Meat: A Benign Extravagance

"It really explained to me the benefits of meat-eating, particularly in the UK as part of a mixed farm. The personal history of Simon Fairlie is quite interesting. He lived in these very progressive communes in Somerset and was milking the cows and slaughtering the pigs, but most of the people were vegetarian or vegan so instead of drinking the milk and eating the meat they were importing almond milk or soya margarine. He was frustrated that these homegrown products were being wasted while more energy was going into importing products. So that’s what motivated him to write the book. He wanted to show the true impact of eating meat if you take local factors into account. He questions the statistics on how much emissions livestock produce. For instance it’s often said that cattle in particular can produce up to 50% of carbon emissions. But Fairlie points out that this is if you’re grazing cattle where there used to be Amazon rainforest. Similarly if you’re grazing cattle in California or Arizona where there’s no water, it’s going to require a lot of water. But if you’re grazing cattle in Somerset where all that grows is grass then that can be an environmentally good thing and it can even store carbon. I think it’s a really important voice to balance out the argument on the effect meat-eating has on the environment. “I can’t think of many other issues that we discuss publicly where the first question is ‘what do you eat?” Fairlie has a great word for animals raised without damaging the environment, he calls it ‘default livestock’. He argues that if meat is raised from animals that are being grazed on land that could be used for nothing else—or on waste, so pigs, or because you need the leather or, I guess, medical products or other things—then that is part of a process and that’s a good thing to do for the environment. It’s quite refreshing, isn’t it, to see that Fairlie influenced environmentalists, that the argument all doesn’t have to go towards veganism, and it’s really interesting to see people like George Monbiot go back and forth [on the issue]. I can’t think of many other issues that we discuss publicly where the first question is ‘what do you eat?’ Yeah. When I go to people with my book, saying ‘perhaps let’s eat less meat,’ some people ask ‘why do I have carnivorous teeth then?’ Others say ‘you weren’t hard enough—when you talk about jobs in the countryside or maintaining the landscape, it’s just an excuse for torturing animals.’ So everyone’s got a really strong view. I think it’s the most natural thing—food is so emotionally loaded—and, at the moment, our culture seems obsessed with food and how we eat. I guess it’s because we’ve got so much food, as well as the time to consider how we eat it. So perhaps our questioning of meat is a result of that [renewed interest], but I don’t think we can deny that it’s emotional, too. If you deny that it’s emotional, you just end up sneaking off and closing the door and stuffing yourself with something bad because you are ashamed. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. What’s so interesting about all these books, particularly Simon Fairlie’s, is he goes into the history and this is nothing new. [Percy Bysshe] Shelley was a vegetarian for a time because he believed in a better future where no one needed meat, or clothes, or marriage, or religion, and many of the Greek philosophers were vegetarian. But I think now with food and veganism in particular, because people feel so powerless, and because the state of the environment is so frightening, especially with climate change, it is a simple thing you can do to help minimise your impact on the planet. I wouldn’t take that away from people, but for me it’s simplistic: I would like to explore a more inclusive theory, a way of maybe bringing it into the mainstream. It’s happening already. “In the past a rich person would have been a glutton, but now a rich person would probably be a vegan with a personal chef” It’s not an extreme thing anymore to eat a certain proportion of vegan food—especially with all these chefs like Deliciously Ella, promoting plant based food. It’s aspirational. In the past a rich person would have been a glutton, but now a rich person would probably be a vegan with a personal chef. Yes, I guess there’s an element of that, but I wouldn’t want to patronise people who feel so strongly about eating animals that they would argue that if they had no choice, they wouldn’t do it. I think it’s dangerous to say that you have to be privileged to worry about these things. If you say that it’s just a middle-class worry, you shut down any conversation and the corporations peddling bad food get away with it. A lot of people who don’t have much money care about food and where it’s from and they shouldn’t be palmed off with ‘oh, it’s cheap, you don’t care about it’, when they do. A lot of nutritionists and chefs who are better versed than me, people like Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jack Monroe, would say you can cook on a budget using ethical products. And it’s not just meat that we’re concerned about—it’s all sorts of things, like clothes. I guess it’s a bit of a twenty-first century thing to be worrying about where all the stuff we consume comes from."