The true costs of cheap meat

Alex Renton

12 September 2013

Eating more sustainable diets - which includes eating less but better meat - is a key theme of our campaign.  Alex has written a book on the true cost of cheap meat which explores many of the reasons why this matters and how change can happen. This blog first appeared on the Eating Better website on 5^th September 2013

Half a year ago the horsemeat scandal broke in Britain. Last week, the authorities let it be known that no supermarket that sold adulterated beef meals will face any charges. They had done their due diligence, and could not be held responsible for the contents of the horse-stuffed beefburgers and ready meals.

Amazing. Even the Daily Mail thought this was an outrage (confession: I wrote the Mail's op-ed). What was interesting was that of the 300+ commenters on the Mail's website, 99% were positive to the article's message about the bullying, ruthless supermarkets. Those that were not already vegetarians told their fellow readers to go to the butcher's instead. These aren't Guardian subscribers, remember.

So, it was a bad week for all of us who thought the scandal might be a milestone on a road towards a better food system. It showed yet more depressing evidence of how Big Food has captured government and neutered regulation. But it was a good week, to be selfish, for launching a polemical book about the true costs of cheap meat.

I can't promise Planet Carnivore will solve any of these problems, but it does ponder some of the recipes for being a better meat eater, and a better member of a meat-addicted humanity. It's a quick read, a run through the history of cheap and industrial meat, its cost and its effects. It tries to explain why, if you believe the FAO, growing meat consumption is the main reason that global agricultural production must double by 2050 and just how great the threat to the environment, to the climate and to animal welfare that is.

It tries to survey, with a broad mind, some of the solutions on the table to the great meat addiction, and take a cool view over whether any of them can be made to work. No - I don't think the in vitro burger is the answer.

When I started to research in February, at the height of the horsemeat scandal, I thought it would be a fairly easy job. I thought I knew the field pretty well. I knew red meat-eating was linked to bowel cancer, that producing a kilo of beef uses 15,000 litres of water and - in feed-lot systems - insane amounts of grain. I'd seen first-hand some of the cruelties that industrial production inflicts on animals for the sake of an extra crumb of profit. But very quickly I realised that this job was going to be a difficult one. I had to confront the fact that what I was researching affected me, my diet and my family.

The first thing to accept was that, despite a life of meat-eating and a career as a food journalist, I was fantastically ignorant. I had been wilfully avoiding the true costs of a habit that, in terms of the diet of my family of four, was doing more damage to the planet than our little car. And I was culpably ignorant of the new threats to animal welfare of the 21^st century; the new cruelties the cheap meat industry and bio-tech is preparing.

And that led me to a painful conclusion. It is that, if you are a meat eater, you must take some responsibility for everything that system does. It's no good protesting, "Well, the meat I eat is entirely grass-fed/local/organic. I know the farmer, I know the conditions the animal lived in."

Because that just lets the rest of the system off the hook. With a system as catastrophic - to humans, to animals, to the planet - as modern meat production, I don't think it is enough just to "be the change you want to see". You have to act to change it, if you are going to go on doing it. This book is an effort at that.

So, is actually possible to be a moral eater of meat? The book concludes, hesitantly, that it is. As Jonathan Safran Foer, the novelist who has published the best modern polemic on the quandaries of the carnivore writes,  "Any ethical meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare." I am. And it feels good.

Alex Renton'sPlanet Carnivore - how cheap meat costs the Earth (and how to play the bill) is an e-book priced at £1.99 or $3 - available from the usual outlets and guardianshorts.co.uk

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