Meat Free Mondays – can it work?

From what I have seen Meat Free Mondays has caused more discussion in the vegetarian and vegan world rather than where it matters with us omnivores and unfortunately the message they are getting is more than likely putting them off.

So the concept of meat free Mondays - could we do with a little less meat in our diet? I would say yes, we could. With the obesity rate in this country on the up then we need to get smarter with our diet and reduce damaging intensive farming. This does not mean that Meat Free Monday leads to a meat free diet. The point about meat free Monday, in my mind as an omnivore is that it is exactly that. Its not a transition point from being a meat eater to a vegetarian, it’s a choice that on one or two days a week you chose not to eat meat.

However from the conversations on the guardian and on the facebook group about meat free Monday it seems that all the vegetarians and vegans involved in the discussion think that people should move to a meat free diet. The majority of comments, ranging from the tame to the abusive, are all about meat free diets. I have retorted with my own comment that they should create their own campaign and facebook group called meat free week/life and leave the argument for Meat Free Monday to continue on a discussion about eating less meat.

It would be interesting to see if meat free Monday really got anyone to change their diet. My thought is that hopefully it will just start a mind shift and people are starting their journey caring about what they eat and the impacts it has on the world around us. It is more realistic to get the whole world to alter their diet and reduce their consumption than get a minority convert to vegetarianism or veganism.

Currently I am campaigning with Birmingham Friends of the Earth about fixing the food chain, and it’s a far from perfect world out there. However, we do not want to attack the farmers, but help them to move to planet friendly farming.

The focus of the campaign is on soya being imported from South America that is being fed to our livestock in the country and in South America, guess what? They are ripping up the rainforest to plant soya. So how can we help? By getting the government to enable our farmers to grow their own feed for their animals. There is 700 million EU subsidies going into intensive farming and this could be invested with our farmers to help them grow and feed their own animals. This would be better for the farmers and better for our food security.

So going back to meat free Mondays, an example I have been given where this has been working is where a school changed to have one day a week meat free. Then for the other days of the weeks they were able to invest in organic meat or fish. Meat Free Monday is all about making smarter choices and its not about having a go at the UK farmers, which quite frankly have enough to worry about.

The Black side of the White Stuff

I was making a list of the perils which our local farmers have to face. Foot and mouth, bovine TB, blue tongue, brucellosis, the weather, market fluctuations and the bank manager are just a few.. The latter is particularly important when jus one of these threats strike. This is not to mention the rising cost of water ( already £1000 a month for many, even with their own private supply), diesel, interest rates, rodent control, feed merchants, fertilizer costs, rent and vets bills. This is by no means a full list. All this has to be taken on in the hope you will have something to sell to someone who wants to buy it.

This week some dairy farmers had to take a bashing. Dairy Farmers Great Britain (DFB) went bust on Thursday. This farmer’s co-op produced 10% of our milk requirements but had been having difficulties for some time. This led to a restructuring, with members having to put up more of an investment if they wanted to stay in the organisation. Apart from contractual obligations trying to find another buyer for your milk is by no means easy so the co-op managed to keep going. Unfortunately the members then found that the price they were getting was. It is now becoming a common complaint from dairy farmers that they are selling for less than the cost of production. While this was happening the Co-operative Society, your local store, put its milk contract out to tender in January. Since they were a major purchaser from DFB the final blow came when the new contract went to Wiseman, Dairy Crest and Yeo Valley.

The receivers have guaranteed to take the members milk for another two weeks and to pay for it. This would seem only fair but it is little consolation because members have lost all their investment in the co-op plus last months milk cheque and the first 2 days of June. The current guess at the average loss for May is £14,000 per member. This will vary according to the size of farm. This means that a major cash flow problem has arisen within the industry and a rush by dairy farmers to find a new purchaser. Their bargaining position will not be strong and the big buyers will drive a hard bargain. There will also be some smaller producers, especially those in remote areas, who will not be seen as good bets due to the costs of collection. As though this is depressing enough, some farmers will have seen the last of up to £90,000 of their investment in DFB. Various reasons are being circulated as to where it all went wrong and we will have to await the receiver’s findings in the autumn. In the meantime we should expect more to leave the industry and imports of milk to increase.

The retailers say they don’t make much profit on milk. This might have something to do milk being used as a lost leader, presumably with the loss being borne by the farmer. They also say that their alleged 50% mark up on hard cheese is not supported by the evidence. Unfortunately the evidence seems to suggest that more upland farmers will be leaving the industry, never to be replaced. In the meantime the consumer should realise that more milk will be imported while home grown milk will come from cows who never see a blade of grass and are fed on imported feed stuff harvested from cleared tropical forest areas. The end losers will of course be all of us as the environment goes down hil and food security becomes a thing of the past.
Dacier