After coronavirus (which might be quite a long way away), or at least when the world settles down to a new normal, there are some things that I’d like to be different. So over the next days and weeks I’m going to write them down. They will mostly be to do with our relationship with the natural world (but not exclusively).
If you would like to have a go at writing a guest blog on a thing that you would like to be different then please take notice of these general guidelines for guest blogs and send it to me at [email protected] for consideration. I’ll give priority to offers that relate to the natural environment, and/or to those that are well-written (IMHO).
A move away from meat eating.
I’m nowhere near vegetarian, and even further away from being vegan, but my meat consumption is very low these days. Particularly these days because it’s summer – and I love salads – and because it tends to be when eating out that I am tempted into eating more meat these days.
At home my meat consumption is dominated by wild-shot venison which I regard as an honorary vegetable. The venison that fills our freezer after Christmas is a present and it is shot in Scottish forests with lead-free ammunition. It is shot as a tree protection measure, and most of it is Sika, a non-native deer species. Now, I know that as the copper bullet passed through the flesh of the deer that ends up on my plate it wasn’t like shooting a lettuce, but that deer was shot for reasons other than appearing on my plate, so I’m afraid I’m not going to feel too bad about it. Eating venison is, for me, part of the process of dropping most meat out of my diet so that’s how it works for me.
It’s a pity that my signature dish involves bacon but I don’t get to cook that often (on the grounds of incompetence). When I say signature dish, I mean it; we only have one signature after all. Maybe it’s time to learn to cook something else?
I am definitely not vegetarian, but I seem to be slightly more vegetarian than many vegetarians I know who eat fish almost every time I see them. That’s OK by me, I don’t think that I have a bad record on being tolerant of others’ food choices. But my non-vegetarian diet counts fish as meat.
All in all, I am vegetarian something like five days a week (probably more in summer and less in winter, especially around Christmas). I don’t think this has changed much in the last decade and it may not change that much in the future either.
My flexitarian diet is founded much more on greenhouse gas emissions and land use considerations than animal welfare issues, but as I’ve paid more attention to those issues over the years, they have simply reinforced my position.
I’m not going to tell you what you should do but it feels as though society is moving more and more towards less meat-eating and I approve of that.
There is no doubt that eating less meat would help with climate change and as everyone says that they want us to reduce emissions dramatically then surely government should encourage us to move in that direction – surely? How?
Government food procurement would be a good place to start. I don’t get to have many ghastly sandwich lunches provided by government agencies and departments these days, and they may have improved vastly, but my memory is of tasteless chicken and unidentifiable red meat. A switch to vegetarian food as the default would be perfectly reasonable. Nobody needs to eat meat at a free lunch provided by the State as a health or religious issue (as far as I am aware).
Some leadership from government ministers wouldn’t come amiss too. If the Cabinet all promised to have meat-free Mondays for a year it would be a good signal – and I would await the media exposes of ministers driving 250 miles up north and being photographed eating pepperoni pizza when they have been telling the rest of us what to do.
Restaurants could do a much better job with vegetarian food – rather than risotto, pasta and tomato sauce or omelette a bit of imagination would be good to see.
But the attitude of food producers, especially farmers, and especially the NFU, needs to change. Why British farmers regard themselves as the guardians of the meat-eating tradition I can’t quite fathom. Vegetables and fruit need to be grown too.
There are apparently about 4.5m vegetarians in the UK, c7% of the population. If the 93% of the rest of the population had just one meat-free day a week then (assuming that they/we didn’t ‘make up for it’ in the rest of the week) it would be equivalent to trebling that figure (because in footprint terms, c60m people going 1/7th vegetarian is like adding 8-9m full vegetarians to the existing number).
The least I’d like to see would be social attitudes changing towards reduced meat-eating. They are already, but not really in agriculture or government – the bastions of tradition even when tradition is poor practice.
If COVID-19 deaths were broken down by dietary preference then I wonder what we’d see – quite possible nothing. It would be a big boost for vegetarian eating if there were any evidence of impact… This article sounds slightly like wishful-thinking to me, but there might (or might not be) something in it.
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I would not expect any Leadership from a Tory Government, Mark. It is virtually unheard of I am afraid.. They are totally absorbed by their vested interests and supporting their own supporters, in this case the big farming combines. In other situations it is a significant proportion enjoying shooting birds and animals for fun.. All round the Tories give us a very introspective view of the world and our own society, with the “what’s in it for me” mentality.
I eat less meat than I did, not venison although I would if I knew how to get culled venison as I rather like it. I eat mainly grass fed meat, advertised and sold as such, some of it is our own lamb and pheasant killed as pests in the garden. Sadly I’m not a great salad person, I’ll eat it but am unimaginative when it comes to making it.
I like the idea of fewer cattle and less milk production but I can envisage more and more acres covered in various kinds of polythene.
Indeed Peter its hardly sustainable low input farming is it. Some of course will be salad and tender vegetable crops( Early potatoes and carrots.
Insects are the way forward, for pure protein production anyway, and can feed humans directly
or through animal feed, to reduce impacts on natural sources .
Local tesco has been putting massive discounts on its vegetarian sections, the one part of the store that did not experience any supply line or stockpiling induced shortages. Apparently as soon as the lockdown started, not to mention the pandemic related stress rising, everybody around here pretty much gave up pretending to be vegan or veggie and reverted straight back to traditional meat and fish based comfort foods.
I think Covid has probably killed this iteration of the veggie trend. It comes around every twenty or so years though, so catch the next one then. It was hot in the seventies, then died, and again in the nineties, and now it has been and gone again.
Likewise vegan in Waitrose. Couldn’t give it away
What a silly post. Veganism is far from a short term trend, it had been increasing rapidly in recent years for many very good reasons, read up on it. My local super markets could not keep up with the demand for vegan milks, the shelves were empty. Oat milk is delicious, especially in coffee, and has a tiny fraction of the environmental impact of dairy milk. Look at the rapidly expanding ranges of vegan products. Get with the times, minimise our impact please.
Well I eat very little meat,OH vegetarian but all this about meat is actually a nonsense. Meat from grass is very sustainable and when lockdown came then less vehicle emissions and aircraft emission suddenly we had clean air.Number of cattle stayed the same and I can tell you this about cattle emissions is rubbish.
For many many years I worked with cattle that lived in at night airtight cow sheds and if there was any truth about the cows polluting then when we went on in the morning we would have been met by awful pollution.
That just did not happen. Ironically the preference to avoid pollution seems to be eat non ruminants, really crazy as poultry and pigs have to live almost exclusively on cereals that are suitable for humans.
These scientists often get everyone believing rubbish.
Most meat doesn’t come from grass fed animals though and cattle don’t emit exhaust particulates. Cattle aren’t kept in ‘airtight’ sheds anywhere. Stop spouting nonsense and pretending you know better than the science which has a massive proven evidence base behind it.
Dave, well it looks as if scientists have got the deaths of 50,000 and counting on their conscience whereas many country’s have numbers much lower.
You do not know what you are on about.
Cattle were kept in airtight sheds for at least a century and those of us looking after them came to no harm.
I’m delighted you’ve put this down as a target.
Your musing over the links with COVID-19 is interesting. However, I’d prefer to look at the links with the meat industry and the risks to human health.
For starters – how about looking at the link between the meat industry with diseases like COVID-19! Infections like this – passed from animals to humans – “are most often viral (less often bacterial) and occur either through direct contact with a sick animal or through consumption of its meat. Out of approximately 1400 pathogens known to modern medicine, more than 800 (~60%) originate from animals²… In addition to COVID-19, these dangerous diseases caused by zoonotic viruses include avian and porcine influenza (commonly known as bird and swine flu), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and various types of haemorrhagic fever, including Ebola⁴.” *Wlodzimierz Gogloza, Medium
Next – what about the widespread use of antibiotics in factory farming? This practice is considered to be one of the greatest threats to public health in the world as antibiotic resistance increases. Infections caused by microorganisms resistant to antimicrobial mediations cause around 50,000 deaths per year in Europe and the US alone and it is anticipated that this will grow to as many as 300,000 million worldwide by 2050 if the situation does not change. Surely this is an absolute outrage!
Next – how about the impacts of the routine use of growth hormones in factory farmed animals and birds on the human consumers?
Next – what are the mental impacts on the people who kill these poor animals by stunning and slashing their throats or shooting bolts into their heads or putting them straight into shredders or gassing them or shooting them for fun, or trapping or snaring them or poisoning them. These disgusting actions must have terrible psychological impacts on the perpetrators.
It’s time to transition to a more humane, safe, environmentally responsible farming system. Go veggie or vegan!
What creatures do you think roamed this planet in their millions, until we decided it was better to grill them between two slices of bread with some ketchup on?
They’re the foundation for every rewilding theory going, and it works, as for deer are they the grim-reaper for saplings. …Nope!
We have plenty of both in every field, hedgerow, copse and wood, the difference – we don’t have any commercial value for trees, they are just a small part of the whole ecological structure, just as the deer are too.
Thomas – you keep dropping hints about your great things you are doing without coming clean on where youa re or what you are actually doing. It’s not very convincing as a claimed expertise. I’m wondering whether you are a character who has escaped from Ambridge.
Provision of meat-free sarnies at lunchbreaks would increase the risk of copping a dose of norovirus from sandwiches contaminated when people were picking them over trying to find something worth eating and also from increased food waste because they just left them and thereby perversely foiled the Gubmint’s food waste reduction targets and anyway they cunningly start early and finish before one o’clock so there isn’t a lunchbreak or food waste at all at all and since I don’t patronise the Salmonella franchises at Waterloo anymore the only calories I get all day are from Electric Soup on the train which is why Mrs C has to meet me at Grately and if I get on the one that doesn’t stop at Grately I’m in deep deep Doody
I’d rather eat organic than go vegetarian or vegan.