This comment piece is based on a book by Simon Fairlie “Meat: A Benign Extravagance“, which shows how the only ethical response to concerns around eating meat (food security, environmental destruction, animal welfare, human health, climate change, to name a few in no particular order) is surprisingly not to stop eating meat. This echoes some of the thinking in my early posts on vegetarianism.
As Monbiot concludes: “The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail.”
While this won’t make me a meat-eater, it does at least appease my conscience for not being a vegan. But it does focus my attention that you can still be an unethical vegetarian, depending on where/how the animal products I consume are produced – where I have definite room for improvement!
Posted by Environmental books I’d like to read « My Green Scrapbook on 21 July 2011 at 15:43
[...] A Benign Extravagance (Simon Fairlie, 2011) – I haven’t read this but posted a very supportive review from George Monbiot, who had to eat his words that veganism is the only [...]