It’s now almost two years since I stopped eating meat, and even now when people ask me why I sometimes find it difficult to answer. Not because I just don’t know, but because there are so many reasons and which one is bothering me most at the time changes regularly, and there seem to be more and more reasons all the time. It seems too complicated to give a simple answer, so rather than starting an hour long lecture/debate with whoever is asking making them wish they never spoke to me in the first place, I thought I might write this so I can just direct them to it. You can ask any questions at the end.

When I first stopped eating meat it was mostly for health and because of problems with intensive farming. Everyone will probably now have seen something about the terrible way many animals are kept. Chickens seem to be on the TV all the time now. And if you care to look the internet is full of information about the ways our animals for food are kept which some viewers might find disturbing.

There are so many problems, and this post would be more like a book if I went through them all properly now, so instead here are a few of the problems and some links. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll go through a few issues and witter on about what I think about them specifically in more detail.

I didn’t really like meat that much anyway.

This is an easy one. If we had a roast dinner, my favorite bits would always be the vegetables. Although there are a few seafood things I miss and I used to enjoy trying new different types of meat at restaurants, or for special meals, I generally wasn’t that fussed. Faced with a growing concern for all the nasty things people were doing so I could eat meat, I thought it would be best if I just stopped.

Chickens (Widespread accepted animal abuse, for your lunch. Lovely)

http://www.vegsoc.org/info/broiler.html

“Each bird has an area of around 0.05m², similar in size to an A4 sheet of paper. As the birds grow, conditions deteriorate and the sheds become increasingly crowded until the shed floor becomes a solid mass of chickens competing to reach food and water. The birds’ natural behaviour to perch, walk, run and fly are obviously frustrated in the shed environment.

Standard intensively farmed broiler chickens are reared to their slaughter weight of around 1.8 to 3 kg within just 6 weeks of being hatched (chickens are normally fully grown by 5-6 months). By selective breeding, the length of time broiler chicks take to grow to 2 kg has been halved in the last 30 years. As broilers are bred to grow as fast as possible this has lead to them becoming more inactive. Their frame cannot support their own weight and this affects the way they walk and puts additional stresses on their hips and legs. At just 6 weeks old, they spend 76%-86% of their time lying down. Birds severely crippled and deformed die of starvation and thirst, unable to reach food or water. Other birds may only be able to move by using their wings to balance”

Most chickens in UK are kept in this way, I mean you can’t really expect them to be wandering around in a nice field in the sunshine pecking away at grubs and seeds for at least 6 months like they would naturally take to reach full size, if you want to pay £2.50 for a whole bird. Not only is this bad for the chicken, but it’s bad for you too. They are fed on an unnatural high energy diet, which unsurprisingly means their meat is not made up the way it would naturally be, contains an imbalance of fats, and is probably another one of the reasons why we have such high rates of diet related diseases. Maybe even more importantly than the damage to individuals health is the problem that the food that feeds the chickens is increasingly soy, which is itself farmed intensively. Huge areas of rainforest are being destroyed to meet demand, with serious environmental implications.

Cows (are meant to eat grass, not corn. And rainforests should grow trees, not corn)

I recently started reading another of Michael Pollan’s books, “The Omnivores Dilemma” , you can read an except from it here. I’m only part way through, but so far it’s mentioned some pretty interesting stuff I’d not thought about relating to cattle farming. He talks about how cows are now almost exclusively fed on corn based diets. This is not their natural food and they can only survive on it for so long before they start developing problems, so they are pumped full of various drugs and bred to combat this.  Again this means the cows lead an unnatural unhealthy and short life and their meat contains an imbalance of fats which means we probably do too. Again there is the problem of where all this corn is coming from.  Even when rainforests are not being destroyed it is probably not the best idea to convert huge areas of your land to mass mono-cultures. This destroys bio-diversity and makes crops susceptible to disease which means more pesticides and more chemicals indirectly in your diet.

To create 1kg of meat it takes 16kg of grain. If we ate the grain or soy or whatever rather than feeding it to the animals we wouldn’t need to destroy as much of the world to produce the amount of food we need. Economic factors seem for some bizarre reason to effect peoples behaviour more than environmental issues,  and if we don’t all kill ourselves by killing the planet first, this misuse of resources will start to effect people more and more as population increases and the price of oil, which all food production relies on, goes up or if oil *shock horror* runs out and we will no longer be able to ignore the real source of our meat.

Dairy products (Eek!)

I’m not vegan. I eat eggs, milk and cheese, in fact I love cheese, it’s one of my favorite things. Also I eat it knowing it is probably not vegetarian and infact contains rennet, which is definitely not vegetarian. Sometimes I think this is a sign that I’m not really all that committed the everything I’ve been saying. Maybe it does. But any kind of reduction is better than none. Do what you can and be aware of what you are doing, but there is no point having a terrible life. Ultimately we should all kill ourselves if we wanted to stop harming the planet and it’s animals and I don’t want to do that. It’s not good to focus in on the negative details of something positive you or other people are doing. It might make you give the whole thing up as a pointless effort if you’re not quite perfect, which is just not true. However one thing I do need to make more effort on is making sure the things I eat are organic (which sets much higher welfare standards as well as stopping the animals being pumped full of drugs) or at least free range. Eggs get snuck into loads of things and you can pretty much guarantee they are from caged hens. Cakes. I always forget when I am buying cakes, you get distracted by the cream. Which probably came from a cow which got lame and developed mastitis (infected, swollen, painful udders) to produce the milk for my cream cake. Lovely.

http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2007/06/dairy-farming/
http://www.milkmyths.org.uk/report/sufferingsilence.php
http://www.cvmbs.colostate.edu/ilm/proinfo/necropsy/notes/udderlesions.htm

Fish (Vegetarians do not eat fish)

Nuff said really. But this has to be the most commonly asked ridiculous question. “Oh you’re a vegetarian… Do you eat fish?” No.

http://www.vegsoc.org/fish/

Erm, maybe I’ll start eating meat again.

I recently had a short stay Wwoofing on a smallholding in Cornwall called Plan-it Earth. Originally I had thought I wouldn’t go anywhere that kept animals for food, but this was an environmental project and sounded really interesting, so I thought I’d see what they were doing.

They kept a small number of animals for their own use and were also able to get well reared meat from friends in the local area. All the animals were well kept, out doors, had lots of space and varied diets.  They killed them and prepared them themselves, which they admitted was always a difficult upsetting process. But rather than a mindless over consumption of cheap meat in every meal as many people tend to eat, this meant they and their children had a great respect for the animals. They would have meat maybe a couple of times a week, used every part and generally had a more real relationship with their food and the animal it came from.

This made a lot more sense to me and made me realise that maybe it wasn’t just eating animals in itself that I had a problem with in some kind of karmic reasons, but that mainly it is because of environmental and animal welfare issues which in the current system makes eating meat unethical, and that it is possible to farm animals for food in an acceptable way. Perhaps in the future you will see me gnawing on pork chops again. I was certainly tempted like never before when I could see the pigs in the field outside. Actually that just made me feel a bit odd. Maybe I’m not ready yet, but you know.