The grass isn’t always greener.
How the impact of our diet is less about what we eat, and more about how it was produced.
Walking into Morley Butchers in Crouch End, the smell immediately transports me back to my childhood in Belfast — accompanying my mother to the local butcher, parting the metal chain curtain, and walking through the doorway into a domain of freshly-prepared meat. I would amuse myself with the sawdust on the floor, as my mother bought the cheap cuts of mutton on the bone for an Irish stew, or some kidneys and liver for a mixed grill.
Andy, who’s been running Morley for the past 10 years, greets me. We start talking about the meat he has on display, the vast majority of which I’ve never experienced — in large part because I’m a vegetarian, and have been for the past 20 years! On display is gammon, produced on the premises using the best cuts of free range Blythburgh pork, Scottish beef steaks from free range, grass-fed cows, and a fantastic array of other produce. So, what brings me into this exotic and foreign land?
Morley is considered one of the best butchers in London, and has been awarded Slow Food London Best Butcher twice — an award that recognises retailers that care about the quality and provenance of their produce. With our high streets dominated by supermarkets — purveyors of processed and industrially produced food — shops like Andy’s offer a vital connection to and lifeline for an alternative food system — one that aims to function in a sustainable way, minimising impact and suffering, while maximising quality.
A critical factor in obtaining the best quality meat — something with the best flavours and greatest nutritional value — is the way in which the animal is reared. Keeping all forms of stress to a minimum is paramount.
This means letting animals live and eat according to their nature, and treating them with respect and as sentient beings, rather than as commodities to be caged, or transported live across continents in inhumane conditions, or slaughtered in brutal ways — hallmarks of a poorly regulated industrial food system.
With the rise of mega farms — housing 20,000 pigs or 1 million chickens under one roof — and the adoption of other US-style approaches to meat production, things are not going to get better — for the animals, the environment or our health.
Animal welfare is not the only aspect of the system we should be concerned about. The entire planet suffers as a consequence of intensive animal agriculture.
Back in 2006, a report published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) revealed that meat and dairy production generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s transport combined. That was over 13 years ago, and meat and dairy production has only been increasing to cater for rising demand — between 2006 and 2014, it rose by around 20%.
While high-welfare butchers like Morley offer an alternative to the industrial meat production that fuels this, the rising consciousness of our impact on the world around us has generated an ever-increasing call for people to reduce their meat consumption, and embrace a plant-based diet as a potential answer to the Earth’s and humanity’s wows. But is veganism or vegetarianism really a solution? Is a plant-based diet always more sustainable and less destructive to the environment? And does a vegan diet always cause less suffering to animals or loss of life?
Just a few doors down from Morley is Miranda Café, offering vegan and vegetarian food. Were it not for the menu, you could easily assume it was like any other café. Gabriel and Francis, the Venezuelan couple who run Miranda, tell me how oftentimes people who have just walked in off the street can’t believe how much they enjoyed a vegan lasagne, or a katsu curry made with homemade seitan.
They make a point of making the flavours the focus of their food, and the food the focus of their customers’ experience — sourcing the best quality ingredients they can, locally where possible. There is no attempt to push a vegan or vegetarian agenda. They want people to be enticed to explore more and more meat-free dishes through experiencing great-tasting food at the café — not by getting evangelical, or challenging people’s belief systems. In their own way they are contributing to the normalisation of enjoying healthy, balanced food that is free of meat.
As with animals, to get the best quality fruit, vegetables, pulses, grains and nuts, stress must be kept to a minimum. For plants this means ensuring the best possible soils and growing conditions — not something achievable through the creation of mono-cultures, the annual ploughing of land, and the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides — ubiquitous elements of industrial farming, causing the degradation of the soils, biodiversity loss, the polluting of the water systems, and much more.
Over the last 40 years around 33% of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion or pollution, and the UK is said to only have around 100 harvests left. As for biodiversity, farmland birds within the UK declined by 56% between 1970 and 2015, equating to a loss of at least 44 million individuals.
We therefore don’t just need to address the rise of mega farms, and the impact of factory farming, we also need to address the destructive agricultural practices utilised within the industrial system to grow the rest of our food.
So, regardless of whether you’re a meat-eater or vegan, if you’re reliant on processed food, and disregard the provenance and means of production, you are having a significant detrimental impact on the environment and animals.
Veganism practiced in this way therefore doesn’t represent a viable means of reducing our impact and the suffering we cause. While the production of high-welfare meat, through grazing and the fertilising of soil, can play a vital and significant role in a regenerative form of agriculture, that enriches soils and increases biodiversity.
The debate about the impact and sustainability of what we eat should not pit one group of people against another. We need to reframe it — away from binary and emotive discussions around meat-based versus plant-based diets, and instead making the focus the agricultural practices being used to produce our food, and how best we can minimise their impact. What’s best for animals, the soil and plants, is ultimately what’s best for us.
So, while on the surface Morley and Miranda might seem like they are at opposite ends of the spectrum — espousing different, competing diets and philosophies, they in fact represent two equally vital strands of the same thread — they represent an alternative, more sustainable food system, and a means for all of us, regardless of the diet we choose to follow, to minimise the impact and suffering we cause through the food we buy and eat. We should therefore show our support for them both, in whatever way we can, and for independent businesses like them.
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You can find out more about Morley Butchers at https://www.morleybutchers.co.uk and Miranda Café at http://mirandacafe.co.uk/ — both are on Broadway Parade in Crouch End. If you would like to know more about the Slow Food movement, visit https://www.slowfood.com/
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Originally published at https://www.villageraw.com.
