Fifty Shades of Green

Posted by Rosie

This meme popped up on my Facebook page yesterday and various friends and I were discussing how well (or not) we are doing ....here at Eco-Gites we certainly drink tap water, nearly always shower (or share bath water!), have meat-free days and eat pretty much all of what we buy.  Where we do rather fail is bicycle use.  The boys do cycle or walk to the village to pick up the school bus when they can but overall one of the disadvantages of rural living is increased car usage compared to city dwellers.   

Some-one else then joined in our Facebook conversation and was quite adamant we should actually be eating more meat, not less.  

The argument against eating meat is a strong one.  It takes far more land and water to produce a comparable weight of meat to vegetables.  Virgin forest is being cleared for rearing animals and with the trees gone and overgrazing, the result is often large scale soil erosion.  With an increasing population and many millions starving can it make sense to be eating more meat when the same amount of land could produce vegetables to feed far more people? 

A considerable amount of meat eaten in the UK today still comes from unethical producers, often outside of the UK, by farmers (and I use that word with caution) who rear their animals in a far from sustainable manner.   Animals are kept 24/7 in vast factory farms where the death rate is high.  To try and reduce death rates, the animals are routinely treated with antibiotics regardless of whether they need them or not. The producers naturally wish to maximise their profits so the animals are pumped with growth hormones and grow at an unnaturally fast rate, often resulting in the likes of chickens being unable to walk due to their weight .... not that they have far to go in their massive sunless prisons, factory farms anyway.  These animals, having never seen the light of day are then transported, crammed into lorries, often over great distances to be slaughtered in far from humane conditions at a massive abattoir.  To further increase profit the meat may be pumped with water (think of those lovely “plump” chicken breasts you see for sale) that shrink so much when you cook them as the water evaporates away.

Buying this cheap meat may be good for your pocket but not for the animal or for the environment.  And what about those antibiotics and growth hormones?  Can you be sure there are not traces in these in the meat?  Do you really want to be eating these with their negative health effects?

So why was this lady on Facebook so insistent that we should be eating more meat?  Let me explain - she is in the meat industry producing ethically reared meat – the animals are out in the fields as long as the weather permits and fed as naturally as possible.  Her argument is that far from eating LESS meat, we should be eating more meat, but more “GOOD” meat likes hers.  This is perhaps a fair point.  She also argued that if someone shifts from eating meat one day a week to a pre-packed, highly processed vegetarian dish made from vegetables routinely sprayed with pesticides then the environmental benefits are zero or may actually be worse. Is she right?  She could be although she could also be wrong.  One could still argue that her meat may be ethical and well reared but surely the land where the cattle graze could produce far more vegetable protein to feed far more people than her cows can?   And vegetables should produce less methane, a greenhouse gas that cows pump out as bovine wind in great quantities.

Who ultimately is right?   The ethical cattle farmer who says that we should be eating more meat and not “demonising” meat production or the meme producers who say we should be eating less meat full stop?  The trouble is there is no right or wrong answer.  There are pros and cons on both sides and in reality the issues are so intertwined  so doing one apparently green action may actually be making things worse overall.  For example, if everyone ate less meat then less “bad” meat would be consumed.  That is surely a good thing.  But the knock on effect could be that the producers work even harder to produce meat that is even cheaper at the expense of sustainability and the welfare of the animal.  This would be a backward environmental step. 

For what it is worth, this is my story with regard to meat and the best solution that we have settled for.  When I first met Simon I was a virtual vegetarian, not because I didn’t like the idea of eating meat nor because I thought it was cruel.  I simply didn’t particularly like meat and found myself feeling very bloated after I ate it.  However when I fell pregnant I started to crave meat and so Simon and I tracked down some ethically produced meat sold through a nearby farm butchers and I started to eat meat again.  However not in large amounts.  This meat was a bit more expensive than comparable supermarket meat and a lot more expensive than the vegetables I had been growing on our allotment.  We set a weekly budget and ate good quality meat, but not every day.  We ate plenty of locally produced vegetables for a balanced diet and as the meat we bought was not treated with hormones or antibiotics I didn’t feel bloated after eating it.  We had found a compromise.  Eat meat but make it GOOD meat and don't eat it every day.  THIS is what I believe is a step in the right direction but that is probably just too complicated for a meme like this one.

You see being green isn't easy.  Everything we do is interconnected so finding the best way to be green is very complicated and in all honesty beyond the likes of us mere mortals to work out.  To be green there is not a right or a wrong thing to do because there is not just one form of green - there are at least 50 shades of Green!  

What do you think?  Should we all switch to ethically produced meat and eat the same amount as before or should we still eat less meat what-ever?  Do you eat more or less meat than say 5 or 10 years ago.  I would love to hear your views.