Livestock farming does not necessarily entail the cruelty that Safran Foer suggests, says Joanna Blythman
If the environmental movement wants to be taken seriously by farmers and consumers, it must stop uncritically trotting out its anti-meat, dairy and egg party line and urgently refine its arguments.
At the moment, American voices like that of Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, shape the debate. His attack is crude and generic.
Using the worst-case scenarios of the US's industrial hog "farms" and feedlots, he argues that all livestock foods entail a greater or lesser degree of animal cruelty and court an ecological apocalypse. It doesn't matter if meat, dairy and eggs are free-range, grass-fed, or organic, these are just lesser forms of the same broad-brush evil.
This approach is simplistic and lazy. There is no acknowledgement that UK and European farming is generally smaller-scale and more extensive. Yes, we do have large intensive factory farms and misguided voices are pushing for even larger ones, but we also have many smaller, more traditional, broadly progressive farms. To lump them in with industrial megafarms is unfair, what's more, it's reactionary in effect because it polarises debate when we need productive dialogue. The discussion should not be whether we eat animal products at all, but what sort we eat, and in what quantity.
Although those evangelising the anti-meat and dairy gospel talk a language of localism, they write a universal prescription for global woes. So because Americans eat grotesque amounts of meat, whole populations elsewhere must become vegan to correct the global imbalance. Using this logic, inhabitants of the lush, green Swiss Alps would be told that dairy is environmentally destructive and urged to switch to imported lentils, while the milk and meat-consuming Maasai pastoralists on arid East African land would be exhorted to live on lettuce.
In the UK, the promise of a sustainable and sustaining diet based exclusively on plant food is cloud cuckoo land stuff. Our land is well-suited to livestock production; vegetables and fruit are never going to be our strongest hand. Moreover, many Britons could benefit nutritionally from eating more, not less, meat, dairy and eggs.
Generic attacks on animal foods simply drive consumption of obesity-fuelling cheap carbs and sugary processed products. No wonder rickets is making a comeback. Would-be environmentalists need to re-write their scripts accordingly.
Joanna Blythman is a food journalist and author of Bad Food Britain.
If the environmental movement wants to be taken seriously by farmers and consumers, it must stop uncritically trotting out its anti-meat, dairy and egg party line and urgently refine its arguments.
At the moment, American voices like that of Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, shape the debate. His attack is crude and generic.
Using the worst-case scenarios of the US's industrial hog "farms" and feedlots, he argues that all livestock foods entail a greater or lesser degree of animal cruelty and court an ecological apocalypse. It doesn't matter if meat, dairy and eggs are free-range, grass-fed, or organic, these are just lesser forms of the same broad-brush evil.
This approach is simplistic and lazy. There is no acknowledgement that UK and European farming is generally smaller-scale and more extensive. Yes, we do have large intensive factory farms and misguided voices are pushing for even larger ones, but we also have many smaller, more traditional, broadly progressive farms. To lump them in with industrial megafarms is unfair, what's more, it's reactionary in effect because it polarises debate when we need productive dialogue. The discussion should not be whether we eat animal products at all, but what sort we eat, and in what quantity.
Although those evangelising the anti-meat and dairy gospel talk a language of localism, they write a universal prescription for global woes. So because Americans eat grotesque amounts of meat, whole populations elsewhere must become vegan to correct the global imbalance. Using this logic, inhabitants of the lush, green Swiss Alps would be told that dairy is environmentally destructive and urged to switch to imported lentils, while the milk and meat-consuming Maasai pastoralists on arid East African land would be exhorted to live on lettuce.
In the UK, the promise of a sustainable and sustaining diet based exclusively on plant food is cloud cuckoo land stuff. Our land is well-suited to livestock production; vegetables and fruit are never going to be our strongest hand. Moreover, many Britons could benefit nutritionally from eating more, not less, meat, dairy and eggs.
Generic attacks on animal foods simply drive consumption of obesity-fuelling cheap carbs and sugary processed products. No wonder rickets is making a comeback. Would-be environmentalists need to re-write their scripts accordingly.
Joanna Blythman is a food journalist and author of Bad Food Britain.
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