Meat - Facing the Dilemmas

If meat is murder, what isvegetarianism?A letter from AmericaWORLDVIEWMarco Flavio Marinucci © Flaviophoto.comRaj PatelRaj Patel is the author ofStuffed and starved:markets, power and thehidden battle for the worldfood system(Portobello Books).With all the evidence that industrial meatproduction is bad for the environment,cannot be sustained equitably for the planet, is aprofligate waste of resources, accelerates globalwarming, and is a vector for all kinds of nastydisease, we might be tempted to enjoin everyone togo vegetarian. And there’s much merit to the idea.Research shows that vegetarians and vegans havea smaller carbon footprint than their carnivorouscounterparts. In the United States, where about2.5 percent of the population is off meat, there’sa marked difference between the annual CO2output of vegetarians and the average population.One recent study found that an ordinary US dietcontributed nearly 1.5 tons more CO2 than avegetarian one, and switching from meat-eating tovegetarian could cut US national greenhouse gasemissions by up to six percent.Vegetarians can also feel smug about their health. Arange of studies have shown that vegetarians have alower chance of dying from stroke and heart diseasethan the average population. One of the largeststudies of its kind was carried out in the UK, where33,883 meat-eaters were compared with 31,546non-meat-eaters. In that study, meat eaters weremore likely to smoke and to be more overweight.But, and this should give us pause, a range of studiesalso conclude that in other diseases, vegetariansand similarly health-conscious meat eaters fareequally well.It’s the ‘similarly health-conscious’ that oughtto set off alarm bells, because it suggests thatvegetarianism isn’t spread randomly throughsociety and that being vegetarian is associated withother kinds of health-increasing behaviour. This isborne out by the evidence.In the US, recent survey data find a link betweenoccupation and diet. Manual workers tend toeat more meat, and beef in particular, than theircounterparts in service or professional occupations.Further, eating less meat is linked to higher levelsof education though not, strikingly, with higherlevels of income, which suggests there’s somethingcultural going on.This leads to an interesting twist to our thinkingabout meat and its absence. Certainly it’s true thatbecoming vegetarian can improve your life chances,other things being equal. But precisely becauseother things aren’t equal, the commandment to bevegetarian isn’t one that all of us can follow withequal ease. There is a host of social obstacles thatstand between the majority of the population in theGlobal North, and sustainable eating patterns.We already know, from studies in California forexample, that the amount of time you spendcommuting and your level of obesity are directlyrelated. We know that poor people are less ablethan the rich to live near their places of work.We know, further, that 14 percent of US fastfood meals – dense in animal meat – are eaten incars. This comes not from a particular nationalfondness for the interior of cars as dining venuebut because, for many of America’s working poor,the only chance they have to eat a meal is en routefrom one job to the next.Further, it’s much harder to be vegetarian if youdon’t have access to fresh fruits and vegetables.If you live in a poor neighbourhood in the UnitedStates, you might be subject to ‘supermarketredlining’, a phenomenon named for its similarityto the banking practice of pinning red lines ontolocal maps to denote the areas where the bankwould make no loans. Supermarket redliningis like this, but with food. It is an increasingfeature of American geography that low incomeneighbourhoods are overwhelmingly less likelyto have fresh food markets, and far more likelyto have fast food outlets and convenience stores.The consolidation of supermarkets meansthat in Boston more than half of fifty big chainsupermarkets have closed since 1970, and thenumber in Los Angeles County has fallen byalmost 50 percent as the markets concentrate inonly the well-to-do areas.The choices that each of us make, then, aren’t madefreely. And there are some profound obstacles thatprevent society’s poorest from choosing a healthydiet. In the Global South, being vegetarian is a defacto state simply on the grounds of income. Inthe Global North, vegetarianism is the prerogativeof the middle class.So what changes, then, would be required tomove all of us in the Global North towards a moresustainable diet? For a start, we ought to dispensewith the idea there’s a magic bullet. No singleintervention can unpick the morass of culture andclass that pushes poorer people to unsustainableeating habits. In moving towards sustainableeating, it is important to jettison the kind ofthinking that reduces diet to individual choice.Instead, a range of policies are needed, fromencouraging fresh fruit and vegetable marketsin low income areas, to increased governmentsponsoredsocial housing nearer places of work,to building cities with walkable environmentsand green space, to living wage legislation, toa reduction in the length of the work day, andto some fairly serious investment in educationand healthcare to stamp out the injustices thataccompany our differential access to food.It is impossible, in short, to talk about meatin America or elsewhere without talking aboutclass. And, if we want to eat sustainably, that’s aconversation we can put off no longer.www.foodethicscouncil.org | Volume 2 Issue 4 | Winter 2007 19