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It seems that the richer human communities get the more meat they eat per person. Meat is an extraordinarily concentrated form of protein and can be hugely beneficial to people on a very poor diet. Yet for people who are already well fed, meat turns into a threat, because its saturated fats are a prime cause of coronary heart disease.

Why do we want to eat so much meat? The root may go way back to hunter/gatherer lifestyles and the provision of meat being a sign of status, or ‘bringing home the bacon’ in our more up to date vernacular. Today it is aided and abetted by an advertising industry with all its super size meals.

Colin Tudge, a farming analyst, points out that cattle and sheep in the UK, have always contributed an important element to farming life, particularly those farms where the cattle feed on uplands or wet meadows that are not suitable for arable farming. Yet he says the problem has arisen because our voracious appetite for meat has led to an industry that intensively farms animals, feeding them on precious grains that would otherwise go directly to human food. Since it takes 7lbs of grain to make 1lb of beef this means that farming becomes hideously inefficient and necessitates the turning over of vast tracts of land to agriculture that could otherwise be left. Like rainforests for instance.

The result is devastating for the whole planet, but even on a very narrow outlook, one can conclude that livestock are now competing with the human species. Already they consume half the world’s wheat supplies, and effectively all of its soya. At this rate by 2050 they will be consuming the food of four billion people.

So should we all become vegetarians? Some would say so, but simply to decrease our meat intake so that meat becomes more of a flavouring, as in a risotto, rather than a great slab, would have a dramatically positive outcome.

There is also an argument that animal husbandry in its old style, utilising hills and wet meadows for food, can actually be more efficient than ‘all plant’ agriculture.

For more see Colin Tudge So shall we reap – what’s gone wrong with the world’s food and how to fix it

Category:Food

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