case of degrees of sentience.
Plants with "opinions and preferences?" Utter nonsense.
Even if it were true that plants are sentient, feeling creatures with "opinions" and such (despite not having brains or a central nervous system) the fact would only make eating animal flesh more morally repugnant than it is -- because tons of those "sentient" plants are consumed by every animal carcass a meat eater ends up gnawing on. So by eating animal flesh for dinner you might actually be consuming thousands of those sentient beings....but by eating some organically grown broccoli from your own backyard you'd be eating only one (assuming your theories regarding sentience were correct, which they are not).
http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2009/06/plant-sentience.html
I'm sure that all of that "respect" and your "glad heart" makes a tortured and slaughtered pig feel very "joyful" to show up on your plate.
The author is 100 percent correct in his conclusions on the comparative efficiencies of growing meat using traditional methods versus feedlots.
I suggest you get out more and visit some country. As example take a ride down the "Cowboy trail" in Southwest Alberta are into the cariboo country of BC.
The land here is 100's of thousands of acres of grassland on which great herds of Bison once grazed.
If we speak of food only , it far mnore enviromentally friendly to leave that as grassland (which it has been for thousands of years) then it is plowing it under to grow crops (which would soon destroy the land as it has down in croplands the world over)
You then argue ethics. Ethics are a rather mutable thing. There are few absolutes. When I look at the comparative "Ethics" of Cultures the world over, i see little if any differences between "Vegetarians" as opposed to peoples with Meat in the Diet.
The extinction of animal species the world over is due primarily to Habitat loss wherein man competes for the same land to "grow his own food". Those great herds of animals on the plains of Africa will vanish NOT because people eat them for food but because the lands they graze upon will be converted to fgrwoing rice and maize and other crops.
My opinion on what is ethical is different then yours and I believe man should adapt his diet to what the ecosystem of a given area NATURALLY provides. The Salish Indians on Canada's west Cost lived for thousands of years on the yearly run of Salmon. I do not consider that as "Unethical".
What has been done to California to grow vegetables and rice and other such foods, wherein water tapped from thousands of miles away and the soils destroyed via overuse and intensive agriculture ,all this done in less then a century is something I consider "unethical"
I wholeheartedly agree.
"When I look at the comparative "Ethics" of Cultures the world over, i see little if any differences between "Vegetarians" as opposed to peoples with Meat in the Diet."
Fascinating. You have access to published research that compares the ethics of carnivorous and vegetarian cultures? Could you please provide us a link to that material or otherwise identify the source of such information?
I'm especially eager to see what factors are used to identify a culture as either vegetarian or carnivorous.
q
The burden is not on the other poster to prove that a vegetarian diet does not lead to a more ethical society, the burden of proof is on those who claim that it does.
I put "Ethics" in quotes because of the nature of the word.
I used an example of the Salish Indians living off the runs of Salmon versus an ecosystem transformed to growing food plants as one way a person can compare "ethics".
Which group had a more "ethical" liefstyle. Which was "friendlier" to nature and all of its bounty?
From MY POV the Salish peoples were more ethical in this regard. Your own opinion might be entirely different wherein the mere fact one group eats meat(or in this case fish), makes them "unethical". This should clearly demonstrate my major point.
What IS "Ethical" and who defines it? Is your viewpoint of what is "Ethical" superior to my own and why?
It is not possible to define "Ethics" by "Published research" . ETHICS can not be defined in such a matter. They are highly subjective.
Most people in the world who eat meat are not the Salish Indians. The Salish Indians are more ethical. Even if that is accepted, it is irrelevant.
Most people in the world who do anything are not the Salish Indians.
Are you claiming that the Salish Indians are unique in depending upon a local game source for food? There are thousands of tribes who were - or are - in a similar relationship with their food source.
Apologists for chowing on corporate cow, pig, chicken and fish flesh hailing the hunter-gatherers.
Say what?
How many people who eat meat in the world are those "thousands" of tribes with a similar relationship to their food source?
Are YOU one of those tribes with a similar relationship to YOUR food source?
Begging your pardon? How are these comments relevant?
Which only reinforces the point being made.
Having meat in ones diet or NOT does not make one more or less "ethical". The far larger role played when arguing "ethics" is the cultures relationship to the enviroment around them. If it a fact that a given enviroment can suffer more degradation by growing plants to eat I can not see how any can take issue with my original point and one I firmly believe in.
That being the less the Human species tries to adapt nature to THEIR needs even if for reasons that are claimed "Ethical or moral" , the more sustainable the ecosystem becomes.
I agree.
I agree with onemantribe's response.
Meat, a "benign" extravagance? "Benign" to whom? Not to the billions of cattle, pigs, chickens, and others, who would never consent to surrendering their lives, no matter how "properly" treated, just so some humans can enjoy eating meat, eggs and dairy -- which, no matter how "green" produced -- eaten on a regular basis are harmful to human health. Moderation? The cattle, pigs, chickens, and others -- they never die in moderation. And I do not devalue them, I do not despise them because they are [sic] "stupid cows," "fascist pigs," "turkeys," etc -- because they have been victimized by us, and deserve respect, not contempt.
The issue of "green" raising and "humane" killing [sic] of billions -- now and in the future -- of innocent, vulnerable, conscious, thinking, feeling, caring individual beings isn't just a simple matter of "green" feasting. It's a serious moral and ethical issue because nonhuman life -- yes, life -- has inherent value, and so-called "food animals" are not mere converters of plant feed into meat feed for human consumption. Take these doomed beings out of the factory farm system only to turn them into plant-meat converting "green" machines? That's how they are valued, that's how they are seen, as converting machines: the plant feed goes into the meat machines, into the milk machines, into the egg machines, into the hide machines, so on. And ultimately, into humans at the "top of the food chain" [sic]
-- the "all-you-can-eat" machines.
So don't give me the "green" environmental argument on how to perpetuate ourselves into eternity along with our "benign" addiction. I could never be that kind of "green" environmentalist and have a clear conscience, too.
conscious, thinking, feeling, caring individual beings = these descriptors can also be said of plants. :-)
animals aren't the only ones who feel and sacrifice so that we can keep on living.
There is a certain irony about humans feeling "better" about only consuming plants, when it is the green plants who are about the only living things not consuming other life at all. They instead have re-engineered themselves to live directly on energy from the sun. We may someday graduate to their level of nondestructiveness if we learn to re-engineer ourselves ...
Um, they live off the soil, a handful of which is filled with billions of living organisms.
Equally conscious, equally sentient, equally self aware? Would you argue that a cabbage or a broccoli is equally conscious, equally sentient, equally self-ware as a pig? A whale?
Through what organisms do plants have the capacity for consciousness, thinking, feeling, and caring?
Not true! There is absolutely NO scientific evidence for your claim that plants have sentience. Read any textbook on the biological underpinnings of consciousness. Your argument is also flawed in a second way: even if plants had consciousness then we should still avoid animal products for simple reasons of harm minimization. See this http://www.animalvisuals.org/data/1mc/ for details.
"Benign" to whom? Not to the billions of cattle, pigs, chickens, and others, who would never consent to surrendering their lives, no matter how "properly" treated,"
But the issue here is this: most of these animals would not be raised, would not be fed, in the first place, if they were not raised as sources of food.
They won't have lives to be taken away.
"The issue of "green" raising and "humane" killing [sic] of billions -- now and in the future -- of innocent, vulnerable, conscious, thinking, feeling, caring individual beings isn't just a simple matter of "green" feasting. It's a serious moral and ethical issue because nonhuman life -- yes, life -- has inherent value, and so-called "food animals" are not mere converters of plant feed into meat feed for human consumption. Take these doomed beings out of the factory farm system only to turn them into plant-meat converting "green" machines? T"
I agree it is an ethical issue. Let's say you completely stop raising animals for food. What happens to them then? Do you propose that they continue to be raised?
For anyone who cares about any sort of ethics whatsoever - read this. Makes ya proud to be human. So long, and thanks for all the fish. No, really, thanks.
http://www.howardhall.com/stories/gone_fishing.html
Thanks for the heads up about the book, I hope my library gets a copy soon.
Its about time to realise the importance of a balanced approach to farming.
One of my jobs was a pig swill collector in Derbyshire. I can't tell you how many dustbins of food were saved from the dump and how many pigs were fattened up for sausages, but it wasn't a trifling amount. Now because of a fiat, we can't do this anymore.
However Stuart Tristram in his book "Waste", illustrates that it can be done eg in Japan and Korea.
Novella Carpenter in her book "Farm City" also shows how you can incorporate animal livestock in city farms and recycle a lot of stuff in the bargain.
Rather than exclude urbanites from growing food we should give incentives.
We now have some hens that are laying, though it doesn't save money per se (we are now on the $5-8 an egg cycle!) I know the actual cost of egg production, know what they eat, know how they behave, and have lots of fertiliser for the garden.
They money we save from growing food on our small lot ($1000 pa) goes a long way to buy meat and baked goods from local produces at the farmers market.
I don't spend hours in front of the TV and don't need a gym membership. Chasing chickens back to their coop is enough.
Thanks George for another great article.
pax
A 'farm city' approach seems sensible (except for the rooster crowing at dawn). A lot of people are not thrilled with the country life, so bringing a bit of country to the city with all its amenities is often preferable. Just this morning I had a Velvet Underground song going through my head: Train Comin' Round the Bend. "I'm sick of cheese, Take me to the city...
George's new revelations change nothing insofar as the moral and ethical factors are concerned.
To the fence sitters out there who still eat meat, who are tired of worrying about the safety of it, bothered by the absolute house-of-horrors and conditions that these animals live in 24x7, not to mention what factory-farms do to the environment, just know, giving up meat isn't that hard. Sure, it will take some time to reestablish your eating and shopping habits, but if this once meat-lover can do it, anyone can!
Its great to be free of meat and all the baggage that goes with eating it.
before long, we will be glad of anything edible that doesn't dissolve cell walls or cause sterility or fetal disfigurement or cancer or brain damage or...
the economic and ecologic factors that contribute to this situation will also change with 'climate' and 'resource depletion'...
local living, local food, raised, or grazed, by the eater...
As a vegetarian (mostly vegan with pragmatic exceptions) who is scientifically minded, I welcome criticism of numerical estimates of environmental impact from farm animals. But I don't plan on becoming a meat eater again just so I can influence the market by trying to find pasture raised products. Even if I was comfortable killing animals for food (I'm not, and I find any comparison to killing plants ridiculous)and even if I thought that eating meat is just as healthy as a good vegan diet (it isn't), I still would need a lot more convincing that it is possible to raise 1/2 of our current meat output with an impact per calorie that isn't substantially higher than my current average. Heck, even if it is possible - just how does the author of this book propose we get to 1/2 the output? Our world population is still predicted to get close to 10 billion before stabilizing, so there is even less to go around. George, you might as well stick with your current diet if you want to save enough meat for people like this author.
Dara
I find that nearly all meat eaters (those who participate in factory farming consumption) always try to find a way to justify the mass slaughter and holocaust that is involved in producing their diets.
I am not against eating animals. I think understanding ecological balances is crucial to our consumption, and actually having respect for the animals that are killed. What I find distasteful is the arrogance with which humans engage in a nazi style slaughter of these beings.
Further, oil is intricately linked to this mass slaughter via production and transportation, a natural resource that will be gone in 50 years, so this "debate" is one of imperial arrogance as well. This won't even be a debate in 50 years. Ecological balance will force it's way upon us. This reality will force food production to be much much closer to consumption. Good luck creating your mass killing fields in this reality.
Finally, Monbiot is a typical liberal nut job. He swings and sways towards power centers, assuring his job security, denouncing people without the slightest understanding of science (this issue, and 911). He is a part of the Must Be Taken Seriously crowd, regardless of the facts.
This article is perfect illustration of the flim flamsy nature of liberals what work for the capitalist media.
For the record, I have personally been responsible for the deaths of 350 chickens-this week along. Yes, I'm a pastured poultry farmer that also ensures her birds are slaughtered humanly by doing it myself. My land isn't suitable for large scale vegetable farming-too sandy and too hilly. But it will raise really good free-range chicken.
I support another small farmer 17 miles down the road by buying his soy beans and corn and Milo for the feed. I help keep the local feed store going by purchasing bedding and fish meal from them. I employ someone from the community and pay them a living wage which directly impacts a poor rural area that doesn't get much attention.
My chickens naturally fertilize my pastures and that, coupled with the fact I only sell my birds within a 50 mile radius ensures I have a minimal fossil fuel imprint.
If I were to only grow vegetables, I would have to drain the aquifer, use ridiculous amounts of fossil fuels, and eradicate the rabbits and gophers and voles and deer that coexist comfortably with the chickens.
I have no problem with vegetarians but I think we're naturally meant to be omnivores. And the one promise I make is that I personally no where every piece of meat I put between my lips was raised and how it was killed.
It's the very least I can do as an omnivore.
Well said, katrine. Thanks.
Excuses, excuses for participating in disgusting, cruel, and unhealthy habits.
"If you eat a leaf of organic lettuce, you are killing a cow". The feed-lot is where we get nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus for organic agriculture. So, if you want to kill less...eat conventional food. BTW, phosphorus is mined. Known reserves will last fifty, or so years. What to do? Cycle nutrients between animals, (us too) and plants.oil in pasture raised animal farms, "Grass-fed beef is the new Sea-run Salmon" .It is cleaner source of fatty 3 omega oils. I have been involved with sustainable agriculture, and energy for for fourtyfive years
"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."
"We"? Is Monbiot a vegan? Really?!
Those against meat farming have long been against industrial raising and butchering of animals.
Monbiot just earned my "Idiot Journalist of the Year" Award.
We harvest plant matter when it is mature and at the end of its life.
We harvest animals when they are teenagers, near the beginning of their lives.
Now try to tell me that these actions are equivalent.
Yup - he used to be my inspiration. By the way, that's clever using the acronym WTF, to stand for World Trade Farms. Sneaky.