Meat

The moral predicament of meat goes beyond the good animals that give their lives for our pleasure and sustenance. A carnivorous quandary rests comfortably at the back of our minds while the flesh of the problem sizzles before us on the barbecue (so rare is a pun well done). While passionate meat-eaters see vegetarians as the root of all evil (no more, I promise), there are bloody tidings we try to ignore when dealing with the rump, the wing and the ham.

One can safely say that human development and civilisation would be not be where it is today without eating animals; increased brain size being the most notable benefit of a high-protein diet. By the end of the last ice age however, nomadic hunters started keeping animals around for more than just meat. Through domestication and selective breeding cattle, sheep, chickens and horses started being used for things like milk, wool, eggs and transport. Known as the Secondary Products Revolution, animal power saw the first sedentary communities with large-scale farming.

While meat and fish gave us brains, cereals and vegetables gave our ancestors much needed calories, improving their size and body odour. Farming allowed human skills to be specialised beyond simply hunting and gathering – resulting in carpenters, masons and blacksmiths*. Meat became a luxury; as the worth of a hen’s eggs to a peasant family was much more than a Sunday roast. Only recently has that changed. In 1960, the average Victorian ate 4.4kg of chicken each year, whereas in 2009 the figure catapulted to 37.2kg per person.

"Did you bring the salad?"

We could blame McDonald’s and KFC for this eventuality; in fact, why not? Fast food chains have the most market power in driving down the price of burger mince and rasher bacon. Although it’s true we are eating more chickens and cows, livestock grows much faster and reaches much bigger sizes than it did a generation ago.** Ethics are quietly smothered when it comes to pleasures of the flesh; both from the industry and the customer. Does this make me like beef or chicken any less? Of course not – one needs only learn to accept the reality.

When employed by one of Australia’s biggest poultry producers, I remember a co-worker describing why he only ate whole chickens. During his time rounding up the bloated birds at the chicken farms, the workers had competitions to see how far they could boot the animals across the dank sheds. Those chickens, he told me, were still salvageable as nuggets, chicken burgers and schnitzels – processed products showed no signs of steel-caps. Distancing oneself in this way is necessary to deal with the reality of mechanically processing ten of thousands of chooks each week.

Should we stop eating meat? Many a vegan would argue that the protein of beef and pork cannot justify the conditions in which animals are raised, and the disease risks of industrial farming. Quite frankly, I would rather be impaled on a turnip than to stop eating meat. As a compromise: take responsibility of what you’re eating; visit your local butcher and ask where your food comes from; and avoid shrink-wrapped supermarket fillets that never, I repeat, never looked like the happy swine on the packet. Oh, there are also vegetables, but let’s be realistic…

* Not to mention politicians, armies and priests.

** Watch Robert Kenner’s excellent documentary, Food Inc., which gives a summary of the eerie transition from farms to factories.