SEDENTARY PIGS, NOMADIC COWS, URBAN CHICKENS - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 11

grain in order to meet demand. India has outstripped the USA as the world's largest produ-
cer of dairy products, a feat that has been achieved without a massive increase in feed-grain
input. Where developing countries, such as Argentina, Botswana or Brazil, have developed
beef industries, they have been based on grazing, rather than on grain. The USA's excess-
ively grain and hormone fed beef is not the norm, but an aberration, reflected in the fact
that both Canada and the EU refuse to buy it.
The 6,000 year long movement of cowboy culture westward has not yet come to an end.
Its last frontier is in the Amazon where it is probably wreaking more havoc than anywhere
previously. But it is 'atypical' and hopefully soon on the wane. The world's livestock con-
sumption is currently broadly split into four quarters: beef, dairy, pork and poultry. Beef
is declining in popularity, while pork, and more especially poultry, are on the ascendant.
'Ruminant production' the FAO remarks, 'both meat and milk, tends to be much more
rural-based,' because 'ruminants' higher daily fibre requirements entail bulk movement of
fodder.' 14 As human civilization urbanizes, and more people are crammed into larger and
denser concentrations, so our livestock become urbanized, and they too are crammed into
larger and denser concentrations. The pastoral steer and the rural cow yield to the agrarian
and proto-urban pig, which in turn is now yielding to the megapolitan broiler hen.
Nonetheless the rivalry between ruminants and monogastrics is far from exhausted.
The 'white revolution', which has quadrupled milk production in India and made her the
world's largest dairy producer, vies for importance with China's booming pork and poultry
industry. In overdeveloped countries, battle lines are hardening between those who advoc-
ate 'grass farming' as the most ecological and humane approach to animal husbandry, and
those who hold that the world's appetite for meat can only be met by feeding grain to pigs
and chickens in 'confined animal feeding operations'. This is a separate conflict from the
ethical dispute between carnivores and vegans. Yet beyond factory-farmed chicken lie spe-
cies of lab-cultured meat that the writers of Leviticus never even dreamed of, and that is
where the interests of agribusiness and of vegans may one day converge.
1 Ponting, Clive (1991), Green History of the World, Sinclair-Stevenson; Harris, Marvin (1977), Cannibals and Kings,
Random House, p 34.
2 Watson, Lyall (2004), The Whole Hog , Profile Books, p 125.
3 Spencer, Colin (1993), The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism , Fourth Estate. No support is given for this
assertion.
4 Harris, Marvin (1986), Good To Eat , Allen and Unwin, pp 47-66.
5 Watson, op cit . 2, p 186.
6 Rifkin, Jeremy (1992), Beyond Beef , Dutton, p 41.
7 Watson, op cit . 2, p 140.
8 Ibid , p 143.
9 Cited in Adams, C (2000), The Sexual Politics of Meat , Continuum Publishing, p 169.