Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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'The monopolising eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by eating an acre at a meal …'
Percy Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet
T
he primary environmental objection to meat-eating has always been that it is ineffi-
cient: in other words, it uses disproportionate amounts of the world's land and resources.
Since 2006, this matter has become somewhat eclipsed by concern about carbon emissions
from animal production causing global warming. However, livestock are responsible for a
relatively small proportion of total greenhouse gas emissions, whereas they occupy well
over half of our agricultural land. This chapter, and the following four, are about the land
requirements of livestock.
It takes anything from three to twenty kilos of vegetable nutrients fed into an animal to
produce one kilo of nutrients in the form of meat. This, it is argued, is both unsustainable
and unjust in a world of six billion people, moving towards nine billion, where many people
already go hungry. There is not enough land to feed all the world's population to the stand-
ard enjoyed by the carnivorous industrial countries, and so the meat industry is a way of
diverting food from poor people to rich. A shift to a vegan diet would release large amounts
of protein and food resources.
All of this is substantially correct, and it is a charge which every meat eater should
consider. However it is a charge which could be levelled against a good many vegetable
products. The production of strawberries, baby sweetcorn, and asparagus, not to mention
coffee, tea, wine and chocolate, may be just as nutritionally inefficient, probably more so -
and, as third world development agencies have often testified, industries of this kind often
take land away from the poor which could otherwise be used for growing staples. All luxur-
ies are, by definition, extravagant. There is a suspicion here that some who single out meat
for environmental stricture on this account do so to add weight to previously held moral ob-
jections to killing animals.
Nonetheless, meat can be distinguished from other luxuries in a number of ways. Firstly
it is, potentially, a staple food, providing protein, fat, vitamins and carbohydrates. You can
