Meat the future

If you eat meat, or have ever eaten meat, there will have been times when you will have been confronted, indisputably and unequivocally, with the fact that chicken is chicken. Beef is cow. Bacon is pig.

The realisation, when it dawns in childhood, is at best uncomfortable and at worst (depending on the bond forged with the pet lamb) traumatic. Though the sense of disgust and shock and guilt lessens with time – sometimes by dinnertime – for many of us, it never goes away entirely. An animal rights group’s display on sow crates, or a damning television exposé on battery farming, can be enough to rekindle the suspicion that we first had as children: that eating animals is wrong.

But as likely as it is that you’ve toyed with the idea of vegetarianism, you probably didn’t act on it – and even if you did, it’s even less likely that you’ve kept it up. Ministry of Health figures [xls] from 2009 suggest that just one per cent of the population doesn’t eat meat – and that figure is less among Maori and Pasifika people. (It is most common of women aged between 15 and 24, with “teenage vegetarianism” a recognised cultural phenomenon, if sometimes a cover-up for disordered eating.)

That’s despite compelling reasons against eating meat, for both your own health and that of the planet. In 2006, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that livestock was responsible for 18 per cent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport – but that figure was recently revised to something like half.

Edward Miller, 27, has just completed his master’s thesis on food security and finance, and says the meat industry is a contributing factor to most major environmental problems, not to mention a wildly inefficient drain on resources like water, grain and fossil fuels.

“All this meat has to come from somewhere, and since the 1950s the ecological footprint of the meat industry has ballooned beyond comprehension,” he says. “We’re now starting to get a pretty good idea of the environmental impacts of the current model of intensive meat production, including its contribution to climate change; the amount of water and fossil fuels required in the production process; the colonisation of new lands; and the loss of biodiversity.”

On a smaller scale, too much red and processed meat has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, liver and kidney disease, diabetes and obesity. Just last week, it was suggested that a diet rich in animal protein could be as harmful to health as smoking, while the impact of ingesting the growth hormones, antibiotics and chemicals routinely present in store-bought, mass-produced meat is still becoming apparent.

Then there’s the factor that many struggle most to stomach: while some producers are better than others, to eat meat is to authorise and participate in the slaughter of living things on a large scale, for our benefit. About 130 million animals are reared and killed for their meat each year in New Zealand, and it’s difficult to eat that meat and not be to some extent complicit in their suffering; even the trip from the farm to the slaughterhouse causes livestock distress, and ‘free range’ is a marketing term which anyone can use, not a reflection of a certain level of welfare. (The SPCA’s Blue Tick is an indicator for eggs, poultry and pork products.)

“I can’t understand why people think meat is necessary because, to me, it’s clearly not,” says Nik Jarvie-Waldrom, 30, a Wellington-based pescetarian – or, as she calls it, “vegequarian” – of about 10 years. “I realise it might seem arrogant, but I view a vegetarian diet as an important step in human evolution, especially as global food security becomes more and more a pressing consideration. I imagine the people of the future looking back at factory farming and not seeing the sense in it at all.”

But to depict all meat eaters as going against appeals to both the head and the heart just because they “like the taste” doesn’t take into account the importance of meat in society. (Though many studies do identify “the taste of meat” as a “major barrier” to vegetarianism.) As much as it’s a global industry, meat is cultural, and even personal. Many religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, regard vegetarianism as an ideal, while others restrict what meats can be eaten and when, like the halal slaughter and ban on pork stipulated by Islamic law. But even outside of religion, meat has a memorable, meaningful, almost symbolic quality: think of the Sunday roast, the Christmas ham, or even the fundraising sausage sizzle.

Ethical producers of meat, like the seven with the SPCA’s Blue Tick certification, are aware of widespread uncomfortable feeling about both poor standards of animal welfare and additives involved in large-scale meat production, and actively appeal to the conscious consumer. Freedom Farms, for example, prioritises “farm-to-plate traceability”, and has an entire FAQ about “life on the piggy farm” on its website; Ruby’s List aims to combine the expertise and transparency of a local butcher with the convenience of online shopping.

The Wireless assistant producer Alexander Robertson follows the process of taking a lamb from the farm to the dinner table:

But with the increase in quality comes an increase in price that means these options are out of reach for most meat-eaters. While patterns of red meat and poultry consumption in New Zealand are similar across [pdf] the most and least deprived neighbourhoods, those in poorer areas are less likely to remove the skin off chicken or the excess fat off meat before cooking. The “mega-trend of convenience food”, too, stacks up against research that reliably shows [pdf] that the diets of low-income households globally are less healthy than those of high-income households – just look how much further a dollar stretches at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut.

In any case, the abhorrent conditions and production line processes associated with intensive industrial farming are a means of maximising production to meet demand: it costs more to raise animals in open spaces, with lower yield. According to the FAO, those so-called “landless” systems produce 45 per cent of the world’s meat, much of it from pigs and poultry (typically the worst-treated of all livestock). Consumption on a global scale has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, and ethical producers make nowhere near enough to satisfy current demand.

If we don’t start cutting back on meat now, we might find ourselves without the option. Compared to the diverse ecosystem of the pre-settlement prairie in the United States, which supported a population of between 40 and 100 million buffalo, the current system of farming grain-fed livestock “might be more economically efficient, but it sure as hell isn’t anywhere as resource efficient”, Edward Miller says. According to figures from the Gates Foundation, just one kilogram of cooked beef takes 192 square metres of land and 69.4 kilograms of grain to produce, and the process generates the equivalent of 27 kilograms in greenhouse gas emissions.

This fossil-fuel intensive model of agriculture will become increasingly difficult to sustain as China, India and other emerging economies industrialise. By 2050, the global population will have exceeded nine billion people, and meat production is expected to have doubled, meaning there will be more competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world’s poor. (And don’t look to the sea for sustenance: if the doesn’t change, stocks of all species of fish currently fished for food are predicted to collapse by 2048.) Figures from as many as 17 years ago found the grain provided to livestock in industrial farms in the United States alone could feed 800 million people; right now, there are estimated to be around 840 million people in a state of chronic malnutrition.

So if we’re not prepared to give up meat altogether, how can we make it more sustainable?

It’s almost too easy to say – but we can start by eating less. Most developed countries over-eat animal protein, but New Zealand has one of the highest rates of meat consumption per person in the world, with 2007 FAO figures putting it behind only Luxembourg, the United States, and Australia. The average Kiwi eats nearly 116 kilograms of meat a year, mostly poultry and beef; by comparison, the total for India – the lowest-ranked of the 177 countries assessed, because of its significant Hindu population – is just 3.2 kilograms per person per year.

New Zealand Nutrition Foundation spokeswoman Jane Petrie isn’t fazed by those figures. “Lean red meat is the best source of easily-absorbed haem iron, so we recommend that people try to include it in their diet three to four times a week,” she says. “New Zealanders eat red meat within national and international guidelines, based on large amounts of scientific evidence.”

But on a large enough scale, even going without meat for one day a week could make meat eating more sustainable. That’s the idea behind Sir Paul McCartney’s Meatfree Mondays (itself based on Meatless Mondays in the United States), which states that 416 million meat-free meals a year would prevent 858,800 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – the equivalent of taking 177,667 cars off the road.

The campaign was extended to New Zealand in December 2012 by the Berrysmith Foundation, though at time of writing just 79 people had taken its online “pledge”. Even assuming that the thousand-odd people that like it on Facebook do go without meat once a week, we’re nowhere near doing our bit towards its stated goal of reducing global meat consumption by 15 per cent. (Neither Meatfree Mondays New Zealand nor the Berrysmith Foundation responded to requests for comment.)

But as much as Meatfree Mondays is about reducing the frequency with which we eat meat, it’s also about opening people’s eyes to all that’s possible with a vegetarian diet – and, in the longer term, that’s just as key. Sticking to a sustainable diet like vegetarianism is widely perceived [pdf] as taking more time and effort – and to a certain extent, that’s true. Though grains, vegetables and legumes are generally cheaper than meat, cooking balanced, nutritious vegetarian dishes takes skills and knowledge that must be learned. Challenging yourself to cook without meat one day a week is more achievable than trying to convert an entire household to vegetarianism full-time.

We can also eat as few animals as possible by making better use of those we do kill. So called “nose-to-tail eating” underwent something of a resurgence in the mid-2000s, after London chef Fergus Henderson espoused the “delights, textural and flavoursome, which lie beyond the fillet”. But going the whole hog also minimises the waste associated with meat production.

“If you had a whole chicken, you wouldn’t throw away the breast and keep the leg, but doing that with offal is the same thing to me,” says Auckland chef Dariush Lolaiy, who has featured calf tongue, ox heart tartar on puffed beef tendon, lambs’ brains ravioli and pig face salad on the menu of his restaurant Cazador. “It’s just as flabbergasting.”

Lolaiy points out that the lines we draw between the animals and organs we eat and those we don’t are informed by our culture and upbringing. Horsemeat, frogs, and snails are eaten in France (as were, until recently, songbirds); black pudding, made from pork blood, and haggis, sheep’s stomach stuffed with offal, are traditional in Scotland.

“I don’t think you would think of cooking the heart if your mother hadn’t done it for you, or if you hadn’t seen somebody on TV doing it, or read a book about it,” he says. “I don’t think it’s the customer’s fault. I think it’s our responsibility, in the industry, to show them that it’s not scary, it’s not hard to cook with – just to put it in their minds as an option.”

As counterintuitive as it might seem, eating more parts of more kinds of animal might help to make meat-eating more sustainable, as it relieves the pressure on menu mainstays like chicken. Several exotic and game species, like rabbit and kangaroo, would have a comparably low environmental footprint as managed meat producers, while bison, goat, elk and venison are lower in fat and calories than beef, and more likely to be free of growth hormones and antibiotics.

The most often-cited alternative source of animal protein going forwards are insects. Last year, the FAO released a 200-page report in which it said insects like beetles, wasps, caterpillars, grasshoppers, worms and cicadas – which are already eaten in large parts of the world – can, and should, be seen as more than a “famine food” in times of scarcity. Insects are high in protein, fat and mineral contents; they’re easy to raise in large numbers; and they could be used to feed both people and livestock, and as such, their potential to reduce world hunger and prevent food shortages and insecurity is significant. The Dutch government has already invested €1 million in researching the legislation and marketing of insects as food.

But Edward Miller makes the point that “culturally-appropriate food” is an important, and often forgotten, aspect of food security: “There are plenty of people who already eat insects, but most find it a pretty difficult prospect to get used to.” Plus, he says, rolling out a whole new form of industrial agriculture could be just as much a drain on resources as meat production. The FAO acknowledges that “negative attitudes towards insects” might be a barrier to their widespread adoption in Western societies, but is optimistic about the potential for a rebrand.

The key is in minimising what the FAO terms “the disgust factor”. Rather than grasshoppers piled high on your plate, insects could be ground into a powder or paste, and turned into familiar forms like sausages and burger patties. Rebecca Smidt, co-owner of Cazador, is confident it can be done. “I’m not terribly bothered about it,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Sure, why not?’ If we can make them as delicious as we can make prawns, load me up. Pass the mayonnaise.”

The other significant investment is being put into tissue-engineered “in-vitro” meat. Around the same time that the FAO released its report into edible insects, Google founder Sergey Brin paid $330,000 USD for the first engineered beef burger. We have three options moving forward, he says in the “Cultured Beef” promo video: we can either become vegetarians; we can “ignore the issues” and continue to destroy the earth; or we can “do something new”.

Earlier this month, Bitelabs tried to raise awareness of a “lab-grown meat future” through a viral marketing campaign about celebrity salami (“You’ve never experienced celebrities like this”). The research is fuelled by the assumption that if there was an ethical, sustainable, affordable alternative to meat that tasted the same, people would prioritise it over the real thing.

But most people don’t like thinking about where their meat came from, whether that’s a cow, a grasshopper, or Jennifer Lawrence, and that’s part of the problem. The animal has been rendered invisible in the process of meat consumption and production, to the point where we’re not in touch with what’s on our plates and how it came to be there, says Dariush Lolaiy: “If you’ve got no connection with what you’re eating, how can you have a mind for sustainability and the bigger picture? You’re not going to feel the need to diversify if you’re happy with your chicken breast.”

Before we can make meaningful steps to reduce our consumption of meat, we need to be open and informed about what we’re eating – and be at peace with that fact. If we don’t see the chicken on our plate as what remains of a real chicken, we’re not going to be concerned about that animal’s welfare, or the very real threat of it running out.