Vegetarianism

People have many reasons for kicking the meat habit and there really isn't such a thing as a typical vegetarian. If there were it would be much easier to explain. Anyway, here are some of the main reasons:

INHUMANITY
Modern animal production is often a very unpleasant business, especially for the animal. In its extreme form chickens are kept tightly enclosed in batteries for their entire short lives. Within the current economic framework this is inevitable, and the process is in fact being extended to other domestic animals such as sheep and pigs.

Such treatment leads to disease, neurosis and early death, and subjectively many vegetarians feel that the animals must be thoroughly miserable. In spite of some controls in Britain animals still suffer, and overseas, where much of our meat comes from, the position is worse. In Australia for instance cattle are still branded with hot irons, and sheep in New Zealand get their throats cut without first being anaesthetised.

BIOLOGICAL INEFFICIENCY
We live in an extremely overcrowded world where food shortage is a major problem, aggravated by the meat eating habit, which in the short term could be alleviated by widespread vegetarianism. This is because if you feed some vegetable food to an animal it converts it into its own tissues very inefficiently.

With farm animals it is common to talk of `Feed Conversion Efficiency'. If you feed ten tons of barley to cows it may be converted into one ton of cow, ie with 10 per cent Feed Conversion Efficiency. As only half the cow is eaten the efficiency is in fact only five per cent. This means that in this case you could feed twenty hungry people with the barley that. is needed to produce meat for one person.

The efficiency of most animal production systems is lower than this so that food production using animals as an intermediary can be still more extravagant. We can't afford much meat in an overpopulated world. Generally speaking dairy production has a greater biological efficiency than meat.

Much of the world's wildlife resources are also threatened by meat hungry people who can't produce enough of it on their farms.

HEALTH REASONS
There are several of these. The first is fat. Farm animals today, like humans, are far too fat. This means that when you eat meat you get much more fat than is natural and healthy. Wild animals just don't have those white streaks of fat that we see in all the meat in butchers' shops. Animal fat today is recognised as a major killer. Thousands of people in Britain die from heart disease every year, and one of the main causes is thought to be too much animal fat-particularly cholesterol. If you want to be a survivor don't eat meat.

Farm animals, like most fruit and vegetables, are not organically grown. Because the consequences of this are generally less well known than the consequences of eating too much cholesterol I'll mention it in a bit. more detail. Farm animals today are subjected to mass medication on a grand scale throughout their lives. They are dosed, drenched, and injected with a whole range of agrochemicals designed to keep the parasites of intensive agriculture at bay. Needless to say, some of these substances are present in the animal when it is slaughtered. Also, some animals are dosed with other substances such as hormones and antibiotics and so on that have been shown to have serious side effects. These haven't yet been demonstrated in the people who eat the meat but it's enough to scare off some of us.

Farm animals, being grass eaters, also consume the agrochemicals that are applied to their food. These may accumulate in their bodies, as DDT is shown to do. When we eat meat we may be eating the accumulated agrochemicals of huge amounts of vegetable food-much more than we could ever eat directly. Although DDT is no longer applied to the land it is still present in the grass and therefore in the animals that eat it. Also, there are still some agrochemical poisons being applied to the land, such as cadmium in superphosphate fertilizer, that can accumulate in the meat of farm animals.

Animal foods often contain parasites such as flukes and tapeworms, and disease-causing organisms, whereas foods of plant origin do not. There are plenty of sick Germans who can attest to the foolishness of eating raw meat.

ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS
Animal production, because it involves the consumption of huge amounts of plant material (much of which could be eaten by humans) is very expensive. Despite the sale of cheaply produced foreign meat in Britain, it still costs more than plant foods. People living on a small budget simply can't
afford meat. Although meat is a concentrated source of several nutrients they are relatively expensive. Whatever nutrient you need there is a cheaper form to be found in the plant kingdom or dairy products-so why waste money?

TECHNOLOGICAL INEFFICIENCY
Modern farming systems rely very heavily on complex technology, as opposed to labour and relatively simple machinery. Technology-intensive agriculture uses large amounts of agrochemicals and fuel to keep going. It is thus very dependent on nonrenewable resources such as fossil fuels, whereas pretechnological agriculture depended mainly on renewable resources of human labour.

In our small island where we eat more than we grow, our sustained food production is very precarious. We really can't expect to be able to continue our animal-based agriculture in a shrinking world. We could however feed ourselves completely on a predominantly vegetarian diet. The example of the 10 tons of barley producing the half ton of edible cow shows this. As the "post-industrial" age draws closer it seems that vegetarianism offers the only hope for the future.

Although animal production can be detechnologised, this can only be at the expense of reduced output. When resources are tight we will need all our spare technology for plant production. In the past, whenever there has been a food crisis in Britain, the first types of foodstuffs to be affected have been the least biologically efficient. In 1940/1945 the biggest cutbacks were in beef cattle, with smaller reductions in more efficient energy converters like dairy cattle and pigs. Plant production actually increased.

This is beginning to happen again now. Meat prices are rising much faster than those of cereals. Farmers are moving out of meat production because people are now eating the grains that previously went to cattle.

Britain is slowly but surely entering a vegetarian era compatible with its chronic food shortage and the realization that energy- and technology-intensive agriculture can't last for ever.

Tony Joyce