from UK Guardian, Saturday 24th march 01

Guardian website: 

The last word on MEAT
by AC Grayling

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion. - Inge

There is something ancient and dreadful about the pyres of burning animals currently reddening our nights..  They are reminiscent of classical antiquity's greatest exercise in holy sacrifice, the hecatomb, in which a hundred oxen were slaughtered and burned to elicit the gods' favour.  The number of beasts represented an immense oblation of self impoverishment by the community, undertaken to prove its earnest to the gods.  (Such things still happen; the Taliban are sacrificing cows this week to apologise to god for taking so long over destroying Buddhist statues - thus annoying Hindus too, for whom cows are sacred.)

Our contemporary burnt offerings address a single god, Mammon, who does not care that the slaughtered beasts had little wrong with them physically, but who hates the vileness of their economic disease: reduced yields of milk and meat, leading to reduced profits.

Some newspapers speak of angry farmers guarding their cherished herds against the cull.  The impression given is misleading.  Every normal week, 100,000 animals die in abattoirs around the country, so it is not the vast industry of death which the farmers contest, but the fact that they get less for vet-slaughtered than abattoir-butchered beasts.

From the Cumbrian pyres to the thousands of acres of grazing that were once Amazonian forest, from the cardiology wards to the lorries crammed with bleating lambs on their way to die, the costs of meat-eating are immense.  The arguments against it are severally persuasive and jointly compelling.  There is an economic argument, which points out that two people can be fed from an acre of land on which livestock are run, as against 20 if it is cultivated for grain.

There is a health argument, which points out that meat is full of fat and bacteria, and if non-organic then full also of hormones, antibiotics and vaccines.  and strongest of all there is a moral argument against using and then killing sentient creatures for our pleasure, when we do not need to do so to live well and wisely.

One does well to take the health argument seriously.  We do not eat "fresh" meat; we eat carrion, for the former would be stiff with rigor mortis, and meat only becomes soft enough to eat once it has begun to rot.  We like our game especially rotten, which is why we leave it hanging for days so that the microbes swarming in it can do their work.

Microbes are the meat-eaters friend;  without them there could be no tender steak, no juicy roast, no tasty chop or rib.  To see how they work, put a dead mouse in the garden and watch what happens.  The little corpse decomposes with such fury that it seems to be wriggling and trying to run away, such is the pullulating mass of microbes consuming it within.

Once the proteins in a corpse have become cheesy, the "cheese-skippers" (piophilia casei) arrive to do what they do to old cheese (and dirty feet - which is why the French call choice gorgonzola "les pieds de Dieu").  Everything is finished off by bacteria, which in 10 hours multiply from 100 to 100 million in number.  They are present in these numbers on the meat in your kitchen; they eat your meat as they ate the mouse, and since everything that eats must defecate, it is their lack of toilet training that gives exposed meat its gamey aroma.

The health argument is a prudential one; the moral argument is one of principle.  A frank look at what is involved in rearing, transporting and killing the animals we eat daily should fill any normal person with more revulsion than the microbial tale just told.  How many real meat-eaters would cut the throat of a cow themselves, and hack open its belly with a knife to empty its intestines?  But the thousands of daily deaths of animals are hidden away, and on the butcher's shelf meat looks innocuous, nothing like the living thing it was.

It is odd: we prosecute anyone who is cruel to a cow - by beating it or giving it electric shocks, say - yet the connection between that fact and the dinner table is rarely made.