James McWilliams Asks Us to Dream of Vegan Utopias, Not Pastured Meat Utopias

Time to dissect another James McWilliams piece. Like the rest of McWilliams’ repertoire, this one is about how McWilliams doesn’t like any kind of animal product consumption whatsoever.

In “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” he writes:

“Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows.”

Okay, now that’s a fair start. Some research suggests that the opposite is true, but most research currently supports McWilliams, I think. What McWilliams doesn’t mention is that grass-fed cows are less carbon- and nitrogen-intensive than grain-fed because growing that grain releases greenhouse gases, even if the cows don’t release as much during digestion. And pasture – unlike feedlots – can serve as a carbon sink.

As for methane, scientists are working on ways to reduce the methane that cows and other ruminants release. For instance, feeding ruminants flax, oregano oil, cashew shell oil and high-sugar rye grasses, or changing cows’ intestinal bacteria could all help reduce animal methane emissions.

And hey, if methane is the problem and methane-emitting animals are the villains, why isn’t McWilliams declaring open season on all methane-emitting wild animals? We should be hunting those methane-emitting menaces to extinction.  

McWilliams continues:

“Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming.”

This statistic could also be correct, but organic and pastured aren’t inextricably linked. Makenna Goodman wrote an article arguing that the disadvantages of organic pastured chickens make non-organic pastured chickens a better option for humans and chickens.

Could McWilliams’ statistic apply to pastured non-organic chicken? It’s hard to say without knowing where he got it.

McWilliams persists:

It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs).

If that’s true, then the US wouldn’t raise so many cows. As grass-fed cows gobbled up more and more real estate, land and meat costs would become prohibitively expensive and would put a stop to cows’ manifest destiny schemes.

Enough commenters posted similar points on McWilliams’ article that he tried to refute them on his blog Eatingplantsdotorg.wordpress.com (one of the weirdest URLs I’ve ever seen). There he writes:

The premise that higher priced meat would lead to reduced consumption is, as far as it goes, accurate. In fact, that’s the only way we’re going to achieve sustained reduced consumption–make animal products radically more expensive. The problem, however, is that no matter how many boutique operations emerge, we’re never going to see the price of animal products collectively rise to the point that it mitigates consumption.

The reason is skyrocketing global demand. Normally, increased demand would lead to increased price–and that may happen, but nowhere near to the extent that it would reduce consumption. Here’s why: this demand virtually dictates that no matter how many expensive options arise, industrial operations, by virtue of their efficiency, will always dominate as the leading form of production–a form of production geared to lower the price of animal products.

This is pure equivocation. Commenters on his article said that if the US switched over to grass-fed-cows only, as in McWilliams’ hypothetical, cows wouldn’t overrun the country (despite taking up more land) because they would be too expensive and so people would eat less cow. To address this, McWilliams substitutes a new hypothetical in which intensively raised cattle are now part of the equation. Sure, that’s more a plausible future, but proposing a new hypothetical doesn’t address whether or not his original hypothetical made sense.

Later in the Eatingplantsdotorg.wordpress.com entry, he says:

I’ll concede that to argue that small scale animal farming would “work” if we all just ate less meat makes sense in theory. But the reality–the entrenched nature and growing demand for affordable animal products globally–suggests that we’d be better off fighting to end the production of animals altogether.

If the world is too selfish, thoughtless and greedy to go for grass-fed cows and eating less meat, how are you going to convince the world to go vegan? Pasture-raised animals wouldn’t satisfy the world’s current demand for meat, true, but a purely vegan agriculture is even worse at satisfying that demand. 

McWilliams is behind the times on this one. Partially inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, many other vegans are accepting that getting omnivores to eat less meat is a more realistic strategy than convincing everyone to go vegan. 

Back to the New York Times entry:

Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a ‘natural’ life pecking around a large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed with nose rings to prevent them from rooting, which is one of their most basic instincts. In essence, what we see as natural doesn’t necessarily conform to what is natural from the animals’ perspectives.

This is a trifling point, but I agree with it. It’s difficult to define what natural means and it’s suspect to defend a practice just by slapping that label on it. As vegan haters of “the naturalistic fallacy” say, “natural” isn’t automatically desirable. If it were, everyone would be anti-civilization primitivists. Many people do see certain benefits in whatever might be deemed “natural.” If pasture-raised meats have some of those benefits, it’s more effective to list those benefits rather than say we gotta love it because “it’s natural.” 

McWilliams goes on:

The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests that it wouldn’t last. These businesses — no matter how virtuous in intention — would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners, increasing stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than competitors could. Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn’t take long for production systems to scale back up to where they started.

This is quite likely true, but I don’t see his point. We shouldn’t buy meat from farms that treat their animals better because a world where that is the only type of farm is unlikely? Should we not buy vegan take-out because a world with only vegan restaurants is unlikely? If there were somehow a vegan world for a second, pretty soon some people would get a hankering for animal products, would hunt and fish them, and raise them for food again (assuming domesticated animals hadn’t yet been extinguished). Does this mean no one should ever go vegan?

McWilliams says:

All this said, committed advocates of alternative systems make one undeniably important point about the practice called “rotational grazing” or “holistic farming”: the soil absorbs the nutrients from the animals’ manure, allowing grass and other crops to grow without the addition of synthetic fertilizer. As Michael Pollan writes, “It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients.” In other words, raising animals is not only sustainable, but required.

But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.

This is true of every form of agriculture that relies on fertility imported from elsewhere, including the agriculture that supplies McWilliams’ vegan food. (Or does McWilliams buy only veganic-organically grown products?)

Still, to the extent that omnivores say that animal farms are always closed, self-sustaining systems whereas vegan agriculture must always import fertility, McWilliams is right to point out that this isn’t true. However, it’s disingenuous of him to reference Joel Salatin as “the guru of nutrient cycling,” with Salatin’s “Polyface” implied as the omnivore’s ideal, when a previous comment discussion on McWilliams’ blog pointed out that not all omnivores see Polyface as an ideal. As Adam Merberg notes, in Meat: A Benign Extravagance, small-scale animal farming advocate Simon Fairlie is skeptical of Polyface. In fact, Fairlie’s skepticism entirely concurs with McWilliams’ own:

Of all the carbon added to Salatin’s pastures over the years, some will have come directly from the atmosphere; but a proportion will have come, directly or indirectly, from another farm in the form of soy, corn or whatever feed Salatin buys in.

However productive Polyface may be, it is in a sense only half a farm, and it doesn’t help to analyse the carbon sequestration on one half, without knowing what is happening on the other. In the case of Polyface if the feed is bought from a responsible organic grower, it may well be that the carbon sequestration on the two farms added together is positive. But in another situation it could well be different. There are plenty of stock farmers who bump up the productivity and (perhaps unwittingly) the organic matter on their farm by buying in feed from a chemical grain farmer who has stripped the carbon content of his fields close to the bottom threshold. (208)

Where Fairlie would disagree with McWilliams is over McWilliams’ implication that Polyface represents the best animal farms can do, and that if Polyface imports fertility, then all aspiring sustainable animal farms must do the same.

McWilliams writes:

Finally, there is no avoiding the fact that the nutrient cycle is interrupted every time a farmer steps in and slaughters a perfectly healthy manure-generating animal, something that is done before animals live a quarter of their natural lives.

As Melissa McEwen points out, this isn’t a problem since new animals are bred, so there are living manure-generators waiting in the wings.

McWilliams continues:

When consumers break the nutrient cycle to eat animals, nutrients leave the system of rotationally grazed plots of land (though of course this happens with plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer systems and septic tanks (in the form of human waste) and in landfills and rendering plants (in the form of animal carcasses).

McWilliams loves to bash animal agriculture with arguments that are just as effective against vegan agriculture. At least this time he admits that’s what he’s doing.

The overarching point of this article seems to be that we shouldn’t support pastured animal agriculture because it impacts the environment and will never realistically supplant factory farming. But then why support vegan agriculture, which also impacts the environment and will never realistically supplant factory farming? 

Obviously this is because James McWilliams prefers a theoretical vegan utopia than a theoretical pastured meat utopia. 

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A Vegan World Means Less Food For Humans (maybe)

“A vegan world can feed more humans,” is one of those absurd less = more vegan arguments — like that “veganism increases dietary variety” — that only makes sense when you consider a certain kind of omnivorism. There’s a good chance that someone who eats nothing but chicken nuggets and french fries will develop a more varied diet if she becomes vegan, since she would have no choice but to dabble in the fruit and vegetable aisles, if only to survive. But dream up the most diverse plant-only diet conceivable and it’s not going to have more variety than the most diverse omnivorous diet conceivable. It’s a physical impossibility. All you need to do is take that vegan diet and add a dash of smoked salmon to it and suddenly you have even more variety.

In “Universal Veganism?,” Jean Kazez makes a similarly obvious point that is lost on many who see veganism as the solution to world hunger: if humans reduce the number of foods they allow themselves to eat, there will be less food for humans.

Kazez writes:

71% of earth is covered with ocean, and seafood provides 20% of animal protein, world wide — 50% in some countries.  In a vegan world, the ocean simply stops being used as source of nutrition.  Land gets wasted too. Only 10% of the earth’s land surface is arable—used to grow for crops.  26% of the land surface is used as grazing land.  Most of that grazing land is not convertible to cropland, so if animals weren’t being raised on it, it would simply be lost to food production.  The total lost to food production: about 79% of the planet’s surface.

Some vegans might say that Kazez has unfairly overlooked seaweed, and a few vegans might even say that vegans can eat bivalves and jellyfish; nevertheless, it would be difficult to credibly argue that a vegan humanity has more food available to it than an otherwise vegan humanity that eats just about every kind of animal from the sea.

It’s probably impossible to figure out the exact percentage of grazing land that cannot be used as cropland, but there’s certainly some, and if you raise animals on it instead of using that land for nothing, that’s more food for humans. On top of that, eating insects and wild land animals increases the human food supply, as would repealing the taboos against eating dead pets and family members. The latter is unlikely to happen outside of mass starving scenarios, but still, the point is that this particular argument for veganism makes no logical sense. 

A lot of vegans see it differently because they only consider animals that are fed on foods that humans can eat. Yes, there’s plenty of that going on, but you could abolish that without abolishing all animal product consumption. And if you did, you’d have a world with more food for humans than a vegan world would.

Or maybe not.

Devin, a commenter, made this point:

If it truly is most calorie-efficient to eat plants directly than it is to eat other animals that eat plants, if humans were to convert the entire biosphere to food production for humans and make every other animal (non-autotroph, anyway) go extinct, then it could in theory provide the most possible food for humans. After all, if every other animal is extinct, they’re not consuming any part of our potential food supply.

Ethics-centric veganism does not oppose humans taking over land for homes, agriculture, entertainment facilities, general civilization business or anything else we want to use it for, as long as our purpose is anything other than intentionally killing animals in order to use their products for ourselves. It doesn’t go against veganism to knock over a forest filled with animals and turn it into cropland for humans. Vegans know that would kill a lot of animals for our own selfish ends, but that’s okay as long it’s a side consequence of our territorial expansion rather than the primary objective. Similarly, it wouldn’t go against veganism to transform the oceans into algae factories, even though that would kill off the sentient sea creatures, since the foreseen fish deaths would be a side-effect rather than the primary goal.

Theoretically, then, a vegan world might provide the most food—but only if humans were to achieve this world by exterminating all other animals and planting highly efficient crops on their graves. So long as other animals exist, humans who eat animals will always have a greater potential food supply than humans who don’t. But maybe a world without other animals (and is thus vegan by default) is one that could be maximally exploited for human sustenance.

Even here, however, veganism doesn’t necessarily rule. Any animals who eat food that humans cannot — such as grass or waste — could still add to the human food supply if they only ate grass on land that could not be used for crops and were successfully kept away from human food. And of course the cannibalism taboo also reduces the potential food supply for humans in a vegan world.

It’s likely that the world with the largest possible food supply for humans would be one where the oceans were turned to edible algae, the forests were knocked down for soybeans, only the grass- and waste-eating animals were spared extinction and human funerals were barbecues instead of burials.

Any takers?

--Tagged under: Environment--

Meat: A Benign Extravagance (Book Review)

With the possible exception of one chapter, Meat: A Benign Extravagance is not a scorching anti-veganism polemic. In looking at the environmental consequences of what we eat and how we produce it, author Simon Fairlie tallies up plenty of points in veganism’s favor. The man is so hard to pin down that many vegans thought his 2008 article “Can Britain Feed Itself?” – a version of which became Chapter 9 of this book – was an endorsement of a vegan society. This is because Fairlie showed that every incarnation of vegan agriculture freed up more land than any system that included livestock. It is more nutritionally efficient to eat grains than to eat animals, Fairlie grants, and that usually includes animals raised on pasture.

Nevertheless, Fairlie endorses a world with livestock, and his reasoning is more complex than “Cows turn inedible grass into meat.” After all, you could always grow nut trees instead of grass. The most significant problems he has with veganism are more aesthetic than environmental. The sterile, industrialized vegan dream with its wide expanses of checkered vegetable patches gaped at by humans in tractors fails to inspire him. “[I]f the human race can only be saved from global warming by living on a diet of turkey-less twizzlers,” he writes, “one wonders if it is really worth saving.” (187)

A “Primal Strip” fake-jerky-fueled humanity is enough to sour Fairlie on the vegan project, but he’s not a fan of simplistic and misleading environmental arguments either. Grains are more efficient than meat, he concedes, and he says this makes meat a luxury. But it is a more nutritionally efficient one than plenty of other extravagances that vegans allow, such as coffee, wine, baby corn, chocolate, tea, strawberries and asparagus. “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 objections to killing animals,” Fairlie says. (12) 

Until veganism demands that we drink only water, eat only potatoes, grains and beans, and give up pets, cars and airplanes—requiring a subsistence diet and lifestyle of its followers—there is no force behind the gloating vegan catchphrase, “You can’t be an environmentalist if you eat meat.”

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Meat: A Benign Extravagance (Book Excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from MEAT: A BENIGN EXTRAVAGANCE by SIMON FAIRLIE, available now, from Chelsea Green Publishing.

Meat: a Benign Extravagance

The Fence

In the 1960s, the American biologist Robert Paine conducted an experiment involving the removal of a predator species from a seashore environment:

When he removed the main predator, a certain species of starfish, from a population of fifteen observable species, things quickly changed. Within a year the area was occupied by only eight of the fifteen species. Numbers within the prey species boomed and in the resulting competition for space, reasoned Paine, those species that could move left the area; those that could not simply died out.[1]

Commenting on Paine’s experiments, Allan Savory remarks: ‘I witnessed a similar disruption in two much larger communities in Africa’, namely the Luangwa valley in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and the lower Zambezi Valley in Southern Rhodesia, where he worked as a biologist:

Both areas contained large wildlife populations – elephant, buffalo, zebra, more than a dozen antelope species, hippo, crocodiles and numerous other predators. Despite these numbers, the river banks were stable and well vegetated. People had lived in these areas since time immemorial in clusters of huts away from the main rivers, because of the mosquitoes and wet season flooding. Near their huts they kept gardens that they protected from elephants and other raiders by beating drums throughout much of the night or firing muzzle-loading guns to frighten them off. The people hunted and trapped animals throughout the year as well.

But the governments of both countries wanted to make these areas national parks. It would not do to have all this hunting going on, and all the drum beating, singing and general disturbance, so the government removed the people. Like Paine, we, in effect, removed the starfish. But in our case we put a different type of starfish back in. We replaced drum-beating, gun-firing, gardening and farming people with ecologists, naturalists, and tourists, under strict control to ensure they did not disturb the animals or vegetation.[2]

The result was a change in grazing behaviour by many of the animal populations, and a rapid deterioration in environmental quality. ‘Within a few decades, miles of riverbank in both valleys were devoid of reeds, and most other vegetation. With nothing but the change of behaviour of one species these areas became terribly impoverished and are still deteriorating as I write.’

The ecologist or park manager faced with these problems, will therefore normally try to simulate the role of predator. Culling large animals near the top of the food chain is the easiest way of controlling what goes on in a wildlife park. Anything else can be very labour intensive. It is true that there is a growing avant garde amongst nature conservationists advocating that animal populations should be left to sort themselves out – as at Ostvaardersplassen Reserve in the Netherlands where ancient varieties of cattle are uncontrolled and are killing off trees by bark stripping, making the area more open.[3] There is much controversy about the wisdom of this approach, and some also about its disregard for animal welfare: in the absence of predators, many animals die a painful and lingering death, unless they are culled. And if they are culled, why not eat them? Culling is either hunting, or else it is a waste of good food.

These problems loom even larger for ecologists in a vegan society, since vegans, by definition, refuse to be predators. Vegans cannot cull – at least not with any degree of ease or consistency. And there is a further problem to be faced: what to do about poaching? Poachers present a problem for all managers of wilderness, but they present a more awkward one for vegan wildlife managers for at least two reasons. A vegan society cannot buy off miscreants with factory-produced meat; and if vegans cannot cull, the pressure to get rid of nuisance animals rises.

So how would wildlife parks function in a fully vegan society? New animals could be introduced, but only with difficulty could surplus animals be removed, by capturing and taking them somewhere else where they might cause the same problem. It is easy to imagine that certain populations might grow, quite quickly, to the point where they started causing damage, not just within the park, but outside it. How would the vegan park manager stop wild boar descending from the woods to dig up gardens, squirrels in their hundreds crawling over nut plantations or destroying timber trees, badgers rolling neighbouring wheatfields flat, or herds of hungry elephants stampeding through cropland?

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Tuesday Links

* T. Colin Campbell’s worst nightmare Denise Minger discusses fatal flaws in The China Study during a podcast interview, seeming not to understand how credentialed and thus automatically correct Campbell is. (link)

* Chris Masterjohn contributes a rebuttal of Chapter Three of The China Study, pointing out where Campbell conveniently ignores much of his own research. (link)

* More evidence that vegans aren’t getting enough B12. (link)

* Vegans should probably avoid eating organic produce, writes one vegan. (link)

* Oregano oil reduces methane emissions in cows. (link)

* Food Fight! is building a map of Portland households that promise to distribute only vegan candy on Halloween so that ethical ghouls and goblins can avoid awkwardly turning down dairy-and-egg-laden abominations every time they ring the bell of an animal enslaving house of horrors. Halloween should be frightening and all, but seeing “whey powder” as the last ingredient on a discarded wrapper of a chocolate bar your once-pure vegan child is eating this very moment is a hell on earth no moral parent should ever face. (link)

* According to this TED talk, there are bits of pig in everything. As Jerry Hopkins writes in Extreme Cuisine, “Every part of the pig is used, everything except the oink.” (link)

* Mowing your lawn and/or letting animals eat grass turns out to be good for the environment in some ways, at least in China. (link)

* Tyler Cowen believes are are likely to become less moral in the future. (link)

* Abolitionist vegan leader Gary L. Francione and his wife owe millions in taxes. Come on Gary, pay your taxes. Do it for the animals. (link)

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Environment--

Interview With a Sustainable Food Advocate: Simon Fairlie

I heard about Simon Fairlie thanks to George Monbiot’s column in The Guardian on Monday, “I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly.” Fairlie is the author of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, a book that caused vegan advocate (but non-vegan) Monbiot to withdraw his support for the no-animal-products-for-anyone-ever vegan model in favor of a system that includes some sustainably raised animal foods. Meat is currently out in the UK and Chelsea Green Publishing will release it in the US sometime in January 2011. Here is their description for it:

Meat is an exploration of the difficult environmental, ethical and health issues surrounding the human consumption of animal flesh. It lays out in detail the reasons why we must decrease the amount of meat we eat, both for the planet and for ourselves, and explores how different forms of agriculture shape our landscape and culture. At the heart of this book, Fairlie argues that society needs to reorient itself back to the land, both physically and spiritually, and explains why an agriculture that can most readily achieve this is one that includes a measure of livestock farming. Meat, animals and dairy have been in the firing line for so long that in some circles, the assumption is taken for granted that there is no case, ever, anywhere, to be made for the role of animals in farming, land care or diet. This book is a wonderful and challenging correction.

Fairlie was formerly an agricultural worker, stonemason and co-editor of The Ecologist Magazine, and is now director of Chapter 7 (“a UK organization which campaigns to provide access to land for all households through environmentally sound planning”) and co-editor of The Land magazine. He also sells scythes through The Scythe Shop.

simon fairlie

Did the George Monbiot column do a good job of summarizing your points in Meat: A Benign Extravagance? Did he get anything wrong?

I think he did a good job of summarizing it. But a lot of my conclusions are more nuanced than can be brought out in 1200 words (that is why it is a book). Judging from readers’ comments on the Guardian site, some people have got the wrong end of the stick about one or two things.

For example, George writes “the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1.” It is not entirely clear what this means and several people on the website say “I don’t believe it,” probably because they think it means that the average food conversion ratio is 2:1. In fact the FAO figure is about 1.4 to 1. What it means is that if you divide the total amount of human edible food fed to animals by the total amount of food we get from animals, the figure is 1.4. This is because a lot of animals are not fed on human edible food, and they almost make up for the 10:1, 5:1 or 3:1 conversion ratios involved in feeding grain to animals.

If you stopped feeding grain to animals (apart from the grain surplus in good years, which is a necessary buffer against crop failure in poor years), you would get less meat, but all this meat would constitute a net addition to human food supplies while releasing enough grain to feed hungry people.

Some vegans predict that Meat: A Benign Extravagance will make meat eaters feel justified in continuing their normal meat eating ways, even if they eat mostly factory farmed meat. Do you think that’s a danger in any defense of meat eating, even when you make a point of criticizing factory farming?  

I think this is a fair comment. On the other hand, if all the vegetarians and vegans in the UK instead demanded high-quality, sustainable, humane meat, that would create a lot more pressure on the meat industry to shape up. I did write a chapter on these issues which was probably more critical of gung-ho meat eaters than it was of vegans, but that got cut because the book was getting too long.

Are there any merits to factory farming?

No. The only excuse is that it provides cheap protein for poor urban people, but these are people who have been dispossessed of their land by the very agricultural system that has developed factory farming.

Is the animal suffering due to factory farming a problem, or is it mainly the environmental aspect that bothers you?

I don’t like the animal suffering either. I don’t like seeing animals caged or cramped for long periods of time, especially to the point where it causes psychological or health problems. This seems worse to me than killing them swiftly.

Steven Davis argued that eating certain kinds of animal products could potentially lead to the deaths of fewer animals than an agricultural-based veganism. Scientists found flaws in his research, but do you see any scenario where eating animal products might kill fewer animals than veganism?

I’m afraid I don’t have a big problem with killing animals for food providing the species as a whole is not at risk. I suspect felling tropical forests for palm oil kills more animals than rearing pigs on waste for lard, and puts more species at risk.

Vegans might say the argument that killing animals is okay if the species survives wouldn’t go over very well if applied to humans. Would you classify yourself as a speciesist?

I make some references to Peter Singer’s use of the term in the book. I also went into more detail on this in the section that was cut from the book, viz:

“I have no problem with people who refuse to eat meat because they do not want to be responsible for killing animals; as a former vegetarian, and a bit of a wimp, I can very easily understand how they came to that conclusion. I do have a problem with people who think that no one should eat meat, or rather they have a problem with me. I particularly take issue with the ‘Meat is Murder’ brigade, because the useful function of the word ‘murder’ is to make a distinction between the deliberate killing of a human being and the deliberate killing of any other living creature. If you obliterate that distinction, you undermine a foundation of human society: cannibal becomes synonymous with carnivore, and the culling of humans and rats can be carried out with equal impunity. If that is speciesism, then so be it, I am a speciesist.”

A common vegan argument is that the only reason people eat meat instead of going vegan is for “taste, tradition and convenience.” Do you think that’s true? And if so, are those reasons enough to justify killing animals for food?

No, many people eat meat and dairy because they find it more nourishing.

Taste and convenience are not particularly strong reasons (unless you are a gourmet or an impecunious workaholic), but “tradition” is. Tradition derives from culture and culture derives from the land and how we manage it: agriculture is the root of all cultures except hunting and pastoral ones. Most people eat meat because of traditional land management systems that have evolved over centuries, and insofar as these systems remain viable and sustainable, as a society we should continue to maintain them.

What are some of the problems (if any) with this year’s U.N. report advocating a global shift toward a vegan diet?

I would agree with the main thrust of the report that collectively we should eat less animal protein. What we do eat needs to be distributed more equitably.

Recently a Swedish study was published suggesting that nutritional density has been overlooked in the comparison between the environmental costs of various foods. Would taking nutritional density into account help exonerate animal products from their reputation as environmental villains? 

To an extent. A widely accepted figure seems to be that animal protein is 1.4 times as valuable as vegetable protein. However, people who are getting enough calories are often getting enough protein anyway. My own experience is that when I am on a vegetarian diet I eat a lot more in volume, especially for manual work.

How often do you eat a vegetarian diet?

I was vegetarian for six years in my youth — keeping goats for milk and having to deal with the male kids changed my mind. I now live and mostly eat in a community where the kitchen is strictly vegetarian, but meat can be eaten in people’s private quarters.

Have you ever been vegan for a notable length of time? 

I once did a week of Euro-veganism (ie, no tropical products) at “The Mudguard of the Revolution Summer Camp.” I felt pretty short of energy, but that might have been because there was no sugar either.

In “Can Britain Feed Itself?,” you wrote that with non-organic veganism, “One hectare of arable land feeds 20 people.” Second place was non-organic with livestock, with one hectare of arable land feeding 14 people. Some people took that as an endorsement of veganism for environmental reasons, but in your conclusion you seemed skeptical of a vegan solution. If non-organic veganism could feed more people with the least amount of land, where does it go wrong?

The difference between organic livestock and organic vegan is much more slight (7.5 people compared with 8) so this is really a question for supporters of non-organic farming.

Environmental arguments in favour of chemical vegan farming are pushing us towards a highly intensive and industrialized agrochemical industry where people are divorced from the land, herded into cities and fed on processed junk food made from spun vegetable protein. Something of the kind is described in James’ Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia. Personally I find this scenario highly unatttractive and if it is deemed necessary because there are so many of us, I would rather see more rigorous population control and more sympathetic farming methods.

Also in that report you posed a challenge to vegans:

“I have so far failed to find any vegan land-use vision that maps out in detail what might be done with the large areas of UK land that would be liberated or abandoned, depending on your viewpoint, if we all turned vegan. So, vegan permaculturists, we know you are out there, here is your chance. Fill in the blank area on Table G — all 9 million hectares of it — with whatever land uses you think are most appropriate, and we’ll publish your ‘Vegan Vision for Rural Britain’ in a future issue of The Land.”

Did you receive any satisfying suggestions?

In the following issue of The Land (No 5), Jenny Hall wrote an article on stockless Britain. In my view it didn’t analyze in detail what the texture of our countryside would look like, beyond “more trees, more wildlife” etc. I don’t know of any vegan analysis which looks at how we could farm and manage the countryside without benefiting from domestic animals as nutrient recyclers and without culling wild animals and combatting pests, or explains what it would look like under such a regime.

One of the obstacles for vegan permaculture is the lack of animal manure. Would wild animals contribute a viable amount of that? 

It is not manure which matters but nutrient accumulation, which can be achieved without passing the nutrients through an animal’s gut, for example by green manures. However animals are by far the best means we have for capturing the nutrients that find their way onto land that is not being cultivated, and particularly for recuperating phosphates. A fully sustainable organic system of agriculture requires animals herded on outlying land to to be folded on arable land or in the stockyard at night. Hunting wild animals would not achieve this.

Could vegan permaculture feed the entire world sustainably?

I think it would have problems recycling phosphates and other nutrients (unless animals were kept for that purpose without eating them, which would be expensive), and problems with pests. Some areas without arable resources would become unable to support their populations. 

What are some of the most environmentally friendly animals to raise for food?

Pigs, or indeed any animals fed on waste; dairy cows on grassland that we want to keep as grass—or that is the fertility building part of an arable rotation, or that will not grow trees.

Would there be less waste if more people developed a taste for offal?

Yes, and even more so if they regained a taste for animal fat, and used animal fat soap.

What else can people do (along with changing their consumption habits) to work toward a more sustainable food system?

Produce sustainable local food. There is a large movement in the UK, and I gather in the US, to increase food production in cities, though I also believe more people should be producing local food in the countryside. They could also be lobbying for legislative changes (e.g., rescinding the ban on giving waste food to pigs, and changing the rules so that chemical farmers are the ones who require licensing and labeling, rather than organic farmers.)

If someone is unable or unwilling to make the effort to get their animal products from small local farms, yet they care about the environment, should they go vegan?

Not really, because they will probably be unwilling or unable to ensure that these vegan products are environmentally sound.

What are some of the worst and some of the best vegan foods from an environmental perspective?

The best are ones that grow locally as part of a sustainable arable rotation, notably pulses. The worst are imported goods from poor countries where there are pressures on land and biomass.

When vegans see reasoned critiques of the health or environmental arguments for veganism, their fallback position is that veganism is only about ethics. Would you say that ethics are the only argument for veganism? Do you have any problems with the ethical vegan argument? 

I think there are some environmental arguments for veganism, particularly if you accept chemical agriculture: it does spare land for other uses.

I don’t have any problem with individuals espousing a vegan ethic, in fact that is a good thing, but I don’t think it would be wise for an entire culture, tribe or nation to become vegan. I don’t know of any entirely vegan culture, but there are cultures — notably the Hindus — where a section of the population is vegan or vegetarian, and since meat is in short supply, this is helpful, especially when it is the people who do physical labour who get the meat.

There is always a certain amount of meat and dairy produce that comes as an environmentally free byproduct of the agricultural system employed, even when that system is designed to produce vegetable crops. A large proportion of livestock in the world, especially the developing world, is fed on waste and crop residues. It is stupid for a society to reject this, but it is fine for individuals to refuse it, since it provides more food for others who may need it more.

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Taking Nutrient Density Into Account Improves Animal Product Environmental Scores, Say Biased Swedes

A pound of grains has a smaller environmental cost than a pound of beef, but that overlooks a key factor — nutrient density. If you’re getting more vitamins and minerals out of a pound of grass-fed beef liver than a pound of white rice, maybe it’s not fair to compare the environmental impact of these foods by weight and calories alone. 

Monica Reinagel at Nutrition Data linked to a Swedish study looking at the environmental effects of milk, soft drinks, orange juice, beer, red wine, mineral water, soy milk and oat milk, while taking into account the nutrients in all those beverages. With this more nuanced method, unfortified semi-skimmed cow’s milk beats orange juice and soy milk, which tie for a distant second.

Fascinatingly, three of the four scientists who conducted this study are employees of the Swedish Dairy Association. I’m not sure who employs the fourth guy, but I’m assuming it’s not the Swedish Soft Drink Association, since sugar water scored the worst. Presumably those three ganged up and pressured the fourth guy into going along with the pro-dairy conclusion of the study.

Still, it’s an interesting angle on the animal products vs. environment debate. In the conclusion of the study, Annika Smedman, Helena Lindmark-Månsson, Adam Drewnowski and Anna-Karin Modin Edman explain why the issue deserves more research:

With increasing frequency, persons and institutions draw conclusions on dietary recommendations from a climate perspective without a comprehensive analysis of nutritional relevance. … A sustainable diet cannot be formulated based only on one or a few aspects but requires taking the complexity of many nutrients into consideration. …

[W]e propose that caution must be taken when suggesting changes in food consumption patterns as a means to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions. Using a functional unit involving only [global warming potential] per kilogram of a food item may lead to the conclusion that vegetable alternatives are always better than those of animal origin.

To our knowledge, the nutrient density has not been taken explicitly into account previously when discussing climate impact of food choices. … It is thus important to use both knowledge in nutrition and climate to avoid simplistic and erroneous conclusions for food recommendations and dietary guidelines to mitigate climate change.

--Tagged under: Environment--

Ishmael-Inspired Faux-Environmentalist Demanded Malthusian Programming But Hypocritically Ate Meat

James Lee

James Lee, a committed nature lover who disagreed with the Discovery Channel’s programming choices, took hostages at the Maryland-based cable station today to bring attention to the ideas on pages 207-212 of My Ishmael, the uncreatively titled sequel to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Both books are against human over-population, and this seemed to have influenced James Lee’s own sentiments:

For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!! …

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

The humans? The planet does not need humans.

(From SaveThePlanetProtest.com)

Notice he didn’t mention the piggies, the male chicks, the moo cows, the lambs or the yaks. Which makes me think that despite his hatred of humans and his unfettered love for forest creatures, he was a meat eater.

It figures that a Quinn-inspired eco-activist could think it was okay to eat meat while conspiring to save the planet. I only read Ishmael, not the sequel, but I still remember the shock to my vegan sensibilities when I got to the part where the narrator eats a steak while bemoaning all the damage humans do to the world. “Um, contradiction,” I thought.

James Lee also got inspiration from An Inconvenient Truth starring Al Gore, another burger-loving so-called environmentalist. No wonder Lee didn’t realize that you can’t be a gun-toting, pipe-bomb-wearing, hostage-taking eco-extremist if you eat meat.

--Tagged under: Environment--

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