Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
64May 2015
W
HAT can you say about a
society whose food pro-
duction must be hidden
from public view? In
which the factory farms
and slaughterhouses supplying much of
our diet must be guarded like arsenals
to prevent us from seeing what happens
there?
We conspire in this concealment: we
don’t want to know. We deceive our-
selves so effectively that much of the
time we scarcely notice that we are
eating animals, even during what were
once rare feasts, such as Christmas,
which are now barely distinguished
from the rest of the year.
It begins with the stories we tell.
Many of the books written for very
young children are about farms; but
these jolly places in which animals
wander freely, as if they belong to the
farmer’s family, bear no relationship to
the realities of production.
The petting farms to which we take
our children are reifications of these
fantasies. This is just one instance of
the sanitisation of childhood, in which
none of the three little pigs gets eaten
and Jack makes peace with the giant,
but in this case it has consequences.
Labelling reinforces the deception.
As Philip Lymbery points out in his
book ‘Farmageddon’, while the produc-
tion method must be marked on egg
boxes in the EU, there are no such con-
ditions on meat and milk. Meaningless
labels such as “natural” and “farm-
fresh” and worthless symbols such as
the little red tractor distract us from
the realities of broiler units and inten-
sive piggeries.
Perhaps the most blatant diversion is
“corn-fed”. Most chickens and turkeys
eat corn, and it’s a bad thing, not a good
one.
The growth rate of broiler chickens
has quadrupled in years: they are
Also in this section:
Book reviews 66
ENVIRONMENT
It’s always good
to be informed.
By George Monbiot
Visit an abbatoir
May 2015 65
now killed at seven weeks. By then they
are often crippled by their weight. Ani-
mals selected for obesity cause obesity.
Bred to bulge, scarcely able to move,
overfed, factory-farmed chickens now
contain almost three times as much fat
as chickens did in , and just two
thirds of the protein. Stalled pigs and
feedlot cattle have undergone a similar
transformation. Meat production? No,
this is fat production.
Sustaining unhealthy animals in
crowded sheds requires lashings of
antibiotics. These drugs also promote
growth, a use that remains legal in the
United States and widespread in the
European Union, under the guise of
disease control. In , Lymbery
notes, MPs warned in the House of
Commons that this could cause the
emergence of disease-resistant patho-
gens. They were drowned out by
laughter. But they were right.
This system is also devastating to the
land and the sea. Farm animals con-
sume one third of global cereal
production, % of soya meal and
% of the fish caught. Were the grain
now used to fatten animals reserved
instead for people, an extra . billion
could be fed. Meat for the rich means
hunger for the poor.
What comes out is as bad as what
goes in. The manure from factory farms
is spread ostensibly as fertiliser, but
often in greater volumes than crops can
absorb: arable land is used as a dump. It
sluices into rivers and the sea, creating
dead zones sometimes hundreds of
miles wide. Beaches in Brittany, Lym-
bery reports, where there are
million pigs, have been smothered by
so much seaweed, whose growth is pro-
moted by manure, that they have had to
be closed as a lethal hazard: one worker
scraping it off the shore died appar-
ently of hydrogen sulphide poisoning,
caused by the weed’s decay.
It’s madness, and there is no antici-
pated end to it. The global demand for
livestock is expected to rise % by
.
Four years ago, I softened my posi-
tion on meat-eatingafter reading Simon
Fairlie’s book ‘Meat: a benign extrava-
gance’. Fairlie pointed out that around
half the current global meat supply
causes no loss to human nutrition. In
fact it delivers a net gain, as it comes
from animals eating grass and crop
residues that people can’t consume.
Since then, two things have
persuaded me that I was wrong to have
changed my mind. The first is that my
article was used by factory farmers as a
vindication of their monstrous prac-
tices. The subtle distinctions Fairlie
and I were trying to make turn out to be
vulnerable to misrepresentation. The
second is that while researching my
book Feral I came to see that our per-
ception of free range meat has also
been sanitised. The hills of Britain have
been sheepwrecked: stripped of their
vegetation, emptied of wildlife, shorn
of their capacity to hold water and
carbon; all in the cause of minuscule
productivity.
It is hard to think of any other indus-
try, except scallop dredging, with a
higher ratio of destruction to produc-
tion. Wasteful and destructive as
feeding grain to livestock is, ranching
could be even worse. Meat is bad news,
in almost all circumstances.
So why don’t we stop? Because we
don’t know, and because we find it diffi-
cult, even if we do. A survey by the US
Humane Research Council discovered
that only % of Americans are vegetar-
ians or vegans, and more than half give
up within a year.
Eventually, % lapse. One of the
main reasons, the survey found, is that
people want to fit in. We might know it’s
wrong, but we block our ears and carry
on.
I believe that one day artificial meat
will become commercially viable, and
that it will change social norms. When
it becomes possible to eat meat without
killing, keeping and slaughtering live-
stock for meat will soon be perceived as
unacceptable. But this is a long way off.
Until then perhaps the best strategy is
to encourage people to eat as our ances-
tors did.
Rather than mindlessly consuming
meat at every meal, we should think of
it as an extraordinary gift: a privilege,
not a right. We could reserve meat for a
few special occasions, such as Christ-
mas, and otherwise eat it no more than
once a month.
All children should be taken by their
schools to visit a factory pig or chicken
farm, and to an abattoir, where they
should be able to witness every stage of
slaughter and butchery. Does this sug-
gestion outrage you? If so, ask yourself
what you are objecting to: informed
choice or what it reveals? If we cannot
bear to see what we eat, it’s not the
seeing that’s wrong, it’s the eating. •
Were the grain
now used to
fatten animals
reserved
instead for
people, an
extra 1.3
billion could
be fed. Meat
for the rich
means hunger
for the poor
“
This article first
appeared in the
Guardian
.
www.monbiot.com.
Factory-
farmed
chickens now
contain almost
three times as
much fat as
chickens did in
1970, and just
two thirds of
the protein
“
