Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
rently are underfed, and a substantial contribution towards feeding the two or three billion
extra people expected to be alive on the planet in 40 years time.
Now if you are a privileged white middle class Briton like myself, who has veered away
from the diet of meat and two veg, and even had spells as a vegetarian, then halving the
amount of meat and dairy in one's diet seems quite tolerable, generous even. Although an
enthusiastic carnivore, I can happily subsist on a less than half the average meat and dairy
enjoyed by the residents of Western Europe, in fact within my social circle, that is pretty
standard. The relentless diet of full English breakfast and meat and two veg pursued until
recently in Britain - or the everlasting succession of charcuterie, steaks and fromage that
many Frenchmen traditionally mop up with their baguettes - takes away much of the ex-
citement that can be derived from slicing into a lump of bacon twice a week throughout
the winter, cracking into a cheese you have waited three months to mature, or frying up the
liver from the pig you have just slaughtered.
However, if you spread this 50 per cent equitably across the world's population, you
have to spread it pretty thinly. In 2000, there were 37 kilos of meat and 78 kilos of milk
about 18 kilos of meat per year (350 grams or about three quarter-pound hamburgers a
week) plus 39 kilos of milk (about 1.33 pints of milk, or barely 75 grams of cheese per
week).
That is a very rough estimate of the amount of animal nourishment each of us could de-
rive as an animal byproduct from an otherwise vegan agricultural system. If it seems dis-
proportionately low on milk and cheese, that is because global figures are skewed by the
Chinese and other nations who don't touch milk. Nutritionally five kilos of milk are equal
to about one kilo of meat (or half a kilo of hard cheese and 4.5 kilos of whey to feed pigs).
But milk generally supplies more nutrients per hectare than meat, so I would hazard that
four kilos of milk are the ecological equivalent of a kilo of meat. This would suggest that
the vegetarian in a default livestock world would be entitled to 111 kilos of milk per year
(slightly more than half a pint day); the cheese eater would get 11 kilos of cheese a year
plus the occasional bonus of sausages from the whey.
These are slim pickings for those of us who like our meat and cheese. They will be even
slimmer for our grandchildren if the world's population grows to the predicted nine billion
in 2050. That brings the equitably distributed default ration down to 12 kilos of meat per
year plus 26 kilos of milk.
If you are a meat or cheese lover and this looks like gloom to you, you have forgotten
the premise that we started from: that this is all free. It is
default
meat and dairy, it is the
surplus that we get from growing the grains and vegetables that are necessary to maintain a
given population. So long as a human population can be maintained on this planet through
the cultivation of vegetables, a certain amount of meat will be your birthright. I may have
