Around 60 billion animals, without taking fish and other marine animals into account, are farmed and slaughtered every year to satisfy our need for meat. And this is a number set to double during the course of this century.
Why should you care?
Wait. Don’t go. I’m not going to simply start listing horrifying facts and statistics to scare you into veganism. I realise this is a food column, and our target is to eat better. And that’s the very point of this piece. But how do you eat better in a world that’s mass-producing cheap meat? The answer is deceptively easy: eat less meat, of better quality. And if you want to stop reading here, you can. Because my central message here is that simple. Go find yourself a responsibly reared, mindfully-slaughtered, delicious grilled chicken right now.
Don’t know where to look? Or how to find it? Or why you’re even doing this when a bucket of freshly-fried chicken and chips is available just around the corner for Rs. 500 (or less)? Okay, so here’s the back story.
At Slow Food’s Terra Madre Salone del Gusto held in Turin last month, the production and consumption of meat became a central talking point. Slow Food, an influential eco-gastronomic movement that focuses on strengthening community, biodiversity and tradition though food, has been running Slow Meat for two years now.
I speak to Serena Milano, General Secretary of the Slow Food Foundation of Biodiversity, on Skype, to find out why they are so concerned about rapidly-rising meat consumption. “It’s simply unsustainable,” she shrugs. “The U.S. consumes about 120 kilos per capita annually. In Italy, it’s 90, and in Africa, it’s between 15 to 20. India is less than 10 kilos. But with more people eating meat, we will need to double the quantity by the middle of this century.”
This means more industrial farming. On small-scale traditional farms, livestock feed off the land they are raised on, and their manure is used as fertiliser. However, with industrial farming, the manure becomes so abundant it causes pollution. In addition, pesticides, fertilisers and antibiotics are used in the feed, all harmful for humans as well as the environment. These farms are also often cruel to animals: they’re packed into small spaces and sometimes mutilated (by dehorning, tail docking or beak clipping).
However, Slow Food’s answer is not to stop eating meat – and for a good reason. “We are promoting less, not none. Slow Food has been working for 30 years with local cultures and economies. If you propose a complete vegan or vegetarian diet, then lots of food cultures won’t survive. Imagine the European mountains without cows. Imagine nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists without animals. Imagine family agriculture with no chickens... it isn’t possible,” says Serena, adding, “I’m not sure that is sustainable. We prefer equilibrium.”
Serena urges people to ask questions about where their meat is coming from. “We invite high-quality food producers to work with us: Shepherds, nomads, small breeders of sheep, goats, cows and chickens... And we ask for a narrative label. There’s more transparency this way. This is also good from a consumer’s point of view.”
In India, where even conventional labelling is sometimes suspect, this may be an ambitious task, I admit. In Europe, well-labelled meat will tell you the country it was born in, farmed and slaughtered. It will specify weight and commercial species, as well as expiry date and storage information. Finally, there will be the name and address of the facility that butchered the animal. Slow Food’s narrative label takes it one step further, asking for details on breed, farming method, area of pasture, type of feed, slaughter and transport.
Serena says Slow Meat is also linked to animal welfare. “When you reduce consumption, you reduce the number of animals. And when you reduce the number of animals, their quality of life improves.”
There’s another advantage to going back to tradition. If you look at old recipes, across cultures, you’ll find they have ways to use every part of the animal. “In South Africa, they call it eating ‘nose to tail.’ Now, people buy only one part of the animal, so we produce a lot, and we waste a lot,” says Serena.
It’s important to diversify in your food habits. We cannot grow into a culture that lives on chicken wings and sirloin steaks: it’s a shocking waste of perfectly-edible, potentially-delicious food.
