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There are a great many reasons why a person might elect to be vegan or vegetarian, Debbie, and many of them are rational, sound, and objective. But by the same token there a many reasons why a person could elect to be an omnivore and include meat in the diet, and many of these reasons are sound, rational, and objective. What I can tell you is that the human is a species that evolved from apes or primate species. The evolution of the human followed a particular trajectory and that trajectory owes a lot to process of moving up the food chain and not regressing back down it. It is quite natural and adaptive for a human to include meat in the diet. Neither saturated fat nor cholesterol have any significant bearing upon heart disease, despite the deeply embedded lie to the contrary. The eating of meat is not a sin.

It is sinful, though, that along the way of bringing meat to the consumer the people involved in, or associating with, the food supply chain cannot be trusted to retain all the integrity of that which is natural, healthful, and adaptive.

Money, strictly speaking I mean fiat currency, has a big bearing upon the matter.

Money is a strange entity. To contemplate how strange we'd have to envisage a 'total global balance sheet' (TGBS).

The TGBS would be a balance sheet like any other. It would list all the assets and summarise their value. It would likewise do the same for all liabilities. Whereas a balance sheet normally does this for a trader or trading enterprise the TGBS would do it for the entire global economy. A result you might not have been able to predict is that the TGBS would balance; that's to say the sum of all the wealth in world (assets) would equate to the total sum of indebtedness (liabilities). Fiat currency is strange for creating a highly asymmetrical distribution of wealth and indebtedness. This asymmetry is tenable just so long as the constant supply of new money needed to add additional value to the 'assets' on the TGBS can be sustained in keeping with expectations and demand.

But the asymmetry becomes decreasingly tenable if the supply falls back to levels that sit below 'need'. Under this situation income ratios escalate. In real terms, and on occasions in absolute terms, the wages of the low-paid must fall, because profits are harder to find when the stream of money supply declines, so people in enterprise look to reducing costs, and labour is seen as cost of production. Hence at some point in the longer economic cycle large swathes of people with incomes below the median find their money does not go so far as it did. High income ratios between the well paid and the low paid are signs of an economy labouring under 'duress' and it creates the need for cheap food.

Cheap food is a delusion. Cheap food is a delusion because over emphasising the need to suppress costs, and over-emphasising the importance and 'value' in 'value', each compromises the the integrity and quality of the food that lands upon peoples plates. People will buy margarine, for instance, on the basis of value and not know a surfeit of polyunsaturated fats in the diet could greatly agonise (raise) the prospects of cancer later in life.

The horse-meat scandal is a crisis, and it is one in a long string of crises, that are evidence of a food provision chain that has lost functional integrity under financial duress. The multiples are putting people in all the links of the food provision chain under excruciating constraints and it is these constraints that entice the kind of fraudulent and criminal 'ask no questions' behaviour that has delivered these problems.

Contrary to what you may have heard, 'money' is the root of all possibilities. But fiat currency is a particular kind of money that is the root of many an unfortunate compromise.

The really dispiriting thing in this in that we have the power to intervene in outcomes for the outcomes are man-made and result from an instrument that is man-made. If we saw fit to make less use of the problematical instrument and looked to alternatives that could constitute 'companion currencies' that we could use in conjunction with fiat currencies we could provide pathways out of the levels of duress we find ourselves in.

The last time asymmetry resulted in this level of duress was in the 1930s. So if you are curious to want know what future events could lie along the present trajectory you need only look to history.

The great difficulty we face is that the Government levies taxes - for all the complications of tax-law we can only pay our taxes in one way and via recourse to fiat currency. This policy of collecting taxes in fiat currency, and only in fiat currency, locks humanity into a predetermined pathway which results in periodic duress where the necessaries of life become decreasingly affordable.

Few people escape the influence of fiat currency; we all of us dance to the tune of the piper. He who pays the piper calls the tune, they say, and the piper is paid in fiat currency. Jesus wasn't mucking about when he evicted the money lenders from the temple for usury compromises peoples ability to access the true currencies, energy and nutrients, that sustain us.