Would Wild Horses make you stop eating meat or is climatic disaster sufficient?

Comments by an omnivore prompted by the speech of Shadow Secretary of State (DEFRA), Mr Nick Herbert, at the Conservative Party’s Annual Conference: Cutting out meat is not green solution: 5/10/2009

I have been unable to find a complete version of the above speech and so there may be some details that would strengthen the argument Mr Herbert has presented but from what I can judge the argument is as follows. Eating less meat is not a green solution to reducing emissions and will not have an effect on climate change. Furthermore, the West should not try to dictate to India and China that they should not increase the amount of meat they eat and that technologies should be developed to reduce emissions from the meat production process. It would seem that Mr Herbert is getting at the campaign for Meat Free Mondays whilst placing some of the blame for the campaign at the feet of vegans and vegetarians.

Although the Meat Free Monday campaign only asks that we cut out meat once a week he is such a committed carnivore that he is quoted as saying that wild horses would not stop him eating meat. He is either missing the point or sees this moderate suggestion to forgo meat on a Monday as the thin edge of the wedge, since the campaign is not about giving up meat completely, however much the vegan and vegetarian community might like to see that happen. His speech challenges a lot of current thinking on food production and climate change and I would advise him to make sure he has all the facts and figures at his finger tips as, never mind the wild horses, there will be many of us wild omnivores, let alone wild vegans and vegetarians, who will be vigorously challenging his viewpoint during the election campaign.

All this got me thinking about dietary diversity and the amount of energy the production of food involves. Having an egg nog made from a fresh egg laid by a free range hen wandering at will in the woods would take little energy apart from that used by your body which had been derived from the previous day’s diet. Eating an egg as part of a mass produced cake delivered to your local baker from a plant somewhere in Europe strikes me as energy greedy. Taking up Mr Herbert’s reference to wild horses also suggested the following analogy. Let us suppose that somewhere beyond the wood there are plains where wild horses roam. This could be a tempting and substantial addition to the food supply, if only one could be caught. Whatever might be involved would certainly take a lot of energy to achieve compared with picking up an egg in the wood. The egg could be stored quite simply for quite a period whereas wild horse meat would have to be preserved unless a lot of meat was thrown away.

In the event of wild horse catching on, especially where population growth meant that more and more people would like some, ‘wild horse’ production might well increase, the grass of the plains could not keep up, and so a new industry would have to be created to produce the feed, preserve and package the meat and then move it to places where no such meat would otherwise be available, thus incurring more energy costs and so on. Welfare considerations for live transport, additives for fast growth and the prevention of disease would all eventually become part of the food chain, as would land clearance to make way for the mass production of the meat.

The analogy comes close to how beef production has grown over the years and where it is going. Instead of developing a new market for horse meat the growth in beef consumption could easily succeed in exacerbating environmental deterioration with increasing climate change impact. Whatever meat production is expanded, the laws of thermo dynamics remain the same as will be the changing patterns of land use which will be required. Can we really afford to expand either an existing industry such as beef anymore than find a new one to develop? It all adds up to the same recipe for disaster. Whatever the meat being mass produced might be it is hard to see how it can be done without affecting the climate and the amount of land available to sustain the world’s increasing population. This is where we are already going with beef production as new markets and products are found for expanding the demand. To claim that technologies should be developed to reduce emissions from the industry is not a solution and is reminiscent of the George Bush fiction that pollution need not be reduced at source, but will be dealt with by technology once it is being created. This simply puts off the evil hour in the short term thinking of politicians. There is not enough time, Mr Shadow Secretary, and it is better to get started on what we can do rather than pin hopes on things we haven’t yet learnt to do.


We must all strive to be fully aware of where our food comes from. Whether the meat is beef or horse, as responsible trustees of this planet for future generations, we should know whether the source is truly sustainable; we should know whether it was harvested to a high welfare standard and whether it was worth all the effort in culinary and climate terms. There would have to be no risk of either wild horse or mad cow disease. We should not eat any meat where vast tracks of forest have been cleared to grow the feedstuffs to sustain an unnatural population and where all kinds of pharmaceutical products have to be manufactures to create fast growth and prevent disease. In any type of diet we should certainly not want to see the product become so popular that the continuously expanding world population wanted more and more of the stuff while it moved onto green field sites for more and more living and manufacturing space: especially at a time when such space was shrinking due to climate change induced desertification and rising sea levels, causing the northern and southern hemispheres to become more and more overcrowded. In the short term the obese proportion of the world population, whether in the West or in India and China can presumably go on munching their way to an early and expensive grave without a word of discouragement from Mr Herbert.

By designating one day a week when other agricultural and horticultural foods can take precedence seems a small step towards making more and more people ask where their food comes from and what the consequences might be. As in most things, a bit of knowledge will encourage a wider world view. Unless we do some clear thinking, ignorance, in the end, will prove to be the ultimate mass killer. I realise that a report of a speech is not the same as being there but in what I have read so far I fear Mr Herbert has much to learn on the long journey ahead of him. When in Brussels, in the interests of dietary diversity, perhaps he should consider both the horse and, if there is one, the vegetarian sections of the menu. I was always told that travel broadens the mind, to which I would add, ‘...and so does thinking about what’s on your plate, how it got there, and what the consequences might be’.

Dacier

See:
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/07/food.foodanddrink
and
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/06/global-land-use/

It goes without saying that comments from Mr Herbert or like minded meat eaters are welcome.