Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
it is peer-reviewed or not is not my main criterion. The farms and nomadic herds I view
through the window of other people's accounts. The only time I get my hands dirty is when
I try to sift out the bullshit.
This is not an easy matter. Livestock farming is a subject, I have discovered, where every
answer uncovers two questions, and every statistic cloaks an ideological assumption. Shel-
ley was perhaps right in 1813, but today the extravagance of livestock farming is no longer
'incapable of calculation'. It can be calculated, though with difficulty. Substantial sections
of this topic are an attempt to pick a path through a crop of statistics that stretches in all dir-
ections as far as the mind's eye can see, and which I have done my best to render palatable
to those who find a proliferation of percentages and decimal points indigestible.
The response to the problems addressed in this topic, Roberts and Monbiot both claim, is
'plain': stop eating meat. But the role that animals and meat play in the ecology of human
food production is too complex to allow for any instant ideological solution. The vegan
answer is not plain, it is simplistic. My purpose in writing this topic is not to expose the
inadequacy of the vegan case, since only a minority are convinced by it anyway, but to hold
it up as template, a clean sheet, against which the impacts and ambiguities of our role at the
top of the food chain can better be studied.
This topic is therefore both a critique of veganism and a tribute to vegans and vegetarians
from Shelley onwards who deserve credit for initiating and widening the debate and per-
suading us to look at animals in different ways. They have radically influenced people's
diets, and demonstrated that people can live happily without meat products; and they are
starting to demonstrate that people can farm successfully without animals. Above all they
have shown that meat-eating is dispensable, and that is a handy thing to know. However the
fact that something is dispensable does not necessarily mean that we have to dispense with
it. As I suggest in Chapter 10, the dispensability of meat is, paradoxically, a good reason
for carrying on eating it.
This is not to say that I am impartial or have no ideological position. For six years in
my early adulthood I was vegetarian, but I was faced with its inconsistency when I started
keeping goats. What was to be done with the male kids? Being poor, I chose to eat them,
and became a born-again carnivore (the worst kind). Now I favour the consumption of a
modest amount of meat and dairy foods (not much more than what the FAO calls 'default'
livestock production). I like keeping livestock and I support small farmers and peasants
in their struggle against agribusiness. It would be foolish to pretend that these preferences
haven't influenced my choice of subject matter or coloured my own interpretation of the
statistics. I feel instinctively that the world would be much the poorer without domestic
livestock and I want to work out why.
There are a number of other matters relating to animals which I have tried to steer clear
of. I am not overly concerned with questions of dietary health, nor do I take any interest in
the diet and dentition of our remote ancestors. I do have views about the ethics of killing
