Meat is the matter

As if recycling, using public transport, not burning tyres, spraying aerosols or slapping polar bears wasn't enough, now the so-called “experts” are telling us to put down that steak and pick up a carrot if we want to stand any chance of saving the planet (well, not the planet so much as humankind's increasingly precarious place atop it...)

The scientific consensus, based on such ridiculous notions as facts, statistics, and errr, science, as opposed to belligerence, bile and bottom lines is that our global consumption habits are at present(big surprise...) completely, epically unsustainable.“It's bollocks though isn't it? It's just a bit of drive-thru chicken and a Big Mac. Would they prefer it if we were still scrabbling round in the weeds for nuts and berries, getting trampled by wooly mammoths? It's bad enough we have to pick our own cotton and can't slap Margaret on the arse next to the photocopier any more (how is that not a compliment??) - now the fun-police are telling us what we can't eat!??!”

Of course you don't have to listen to the “experts” (Or this mostly veggie loudmouth). The proof's in the black pudding. Climate change, which if anyone is still in any doubt about - as the latest tornado whisks the tinfoil hat off their bonce - is REAL and it's being massively exacerbated by the meat industry, with a third of planet-heating gases a direct result of animal farming. Even ignoring some pretty compelling arguments about cruelty, animal sentience etc, meat production is just bad maths.Once you've flattened another acre of rainforest (every six seconds) for cattle farming, it requires approx 15,000 litres of water input into the system to output just one kilogram of beef (saying nothing of the monumental infrastructure and carbon footprint created to enable the system) In fairness, that's only 1700 litres of water (15 full bathtubs) towards that quarter pounder. Chicken at least is more efficient than beef, requiring only nine calories input for every one calorie output.That's a poor rate of return. Incidentally, these aren't numbers dreamed up by conspiracy theorists, it's data coming out of the meat industry.

“Yeah, well if climate change is real...”

IT'S REAL

“...and sea levels are rising, then surely it's a good thing to use up lots of water? Get out of that one.”

Sit down before you hurt yourself.

Another problem is that animals piss. Animals shit. Animals fart and burp (Cows and other farmed animals produce around 40% of the methane currently overheating the globe). When you crowd them together by the thousands (and tens of thousands...), it necessitates a lot of animal waste pumped into the waterways and mechanically sprayed (Google it) onto adjoining land. Of course, it's not just animal waste, it's animal waste containing trace antibiotics, topical antiseptics, bactericides, fungicides and many other medical interventions needed to keep masses of beasts crammed together in their own filth from not festering toooo much. Mmmmmm, that quarter pounder...

In fact, 80% of the world's antibiotics are consumed within the meat industry - Not by the spotty trainees at Mc Donalds who give each other tonsillitis – but to promote “healthy” animal growth. The risk is by over-medicating livestock to avoid millions of customers biting into weeping sores and the like, we're instead incubating resistance to antibiotics in superbugs which can further spread their antibiotic immunity to other bacteria, passing from animals to humans. Since we put such stock in the use of antibiotics (with professionals only relatively recently beginning to curb their over-application), microbial resistance is a genuine threat to, well, no less than modern medicine!! (Google it if you're feeling brave) It's a threat large sectors of the meat industry are all but ignoring.

We are of course crawling through a pandemic at this moment which itself originated in the animal markets of China and terrifyingly, experts agree is likely a mere dress rehearsal for the next big pandemic as the spiralling global population's unsustainable demand for meat creates breeding grounds for pathogens. 75% of emerging diseases are zoonotic, meaning they originate in animals. Ebola, SARS, MERS, and Zika all pre-empted our latest battle with bacteria with devastating effects and when the statistics suggest the global population will demand a doubling of meat production by the year 2050 (FAO), the whole picture looks grimmer than aWimpy'sat a service station.

Plant-based alternatives to meat with lower carbon footprints have grown in popularity and quality, but are still outpaced by growing global demand for real dead animal. “Cultivated/lab-grown” meat is a potential future game-changer, though its struggle remains uphill. On a cellular level, it IS meat. Clean, pesticide, disease and antibiotic-free meat cultured under rigorous lab conditions which never saw it wallow in faeces or shrink in fear from a bloody-aproned abattoir worker with a bolt-gun. Meat, without the blood, shit and suffering – it's simply gonna be too weird for a lot of people, no doubt inciting the sort of frothing rage and paranoia the vaccines to our latest zoonotic plague have. There's gonna be some serious face-palming.

But then the shaming and polarisation of our culture wars will ultimately harm us all. Virtue-signalling and weaponising of labels like “Vegan” or “Vegetarian” just gives others something to push back on with intransigence at a time where a coordinated effort and reevaluation of what's healthy or sustainable is desperately needed. The bullying actions of some militant vegan protestors in my hometown of Brighton a couple of years back had many of my plant-based mates wanting to chuck dogs at them. Perhaps one day we'll fully reckon with the vastness of the slaughter we perpetuate behind closed gates for the food on our tables but right now just taking a little accountability for the reality of its unsustainability is a start. Any individual's intentional reduction in meat consumption should be applauded, not negated from someone else's moral high-ground as not enough. Someone who decides to eat meat two days of the week instead of four is benefitting the environment just as much as a twice-a-weeker who goes full veggie... they just don't get that particular hummus-stained T-shirt