Meat

Worldwide, we eat five times as much meat as we did 50 years ago.
According to Compassion In World Farming, every American eats a staggering 124kg of meat a year. Europeans are catching up fast, munching their way through 89kg per person per year.

Fifty years ago, meat was a treat, something you ate on Sundays, or to celebrate birthdays and Christmas. Since the WW2, we expect it every day, with disastrous effects both on our health and on the animals we rear.

Too much red meat can lead to heart disease, obesity and certain cancers. The consumer desire for skinless chicken means the waste products are shovelled into odious Turkey Twizzlers.

In many factories, chickens are allotted the space of an A4 piece of paper for their entire short lives. They fatten so fast that their bone strength can't keep up, so many spend their lives sitting in muck and feathers, their legs too weak to carry them.

As a nation, we profess to love animals, yet we are ignorant about the way we rear the animals we eat. We also profess an interest in our food and the environment, yet in places like Somerset, one of the great apple-growing regions of the British Isles, the supermarket sells apples imported from South Africa and New Zealand. The environmental cost in food miles is massive, and the blander taste a loss to our palates.