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Meat: A Benign Extravagance
Meat - A Benign Extravagance is an exploration of the difficult environmental and ethical issues that surround the human consumption of animal flesh. The world's meat consumption is rapidly rising, leading to devastating environmental impacts as well as having long term health implications for societies everywhere. Simon Fairlie's book lays out the reasons why we must decrease the amount of meat we eat, both for the planet and for ourselves. At its heart, the book argues, however, that the farming of animals for consumption has become problematic because we have removed ourselves physically and spiritually from the land. Our society needs to reorientate itself back to the land and Simon explains why an agriculture that is most readily able to achieve this is one that includes a measure of livestock farming.
336 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2010
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1009 people want to read
About the author
Simon Fairlie
11 books6 followersSimon Fairlie is an editor of The Ecologist, and co-author of Whose Common Future? (Earthscan, 1993). He writes for The Guardian, New Statesman and Perspectives.
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December 31, 2010
Since this can be a contentious subject, I will begin this review by disclaiming my personal positions on the core issues of this book, so that my appraisal may be interpreted in light of my bias. I am very passionate about diet, food, and ecology. My concerns regarding this subject matter are nutrition, ecological issues (in which I include agricultural economy, environmental consequences, and sustainability), social issues, and lastly morality. I have lived several years as a vegan, before negative personal experience and review of previously ignored evidence led me to believe it was not the nutritional and ecological panacea I had been led to believe it was. Similarly to the author, I now consume modest portions of traditionally raised animal products along with a whole foods plant based diet.
With that said, I found this book to be thought provoking in the extreme. More than anything else, my biggest takeaway was a deeper appreciation for the incredible complexity involved in the various sciences charged with evaluating the environmental limitations and effects on food production.
Given how broad this field is, Fairlie naturally must limit the scope of the book. Nutritional factors and the morality of animal eating are completely excluded from consideration in this work. Meat is purely focused on an analysis of how much of what type of food can be produced on how much land under what conditions. Also, as noted in the book, each chapter consists of a stand alone essay, so the overall work feels a little disjointed. I didn't find that to be much of a negative.
Despite the author's status as an enlightened carnivore, I found this book to be highly free of bias and polemics. He gives equal space to proponents of veganism and omnivorism, permaculture and industrialized agriculture. All arguments are critically examined using rigorous scientific, statistical, and historical evidence. Furthermore, extensive portions of the book are devoted to analyzing common scientific data, exploring the presumptions and ideological biases that formed potentially unreliable conclusions. One of the first chapters includes a detailed investigation into various productions methods for livestock and plant matter, and what actual yields of each under different conditions really are. Later in the book, this information is used to analyze the food producing capacities of four different models: chemical vegan, chemical livestock, permaculture vegan, and permaculture livestock. I found these sections especially interesting, as most mainstream vegan literature does not include technical analyses of what vegan agriculture actually looks like. When the advantages and disadvantages are weighed, some critical problems arise.
However, again due to the limited scope of the book, the author chose to apply much of his analysis to the unique circmstances of the United Kingdom. While the principles are interesting and informative, it's hard to know how much different his conclusions would be in other locales. Another limitation is that Fairlie assumes that the fossil fuel age will end in the near decades without a new infrastructure based on renewable, zero carbon energy. While the prospects for the future energy economy are varied and beyond the scope of the book, it's worth noting that much of his analysis presumes that there will be no new easily accessible mass source of energy. However, his explanation of the difficulties in properly managing the nitrogen and phosphate cycle and the maintenance of soil fertility, which as he and others argue is vastly harmed by urbanization and chemical agriculture, highlight extremely important issues that must be addressed in the development of a sustainable food system.
Overall, the book succeeds most where it is deconstructing conventional wisdom surrounding the role of livestock. The vegan establishment ubiquitously decries the caloric inefficiency, the extreme use of water, and the contribution to climate change associated with livestock production. These are often cited as reasons to abolish animal agriculture. Fairlie conducts a meticulous investigation into those claims, and the nuanced truth he uncovers suggests that they are fallacious. The 10:1 ratio of animal feed to meat often cited turns out to be a very limited snapshot of the marginal efficiency of grain fed animals in a concentrated industrial operation. Even in that setting, given that most of the animals' weight comes from grass prior to the CAFO, the ratio drops considerably. There are a number of considerations that can affect it, but it seems 3-4:1 is a more reasonable assessment. Similarly, the water usage statistics tend to come either from a calculation of all of the rainwater that fell on grass that animals ate, or an extrapolation of one specific region in a desert climate where pasture land needed to be irrigated. Since the former does not represent water that was available to humans for alternative use, and the latter represents about 1% of overall production, the water use claims are irrelevant to general livestock production. Finally the greenhouse gas contribution claimed by opponents (18%, according to a UN report) was based on a highly subjective calculation that was designed to promote intensive CAFO operations by allocating emissions from deforestation (which are not recurring emissions, and based off a year with vastly higher rates than current trends) arbitrarily to pastured live stock. A more realistic analysis results in livestock production contributing far less green house gases.
Fairlie advocates a return to decentralized, rural based agricultural systems where animals (what he calls default livestock use) are integrated with the land, serving as a source of fertility and a way of converting non arable pasture land (in the case of cows) and food waste (in the case of pigs and chickens) into a source of human sustenance. This would require that advanced industrial economies eat about 50% of the meat that they currently consume, but Fairlie convincingly argues in favor of the role of default livestock production in a sustainable food economy.
As the pressures of population growth and the costs of technological development continue to pose a threat to human civilization, the debate on how to balance the needs of human food requirements and ecological carrying capacity is increasingly critical. This book is a meticulously researched, well documented, and informative investigation of the various problems and potential solutions, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who eats and cares what the world their grandchildren will live in looks like.
With that said, I found this book to be thought provoking in the extreme. More than anything else, my biggest takeaway was a deeper appreciation for the incredible complexity involved in the various sciences charged with evaluating the environmental limitations and effects on food production.
Given how broad this field is, Fairlie naturally must limit the scope of the book. Nutritional factors and the morality of animal eating are completely excluded from consideration in this work. Meat is purely focused on an analysis of how much of what type of food can be produced on how much land under what conditions. Also, as noted in the book, each chapter consists of a stand alone essay, so the overall work feels a little disjointed. I didn't find that to be much of a negative.
Despite the author's status as an enlightened carnivore, I found this book to be highly free of bias and polemics. He gives equal space to proponents of veganism and omnivorism, permaculture and industrialized agriculture. All arguments are critically examined using rigorous scientific, statistical, and historical evidence. Furthermore, extensive portions of the book are devoted to analyzing common scientific data, exploring the presumptions and ideological biases that formed potentially unreliable conclusions. One of the first chapters includes a detailed investigation into various productions methods for livestock and plant matter, and what actual yields of each under different conditions really are. Later in the book, this information is used to analyze the food producing capacities of four different models: chemical vegan, chemical livestock, permaculture vegan, and permaculture livestock. I found these sections especially interesting, as most mainstream vegan literature does not include technical analyses of what vegan agriculture actually looks like. When the advantages and disadvantages are weighed, some critical problems arise.
However, again due to the limited scope of the book, the author chose to apply much of his analysis to the unique circmstances of the United Kingdom. While the principles are interesting and informative, it's hard to know how much different his conclusions would be in other locales. Another limitation is that Fairlie assumes that the fossil fuel age will end in the near decades without a new infrastructure based on renewable, zero carbon energy. While the prospects for the future energy economy are varied and beyond the scope of the book, it's worth noting that much of his analysis presumes that there will be no new easily accessible mass source of energy. However, his explanation of the difficulties in properly managing the nitrogen and phosphate cycle and the maintenance of soil fertility, which as he and others argue is vastly harmed by urbanization and chemical agriculture, highlight extremely important issues that must be addressed in the development of a sustainable food system.
Overall, the book succeeds most where it is deconstructing conventional wisdom surrounding the role of livestock. The vegan establishment ubiquitously decries the caloric inefficiency, the extreme use of water, and the contribution to climate change associated with livestock production. These are often cited as reasons to abolish animal agriculture. Fairlie conducts a meticulous investigation into those claims, and the nuanced truth he uncovers suggests that they are fallacious. The 10:1 ratio of animal feed to meat often cited turns out to be a very limited snapshot of the marginal efficiency of grain fed animals in a concentrated industrial operation. Even in that setting, given that most of the animals' weight comes from grass prior to the CAFO, the ratio drops considerably. There are a number of considerations that can affect it, but it seems 3-4:1 is a more reasonable assessment. Similarly, the water usage statistics tend to come either from a calculation of all of the rainwater that fell on grass that animals ate, or an extrapolation of one specific region in a desert climate where pasture land needed to be irrigated. Since the former does not represent water that was available to humans for alternative use, and the latter represents about 1% of overall production, the water use claims are irrelevant to general livestock production. Finally the greenhouse gas contribution claimed by opponents (18%, according to a UN report) was based on a highly subjective calculation that was designed to promote intensive CAFO operations by allocating emissions from deforestation (which are not recurring emissions, and based off a year with vastly higher rates than current trends) arbitrarily to pastured live stock. A more realistic analysis results in livestock production contributing far less green house gases.
Fairlie advocates a return to decentralized, rural based agricultural systems where animals (what he calls default livestock use) are integrated with the land, serving as a source of fertility and a way of converting non arable pasture land (in the case of cows) and food waste (in the case of pigs and chickens) into a source of human sustenance. This would require that advanced industrial economies eat about 50% of the meat that they currently consume, but Fairlie convincingly argues in favor of the role of default livestock production in a sustainable food economy.
As the pressures of population growth and the costs of technological development continue to pose a threat to human civilization, the debate on how to balance the needs of human food requirements and ecological carrying capacity is increasingly critical. This book is a meticulously researched, well documented, and informative investigation of the various problems and potential solutions, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who eats and cares what the world their grandchildren will live in looks like.
March 23, 2015
Is meat evil? A vocal minority shouts “Yes!” The British eco-journalist, George Monbiot, was an enthusiastic advocate for the vegan diet. He did an abrupt U-turn after reading Simon Fairlie’s book, Meat — A Benign Extravagance. Fairlie is a powerhouse thinker, a fire hose of ideas, and a tireless detective who hunts down those who ejaculate statistics that are ridiculously biased or fictitious. This book will reduce your trust in all statistics by 71.8 percent. He doesn’t take sides; he forces everyone to reconsider their beliefs. I strongly recommend it to readers who have an addiction to food.
Fairlie is an ex-vegetarian, a hippie eco-journalist, and a jack-of-all-trades. Once upon a time, he was living on a vegetarian commune in England, and contemplating their diet. He suddenly realized that it made no sense. The protein and oils that they consumed were imported from faraway lands where people were poor and hungry, whose cropland was being diverted from essential subsistence farming to produce commodities for export — nuts, soy, pulses, peanut butter, and vegetable oils. Why didn’t his commune consume the protein and oils produced by their next-door neighbors — meat, eggs, and dairy foods?
One of his primary interests is livestock production. His (impossible) sacred mission in life is to envision a sustainable way of feeding 60 million Brits. He doesn’t gift wrap a perfect solution, but the process of his search is delightfully illuminating. Three ideas provide the foundation of this book. (1) Feeding grain to livestock (or automobiles) is not ethical. (2) Humankind consumes too much food from animal sources, and people in the prosperity bubble should cut back. (3) A diet that includes mindfully produced animal products can be ethical.
The book contains an enormous number of words and ideas, and it did not have space for some important issues. Fairlie sincerely believes that caring and competent livestock husbandry does not involve cruelty. Allowing animals to suffer from the painful maladies of old age is cruel. In the good old days, merciful wild predators ethically put elderly critters out of their misery.
He acknowledges the arrival of peak cheap energy, but doesn’t vigorously explore the enormous consequences for agriculture and society. Feeding 60 million Brits via muscle-powered agriculture is not possible, and it’s impossible to indefinitely continue mechanized farming using biofuels.
He proposes a radical redesign of the British way of life, whilst not addressing the Mother of All Problems — the extreme overpopulation of the UK, and its dependence on importing large amounts of food. (Or is agriculture itself the Mother Problem?) Obviously, it would be far easier to feed one million (or fewer) Brits in a sustainable way. He sensibly omits a discussion of diet and health, in which a million experts can agree on nothing.
If a fleet of predator drones destroyed every facility for the mass production of animal foods tonight, half of the world’s livestock and poultry would remain unharmed. Ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) convert plant fiber that we cannot digest into meat and milk that we can digest. Normally, they dine on lands that are unsuitable for raising crops. Hogs are omnivores that, in traditional societies, excelled at converting garbage into bacon. They cleaned up feces, kitchen trimmings, spoiled foods, butcher’s wastes, and many other delicacies, converted them into wealth, and stored it up — like a piggy bank. Chickens played a similar role.
So, if the consumption of animal foods were limited to animals raised in these traditional ways, it would cause far less harm. Never forget that the production of grains and vegetables is also a source of immense harm. Plowing and reaping a grain field destroys many animals in a cruel and unethical manner, and it gradually ruins the soil, too.
Fairlie devoted considerable effort to exposing the sources of ridiculous statistics cited by the anti-meat crowd. For example, “each kilogram of beef requires the consumption of 100,000 liters of water.” This was traced to David Pimentel, a respected scientist. His calculation included rain that fell on the grassland — rain that would fall whether or not livestock were present. Fairlie’s grass-fed cattle consume about 50 liters of water per day, and soon piss most of it right back out. At the very most, his grass-fed beef required 400 liters per kilogram of meat. Oddly, Pimentel’s calculations implied that less water was needed to produce grain-fed beef.
Fairlie also butted heads with those who blame climate change on livestock, the alleged source of 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle are worse than cars! He plunged into a long and comical hunt for the source, which turned out to be the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The statistic was blessed by the reputable International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), went viral, and was repeated by major media outlets, with no fact checking whatsoever — an instant imaginary catastrophe.
Transportation probably produces about 52 percent of greenhouse gases. Ruminants probably produce from 5 to 9.6 percent of emissions. If all cattle were exterminated tonight, they would soon be replaced by wild ruminants, which also fart and belch. The Great Plains of the US were formerly home to 60 million bison (not a problem), but they have been replaced by 60 million climate killing cattle (oh my God!).
The ecologically worst foods come from exterminated rainforests. We must avoid rainforest products like soy, beef, and palm oil. Was your tofu, vegetable oil, or soy burger born in a former jungle? Seventy percent of vegetable oil comes from soy. Soybeans are processed into vegetable oil and soy meal. About three percent of the meal is eaten by humans. Most of the meal becomes high-potency feed for the industrial meat-production facilities that we all love to hate.
What would the UK look like if it became 100% vegan? There would be no livestock, and no manure, so soil fertility would have to be maintained by devoting a third of the cropland to growing green manures, instead of food. If the land were to be worked with biofuel powered machines, then more land would be needed to grow the fuel. Maintaining and replacing the machines would require the existence of an industrial society, which is not sustainable. If horses were used for traction, producing their feed would require between a quarter and a third of the farm (for oats, grass, and hay).
On the bright side, land formerly used for grazing could be returned to woodland and wildlife. On the downside, expanded woodland would provide habitat for expanded numbers of wild animals, which vegan communities could not ethically kill. Bunnies, boars, and deer frequently confuse large thriving gardens with a delicious paradise, and they routinely disregard stern instructions from agitated gardeners.
No farmer, meat-eater or vegan, can tolerate the presence of uncontrolled wildlife. One solution is defoliation — surround the community with a wide vegetation-free buffer. Animal rights advocate, Peter Singer, recommended capturing and sterilizing the wildlife. The other option is an impermeable fence, tall enough to block deer, and deep enough to block burrowers. Do you enclose the garden, or do you enclose nature? What about mice, rats, and pigeons?
These are just a few of the notions served at Fairlie’s banquet of ideas. After observing the world through the mind of a livestock husbandman, I was impressed by how much effort, complexity, suffering, and damage was required to keep way too many people alive.
The original indigenous inhabitants of the land simply adapted to living with the ecosystem that surrounded them. They ate salmon, bison, and aurochs that thrived without human owners and managers. Their way of life had no objections whatsoever to the existence of lions, wolves, and bears. They had little need to molest the living forest. They never had to think about soil depletion, erosion, or pollution. They enjoyed a far healthier diet. They could drink out of any lake or stream. They lived well, without rocking the boat, for quite a while.
Fairlie is an ex-vegetarian, a hippie eco-journalist, and a jack-of-all-trades. Once upon a time, he was living on a vegetarian commune in England, and contemplating their diet. He suddenly realized that it made no sense. The protein and oils that they consumed were imported from faraway lands where people were poor and hungry, whose cropland was being diverted from essential subsistence farming to produce commodities for export — nuts, soy, pulses, peanut butter, and vegetable oils. Why didn’t his commune consume the protein and oils produced by their next-door neighbors — meat, eggs, and dairy foods?
One of his primary interests is livestock production. His (impossible) sacred mission in life is to envision a sustainable way of feeding 60 million Brits. He doesn’t gift wrap a perfect solution, but the process of his search is delightfully illuminating. Three ideas provide the foundation of this book. (1) Feeding grain to livestock (or automobiles) is not ethical. (2) Humankind consumes too much food from animal sources, and people in the prosperity bubble should cut back. (3) A diet that includes mindfully produced animal products can be ethical.
The book contains an enormous number of words and ideas, and it did not have space for some important issues. Fairlie sincerely believes that caring and competent livestock husbandry does not involve cruelty. Allowing animals to suffer from the painful maladies of old age is cruel. In the good old days, merciful wild predators ethically put elderly critters out of their misery.
He acknowledges the arrival of peak cheap energy, but doesn’t vigorously explore the enormous consequences for agriculture and society. Feeding 60 million Brits via muscle-powered agriculture is not possible, and it’s impossible to indefinitely continue mechanized farming using biofuels.
He proposes a radical redesign of the British way of life, whilst not addressing the Mother of All Problems — the extreme overpopulation of the UK, and its dependence on importing large amounts of food. (Or is agriculture itself the Mother Problem?) Obviously, it would be far easier to feed one million (or fewer) Brits in a sustainable way. He sensibly omits a discussion of diet and health, in which a million experts can agree on nothing.
If a fleet of predator drones destroyed every facility for the mass production of animal foods tonight, half of the world’s livestock and poultry would remain unharmed. Ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) convert plant fiber that we cannot digest into meat and milk that we can digest. Normally, they dine on lands that are unsuitable for raising crops. Hogs are omnivores that, in traditional societies, excelled at converting garbage into bacon. They cleaned up feces, kitchen trimmings, spoiled foods, butcher’s wastes, and many other delicacies, converted them into wealth, and stored it up — like a piggy bank. Chickens played a similar role.
So, if the consumption of animal foods were limited to animals raised in these traditional ways, it would cause far less harm. Never forget that the production of grains and vegetables is also a source of immense harm. Plowing and reaping a grain field destroys many animals in a cruel and unethical manner, and it gradually ruins the soil, too.
Fairlie devoted considerable effort to exposing the sources of ridiculous statistics cited by the anti-meat crowd. For example, “each kilogram of beef requires the consumption of 100,000 liters of water.” This was traced to David Pimentel, a respected scientist. His calculation included rain that fell on the grassland — rain that would fall whether or not livestock were present. Fairlie’s grass-fed cattle consume about 50 liters of water per day, and soon piss most of it right back out. At the very most, his grass-fed beef required 400 liters per kilogram of meat. Oddly, Pimentel’s calculations implied that less water was needed to produce grain-fed beef.
Fairlie also butted heads with those who blame climate change on livestock, the alleged source of 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle are worse than cars! He plunged into a long and comical hunt for the source, which turned out to be the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The statistic was blessed by the reputable International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), went viral, and was repeated by major media outlets, with no fact checking whatsoever — an instant imaginary catastrophe.
Transportation probably produces about 52 percent of greenhouse gases. Ruminants probably produce from 5 to 9.6 percent of emissions. If all cattle were exterminated tonight, they would soon be replaced by wild ruminants, which also fart and belch. The Great Plains of the US were formerly home to 60 million bison (not a problem), but they have been replaced by 60 million climate killing cattle (oh my God!).
The ecologically worst foods come from exterminated rainforests. We must avoid rainforest products like soy, beef, and palm oil. Was your tofu, vegetable oil, or soy burger born in a former jungle? Seventy percent of vegetable oil comes from soy. Soybeans are processed into vegetable oil and soy meal. About three percent of the meal is eaten by humans. Most of the meal becomes high-potency feed for the industrial meat-production facilities that we all love to hate.
What would the UK look like if it became 100% vegan? There would be no livestock, and no manure, so soil fertility would have to be maintained by devoting a third of the cropland to growing green manures, instead of food. If the land were to be worked with biofuel powered machines, then more land would be needed to grow the fuel. Maintaining and replacing the machines would require the existence of an industrial society, which is not sustainable. If horses were used for traction, producing their feed would require between a quarter and a third of the farm (for oats, grass, and hay).
On the bright side, land formerly used for grazing could be returned to woodland and wildlife. On the downside, expanded woodland would provide habitat for expanded numbers of wild animals, which vegan communities could not ethically kill. Bunnies, boars, and deer frequently confuse large thriving gardens with a delicious paradise, and they routinely disregard stern instructions from agitated gardeners.
No farmer, meat-eater or vegan, can tolerate the presence of uncontrolled wildlife. One solution is defoliation — surround the community with a wide vegetation-free buffer. Animal rights advocate, Peter Singer, recommended capturing and sterilizing the wildlife. The other option is an impermeable fence, tall enough to block deer, and deep enough to block burrowers. Do you enclose the garden, or do you enclose nature? What about mice, rats, and pigeons?
These are just a few of the notions served at Fairlie’s banquet of ideas. After observing the world through the mind of a livestock husbandman, I was impressed by how much effort, complexity, suffering, and damage was required to keep way too many people alive.
The original indigenous inhabitants of the land simply adapted to living with the ecosystem that surrounded them. They ate salmon, bison, and aurochs that thrived without human owners and managers. Their way of life had no objections whatsoever to the existence of lions, wolves, and bears. They had little need to molest the living forest. They never had to think about soil depletion, erosion, or pollution. They enjoyed a far healthier diet. They could drink out of any lake or stream. They lived well, without rocking the boat, for quite a while.
January 14, 2012
I think this book had a lot of potential, and I was intrigued to see what a fellow environmentalist would have to say on the topic of the sustainability of meat. While I think Fairlie did a phenomenal job overall, there are many glaring and not-so-glaring errors in his book, both in terms of data and in terms of conclusions. The best part of the book is, by far, the scenarios he develops involving different agricultural systems and how they would relate to the dietary patterns of the public. He discusses these in a way that I wish vegetarians and vegans would do more frequently, although I think he sometimes makes very large assumptions that don't necessarily stand up to scrutiny. The worst part of the book was his discussion of a vegan vision of the world. He essentially trolled around the internet to develop this 'vision' and as such it is more the rantings of random vegans from the web than an actual alternative, as presented by informed people. For someone who only peripherally follows the topic, this would look like vegans are just lunatics who have no insight into a future without meat, which is far from the case. I think this book could make a really valuable contribution to the discussion around environmentally sustainable food systems, but I don't know that it will ever take off given his dry approach. And while I know that he deliberately avoids the other aspects of this issue (e.g. ethics, social and economic aspects of sustainable food systems), I think it is left lacking in so many areas that most people can relate to, I think the book will always have a limited reach. While other writers on the topic of sustainable food systems like Pollan have perfected the art of engaging the reader through a mix of narrative and facts, Fairlie all but drops the narrative altogether and expects the strength of his facts to carry the reader to the same conclusions as him. Unfortunately, if you're not well-read on the topic, I suspect you may tire of his number crunching, and if you are well-read, you will spend a lot of time circling errors and commenting in the margins.
February 13, 2013
I would give the first half of Meat five stars and the last half three, but Goodreads doesn't work that way.
Here's why the first half was awesome: It's a well-researched and unbiased account of the impact meat animals actually have on our environment. Yes, the text looks dense due to the font and footnotes, but it's actually quite easy to read.
Maybe because I'm much less interested in philosophizing about societal changes, I found the second half to be a slog. But it also felt much more opinionated and less rounded, citing theorists instead of studies with numbers.
Since the book was written with each chapter a separate essay, the author gives you complete leeway to skip around and read only what you want. If you've got a limited attention span, you'll get most of the highlights by reading chapters 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, and 14.
Here's why the first half was awesome: It's a well-researched and unbiased account of the impact meat animals actually have on our environment. Yes, the text looks dense due to the font and footnotes, but it's actually quite easy to read.
Maybe because I'm much less interested in philosophizing about societal changes, I found the second half to be a slog. But it also felt much more opinionated and less rounded, citing theorists instead of studies with numbers.
Since the book was written with each chapter a separate essay, the author gives you complete leeway to skip around and read only what you want. If you've got a limited attention span, you'll get most of the highlights by reading chapters 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, and 14.
September 29, 2012
First off, before I start, I heard about this book through a caveman diet blog, so you know where my biases lie.
Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, as it says, a defense of eating meat. The author explains and then knocks down one vegan myth after another: that it takes 10 pounds of edible plants to get one pound of meat (this is only true if you ignore one of the main reasons our ancestors kept animals; namely, that they eat things humans don't), that it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise a single cow to adulthood (yes, if you include every single drop of rain that falls on every blade of grass the cow eats), that grazing ruins the soil and leaves nothing but scrub and desert behind (it can, but if done mindfully it can equally rejuvenate desert into lush grassland), that the rainforest is being destroyed to farm cattle (this has as much or more to do with soy farming as cattle grazing), or that animal methane emissions are one of the main contributors to global warming (Here, his words say it best:
The vision of a vegan England (well, one vegan's vision of) given later on, where in order to live in harmony with nature and prevent having to kill millions of pest animals in the course of agriculture, they literally wall themselves off from the natural world, was also especially ironic.
However, the book is in no way an unbridled paean to the joy of meat. There are two major caveats I'll add after my above list:
1) Simon Fairlie does not deal in any way with the ethical (that animals should have equivalent rights to humans, that killing merely for food is wrong when alternatives are available, etc.) or the evolutionary (that humans are natural herbivores, that meat was only a secondary food source, that humans are ill-adapted to digest meat, etc.) arguments for veg*nism. Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, by design, concerned only with the ecological and economic impacts of meat eating.
2) The current paradigm, in which a fraction of the global population gets all the meat they want, some people only get it occasionally, many basically never get it, and everyone's environment suffers to provide that unequal supply, is not sustainable in any way. In the face of soil depletion, climate change, peak oil, and a myriad of other pressures, something will have to change, and probably quite drastically. Meat is benign, yes, but is also extravagant.
The book is quite dense and full of references, but is written in a conversational tone with several anecdotes about the process of research. There are a number of instances where the author writes about the difficulty he had trying to find the source for claims made by either side, and in once case after being repeatedly given the run-around he resorts to just typing stuff into a search engine and seeing if he can find out where the source got the information for her claims. For the record, it's a source claiming that climate change can essentially be solved through carbon sequestration of pastured land grazed by cattle.
For me, I actually think the most interesting points were the times when he departed from his usual recounting of statistics and facts and talked about the emotional impact of eating meat; that doing so keeps us close to nature, which is, after all, red in tooth and claw (though this obviously doesn't apply to city-dwellers who get all their food prepackaged like myself!). A society in which no animals are eaten, even if it doesn't follow the lines of some of the more extreme vegan ideologues in gengineering most of the animal kingdom to eliminate predation entirely, is farther from nature than the omnivores are. I don't tend to think of my own meat-eating in moral terms--I tend to default to the nutritional benefits, especially over the available substitutes--and it was kind of eye-opening, even if of limited benefit to an urbanite.
The vision of a pastoral society given at the end is likely to provoke a strong response from quite a lot of people, but as the author points out, it is a lifestyle led by a significant portion of the world's population right now, and while I doubt many people would adopt it out of choice, we may have to do so out of necessity.
Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, as it says, a defense of eating meat. The author explains and then knocks down one vegan myth after another: that it takes 10 pounds of edible plants to get one pound of meat (this is only true if you ignore one of the main reasons our ancestors kept animals; namely, that they eat things humans don't), that it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise a single cow to adulthood (yes, if you include every single drop of rain that falls on every blade of grass the cow eats), that grazing ruins the soil and leaves nothing but scrub and desert behind (it can, but if done mindfully it can equally rejuvenate desert into lush grassland), that the rainforest is being destroyed to farm cattle (this has as much or more to do with soy farming as cattle grazing), or that animal methane emissions are one of the main contributors to global warming (Here, his words say it best:
The exaggerated emphasis on the alleged four or five percent of [greenhouse gases] emitted by cattle, and the mendacious rhetoric about cows causing more global warming than cars, look suspiciously like an attempt to shift some of the blame for global warming from below ground to above ground, from fossil fuels to the natural biosphere, from the town to the country and from the rich to the poor.
The vision of a vegan England (well, one vegan's vision of) given later on, where in order to live in harmony with nature and prevent having to kill millions of pest animals in the course of agriculture, they literally wall themselves off from the natural world, was also especially ironic.
However, the book is in no way an unbridled paean to the joy of meat. There are two major caveats I'll add after my above list:
1) Simon Fairlie does not deal in any way with the ethical (that animals should have equivalent rights to humans, that killing merely for food is wrong when alternatives are available, etc.) or the evolutionary (that humans are natural herbivores, that meat was only a secondary food source, that humans are ill-adapted to digest meat, etc.) arguments for veg*nism. Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, by design, concerned only with the ecological and economic impacts of meat eating.
2) The current paradigm, in which a fraction of the global population gets all the meat they want, some people only get it occasionally, many basically never get it, and everyone's environment suffers to provide that unequal supply, is not sustainable in any way. In the face of soil depletion, climate change, peak oil, and a myriad of other pressures, something will have to change, and probably quite drastically. Meat is benign, yes, but is also extravagant.
The book is quite dense and full of references, but is written in a conversational tone with several anecdotes about the process of research. There are a number of instances where the author writes about the difficulty he had trying to find the source for claims made by either side, and in once case after being repeatedly given the run-around he resorts to just typing stuff into a search engine and seeing if he can find out where the source got the information for her claims. For the record, it's a source claiming that climate change can essentially be solved through carbon sequestration of pastured land grazed by cattle.
For me, I actually think the most interesting points were the times when he departed from his usual recounting of statistics and facts and talked about the emotional impact of eating meat; that doing so keeps us close to nature, which is, after all, red in tooth and claw (though this obviously doesn't apply to city-dwellers who get all their food prepackaged like myself!). A society in which no animals are eaten, even if it doesn't follow the lines of some of the more extreme vegan ideologues in gengineering most of the animal kingdom to eliminate predation entirely, is farther from nature than the omnivores are. I don't tend to think of my own meat-eating in moral terms--I tend to default to the nutritional benefits, especially over the available substitutes--and it was kind of eye-opening, even if of limited benefit to an urbanite.
The vision of a pastoral society given at the end is likely to provoke a strong response from quite a lot of people, but as the author points out, it is a lifestyle led by a significant portion of the world's population right now, and while I doubt many people would adopt it out of choice, we may have to do so out of necessity.
December 18, 2014
I must confess I'm struggling with this, and the main thing stopping me from giving up is the fact that I paid £15 for it. There's no attempt at narrative to carry what is essentially a string of back-of-the-envelope calculations interspersed with short polemics, and given that the author misunderstands certain key concepts (embodied water for example) I don't even trust the calculations. There are a few interesting snippets that I would have liked to see discussed in more detail, for example the fact that much of the UK's food waste problem was caused by the fact that following the BSE crisis it was made illegal to feed food waste to pigs, but rather than essentially dismissing this as "health and safety gone mad" I'd have liked to see some discussion of how it might be possible to recycle food waste without propagating pathogens through the system. Maybe it will get there later in the book but thus far I've seen nothing that contradicts my basic belief that while it may be theoretically possible to design an agricultural system featuring animals that minimises environmental impacts without compromising welfare, we're a very long way off having that at the moment so in the meantime it's probably a good idea to eat as little animal produce as possible.
Update: I gave up. Life's too short.
Update: I gave up. Life's too short.
May 25, 2011
Within the first few chapters I thought that this book might become one of those that I proselytise for; at the end of it, I find myself fighting the urge to order ten more copies so I can pass them out come the holidays.
And all this despite the fact that I was really turned off by the hyperbolic jacket description.
Part of the reason I don't immediately buy ten more copies is that it's not an easy read -- Fairlie's argument is scientifically rigorous, and even though he explains the math in a way that a lay audience can understand, it's still more of a 201 text than a 101 text. And, unfortunately, the subjects of food security and permaculture don't appear (yet) to be of interest to a general audience.
But they should be. The underlying message of this book, the Big Idea that we have so much trouble accepting, is that the Earth is a closed system -- a fabulously complex one, and one that we understand very imperfectly, but one which we cannot escape taking part in and affecting. From this premise, Fairlie examines the two ends of the ideological spectrum: the arguments for continuing industrialization of agriculture and high meat consumption; and the arguments for a vegan lifestyle, whether achieved organically or through technological fixes.
Being, as I said earlier, a 201 text, Fairlie spends most of his time taking down the vegan argument, assuming that anyone reading the book is already fairly convinced that industrialized agriculture is an unsustainable system. The way he does this is by showing, again and again, the sorts of cycles various nutrients pass through, and the many ways that domestic animals have been bred to faciliate those cycles. Industrialization has usurped those roles by making it possible to mine for or synthesize much of that; but this creates vast inefficiencies, and it is those inefficiencies that vegans hold up as reasons to eliminate livestock altogether. Fairlie is quite convincing in showing the way numbers have been manipulated by both sides of the argument, and in making the reader question whether the low-tech sort of agriculture practiced by humanity for thousands of years was perhaps the most efficient system yet designed.
I do not agree with him on every point; being from the urban elite, his picture of a re-ruralized future was, quite frankly, frightening to me, and I am not so dead-set against developing technologies that mimic the roles livestock traditionally held rather than going entirely back to animal-power. But the greatest strength in this book is that Fairlie invites the reader to argue with him, making his own prejudices transparent and giving the reader as much unbiased information as is possible. He is also, being English, understandably most knowledgeable about (and interested in) the British Isles and their ecology; there are several sections that are useful to an American reader only for the template they provide, rather than any of Fairlie's specifics. Still, this is overall an important book, and one I hope finds a wider audience.
And all this despite the fact that I was really turned off by the hyperbolic jacket description.
Part of the reason I don't immediately buy ten more copies is that it's not an easy read -- Fairlie's argument is scientifically rigorous, and even though he explains the math in a way that a lay audience can understand, it's still more of a 201 text than a 101 text. And, unfortunately, the subjects of food security and permaculture don't appear (yet) to be of interest to a general audience.
But they should be. The underlying message of this book, the Big Idea that we have so much trouble accepting, is that the Earth is a closed system -- a fabulously complex one, and one that we understand very imperfectly, but one which we cannot escape taking part in and affecting. From this premise, Fairlie examines the two ends of the ideological spectrum: the arguments for continuing industrialization of agriculture and high meat consumption; and the arguments for a vegan lifestyle, whether achieved organically or through technological fixes.
Being, as I said earlier, a 201 text, Fairlie spends most of his time taking down the vegan argument, assuming that anyone reading the book is already fairly convinced that industrialized agriculture is an unsustainable system. The way he does this is by showing, again and again, the sorts of cycles various nutrients pass through, and the many ways that domestic animals have been bred to faciliate those cycles. Industrialization has usurped those roles by making it possible to mine for or synthesize much of that; but this creates vast inefficiencies, and it is those inefficiencies that vegans hold up as reasons to eliminate livestock altogether. Fairlie is quite convincing in showing the way numbers have been manipulated by both sides of the argument, and in making the reader question whether the low-tech sort of agriculture practiced by humanity for thousands of years was perhaps the most efficient system yet designed.
I do not agree with him on every point; being from the urban elite, his picture of a re-ruralized future was, quite frankly, frightening to me, and I am not so dead-set against developing technologies that mimic the roles livestock traditionally held rather than going entirely back to animal-power. But the greatest strength in this book is that Fairlie invites the reader to argue with him, making his own prejudices transparent and giving the reader as much unbiased information as is possible. He is also, being English, understandably most knowledgeable about (and interested in) the British Isles and their ecology; there are several sections that are useful to an American reader only for the template they provide, rather than any of Fairlie's specifics. Still, this is overall an important book, and one I hope finds a wider audience.
January 11, 2012
Meh, I respect that he did good research and blah de blah and I myself really dislike CAFO practices, however this book COMPLETELY IGNORES the staggering health statistics that suggest our overly processed cheap grain based foods are killing us. Fatal heart disease numbers are still staggeringly high despite all the medications available, kids and adults are becoming "allergic" to everything under the sun, childhood obesity has exploded, and I could go on and on. Yes its a bummer that not everyone can afford to eat real whole food and yes we need to move toward more sustainable production practices, but I think the vegetarian utopia he hypothosises is just silly. It would never work in real life, especially because if you've ever sat a real ranch raised individual in the same room as a city dweller... well lets just say someone who's never lived off the land has no clue what it actually entails to work it responsibly and ethically. There are much bigger problems in play in this system and its silly to scapegoat meat for it. Especially when we are OMNIVORES, not herbavores!!! He does touch on the reality that small scale ranching (or "farming" as he puts it) is much better than CAFO's, but what he neglects completely is the glaring issues with grain production in this world. Over 90% of grains are genetically modified. How is this sustainable? And obviously its proving very destructive to our overall health and well being. Just look at all the chronic diseases that are helped by cutting out all grains/gluten (Celiac's to name one)and the exploding number of gluten intolerant individuals. Food for thought...
September 26, 2013
I'm an enthusiastic carnivore, but this book almost made me vegan.
Fairlie presents a well written and thoroughly documented argument for the environmental sustainability of livestock, but he ties it to a worldview that requires the general population to abandon cities, motor vehicles, plastic, and pretty much anything invented in the last hundred or so years in exchange for rural lives as loosely organized mostly self-sufficient peasants. As someone who enjoyed reading his book electronically on my iPhone, after having returned by car from a business meeting that helped pay for said book, part of which included a meal made from vegetables and meats produced by people who are far more talented and interested in farming than I am, I cannot reject strongly enough his proposal for how we should live.
The straw-man vegan society he sets up to demonize is laughable, and his attacks on GOOFs ("Global Opponents of Organic Farming") are just silly. As I was reading I marked arguments that I found to be specious, with the intention of writing a rebuttal to them, but with well over 100 passages marked I don't know where to begin and won't bother.
That said, I still recommend the book. Fairlie's research is excellent, and he brings amazingly diverse fields of study into scope as he crafts his vision for a permaculture society. I remain unconvinced by his argument, but it's entertaining and satisfying to witness his crafting of it. But thank goodness I also used other sources in my own research, or else tomorrow morning I'd be trading in my eggs and bacon for tofutti and veggie "bacon".
Fairlie presents a well written and thoroughly documented argument for the environmental sustainability of livestock, but he ties it to a worldview that requires the general population to abandon cities, motor vehicles, plastic, and pretty much anything invented in the last hundred or so years in exchange for rural lives as loosely organized mostly self-sufficient peasants. As someone who enjoyed reading his book electronically on my iPhone, after having returned by car from a business meeting that helped pay for said book, part of which included a meal made from vegetables and meats produced by people who are far more talented and interested in farming than I am, I cannot reject strongly enough his proposal for how we should live.
The straw-man vegan society he sets up to demonize is laughable, and his attacks on GOOFs ("Global Opponents of Organic Farming") are just silly. As I was reading I marked arguments that I found to be specious, with the intention of writing a rebuttal to them, but with well over 100 passages marked I don't know where to begin and won't bother.
That said, I still recommend the book. Fairlie's research is excellent, and he brings amazingly diverse fields of study into scope as he crafts his vision for a permaculture society. I remain unconvinced by his argument, but it's entertaining and satisfying to witness his crafting of it. But thank goodness I also used other sources in my own research, or else tomorrow morning I'd be trading in my eggs and bacon for tofutti and veggie "bacon".
August 8, 2019
It's a good book, but to use a bad pun, it's a meaty read.
For first-time or casual readers of the subject I wouldn't put this one at the top of the to-read list.
However, for those more dedicated it is a worthy read. He references several authors, both positively and negatively, that I have already read. And, many of the chapters stand alone and there is some truly fascinating analysis and information.
Having said that, there are also a lot of numbers to sort through. In some of those passages I started to lose track of the train of thought. Finally, the book is very much British and Euro-centric which is still quite a different meat production system from the barbaric abattoirs of the United States.
So, it's worth reading and probably even worth keeping on the shelf as a reference source.
For first-time or casual readers of the subject I wouldn't put this one at the top of the to-read list.
However, for those more dedicated it is a worthy read. He references several authors, both positively and negatively, that I have already read. And, many of the chapters stand alone and there is some truly fascinating analysis and information.
Having said that, there are also a lot of numbers to sort through. In some of those passages I started to lose track of the train of thought. Finally, the book is very much British and Euro-centric which is still quite a different meat production system from the barbaric abattoirs of the United States.
So, it's worth reading and probably even worth keeping on the shelf as a reference source.
March 3, 2014
This book is a must read for anyone interested in what we eat, how it is produced and the impact it has on the environment and the worldwide economy (and balance of power).
Simon Fairly is not only a small farmer, he did tons of research and got even the tiniest detail.
What I liked about this book, is its transparency and honesty. This is one of the rare books on the subject of food that does not takes sides (for meat or against meat).
This book is a treasure cove of interesting info.
Whether you're a big time meat eater or a hard core vegan, this book will very certainly impact the way you see food and ultimately what you eat.
Simon Fairly is not only a small farmer, he did tons of research and got even the tiniest detail.
What I liked about this book, is its transparency and honesty. This is one of the rare books on the subject of food that does not takes sides (for meat or against meat).
This book is a treasure cove of interesting info.
Whether you're a big time meat eater or a hard core vegan, this book will very certainly impact the way you see food and ultimately what you eat.
September 23, 2022
Outstanding. The first 50% of this book is a thoughtful literature review of the discussion to date. Fairlie tracks down key arguments, key sources and is unsparing in declaring his own views and biases. I commend him for this.
The final few essays are (IMHO) skippable. Here, Fairlie paints a dystopian vision of an urbanised world dominated by factory farming and man divorced from nature. In the vegan version, we "resign" from our role as super-predator completely, and apparently become so squeamish about predation in nature that we cannot effectively control wild populations of animals which will then become a nuisance. Logic dictates that in a world where we refuse to kill, the only other alternative is to sequester humanity away from all other species, or to engineer the things that are problematic out of those species.
In fairness to Fairlie, he also cites a "carnivore's" version of the same type of world view - where we lock ourselves away in coastal cities and our men and boys go out to hunt while the women stay at home. Like the Panopticon, these visions might make for an interesting sci-fi film, but I remain deeply sceptical of both their likelihood and desirability.
Fairlie's key anxiety then, is that humanity has become increasingly divorced from nature - and that to give up animal husbandry entirely is to accelerate and further cement this trend. In addition, he contends that our global system of industrial agriculture is deeply reliant on fossil fuels and long-distance food miles which further abstract our relationship with the food we eat and the land we live on. While there is compelling data to suggest that eating locally might not be the panacea we all hope it is, these arguments are based primarily on a meta-analysis of GHG emissions data per food group - based on land use. Fairlie's opening essays do an excellent job of deconstructing the "land use" argument in relation to cattle and farming methods- and I think he does enough here to show that we need a far deeper understanding of soil science, local soil conditions and local farming methods than we currently have before we can start making blanket recommendations for a "universally" correct way to produce food.
So with all of that in mind, yes we need to dramatically reduce our meat intake, and yes, food miles are a comparatively "less bad" cause of carbon emissions than land use - but that doesn't mean that they aren't bad at all. As a society, we might find that incurring some carbon food miles are an acceptable trade-off for acquiring certain kinds of nutrients and crops, but this certainly won't be the case for all kinds of crops. Mono cultures, while efficient in terms of harvest, growth and shipping, are inherently vulnerable: vulnerable to exploitation, vulnerable to monopoly, vulnerable to corruption and vulnerable to disease (example).
Local food production systems, using open pollinated seeds that are adaptive to their local climates, may be less efficient in terms of total calorie output than the global industrial complex that we have today, but that doesn't mean that they aren't worth investing in. At the very least, such a practise would help pad out our bank accounts of climate resilient staple crops, which is no small thing.
Where I disagree with Fairlie is his notion that a return to local food production must also mean a return to rural life. He is scathing towards the "creative class" and this shows in the latter pages of the book. To address some of his suggestions here:
● Turning back the clock on biofuels and cars by reintroducing horses might be an option, but it is a far inferior option to underground trains and bicycles. For one, the Mews that use to house them have all been turned into condominiums - for two, the management of poop at the height of London's horsey-bus era was a real challenge.
● Producing food locally does not have to exclude cities, unless you are taking an anti-technology view. There are ways in which cities can artificially mimic (less efficiently, sure) natural systems when it comes to resource cycling. There are ways in which cities can create land for food crops, whether it's through underground farms, community projects, or roof top farms. I feel that Fairlie's distaste for both the city ("algae food") and for artificial food production systems has left him underestimating the potential impact of such systems when managed on a small scale. As far as I am aware, there's no reason why we can't have an and/and instead of an either/or.
To conclude, Fairlie's closing essays sketch a world in which we are either technocrats divorced from nature or peasants (in Fairlie's sense of the word) returned to it. I think this is a gross simplification. With the caveat that I am no expert, I'd like to propose a third option, one in which we seek to understand nature rather than simply master it. For this we'll need to try many models of coexisting with nature (to understand what works best) and a good dose of humility.
Thank you Fairlie, for writing such a thought-provoking book.
The final few essays are (IMHO) skippable. Here, Fairlie paints a dystopian vision of an urbanised world dominated by factory farming and man divorced from nature. In the vegan version, we "resign" from our role as super-predator completely, and apparently become so squeamish about predation in nature that we cannot effectively control wild populations of animals which will then become a nuisance. Logic dictates that in a world where we refuse to kill, the only other alternative is to sequester humanity away from all other species, or to engineer the things that are problematic out of those species.
In fairness to Fairlie, he also cites a "carnivore's" version of the same type of world view - where we lock ourselves away in coastal cities and our men and boys go out to hunt while the women stay at home. Like the Panopticon, these visions might make for an interesting sci-fi film, but I remain deeply sceptical of both their likelihood and desirability.
Fairlie's key anxiety then, is that humanity has become increasingly divorced from nature - and that to give up animal husbandry entirely is to accelerate and further cement this trend. In addition, he contends that our global system of industrial agriculture is deeply reliant on fossil fuels and long-distance food miles which further abstract our relationship with the food we eat and the land we live on. While there is compelling data to suggest that eating locally might not be the panacea we all hope it is, these arguments are based primarily on a meta-analysis of GHG emissions data per food group - based on land use. Fairlie's opening essays do an excellent job of deconstructing the "land use" argument in relation to cattle and farming methods- and I think he does enough here to show that we need a far deeper understanding of soil science, local soil conditions and local farming methods than we currently have before we can start making blanket recommendations for a "universally" correct way to produce food.
So with all of that in mind, yes we need to dramatically reduce our meat intake, and yes, food miles are a comparatively "less bad" cause of carbon emissions than land use - but that doesn't mean that they aren't bad at all. As a society, we might find that incurring some carbon food miles are an acceptable trade-off for acquiring certain kinds of nutrients and crops, but this certainly won't be the case for all kinds of crops. Mono cultures, while efficient in terms of harvest, growth and shipping, are inherently vulnerable: vulnerable to exploitation, vulnerable to monopoly, vulnerable to corruption and vulnerable to disease (example).
Local food production systems, using open pollinated seeds that are adaptive to their local climates, may be less efficient in terms of total calorie output than the global industrial complex that we have today, but that doesn't mean that they aren't worth investing in. At the very least, such a practise would help pad out our bank accounts of climate resilient staple crops, which is no small thing.
Where I disagree with Fairlie is his notion that a return to local food production must also mean a return to rural life. He is scathing towards the "creative class" and this shows in the latter pages of the book. To address some of his suggestions here:
● Turning back the clock on biofuels and cars by reintroducing horses might be an option, but it is a far inferior option to underground trains and bicycles. For one, the Mews that use to house them have all been turned into condominiums - for two, the management of poop at the height of London's horsey-bus era was a real challenge.
● Producing food locally does not have to exclude cities, unless you are taking an anti-technology view. There are ways in which cities can artificially mimic (less efficiently, sure) natural systems when it comes to resource cycling. There are ways in which cities can create land for food crops, whether it's through underground farms, community projects, or roof top farms. I feel that Fairlie's distaste for both the city ("algae food") and for artificial food production systems has left him underestimating the potential impact of such systems when managed on a small scale. As far as I am aware, there's no reason why we can't have an and/and instead of an either/or.
To conclude, Fairlie's closing essays sketch a world in which we are either technocrats divorced from nature or peasants (in Fairlie's sense of the word) returned to it. I think this is a gross simplification. With the caveat that I am no expert, I'd like to propose a third option, one in which we seek to understand nature rather than simply master it. For this we'll need to try many models of coexisting with nature (to understand what works best) and a good dose of humility.
Thank you Fairlie, for writing such a thought-provoking book.
January 17, 2018
if you have a moral qualm about eating animals because animals have souls, etc, this book will not convince you to eat meat. however, if you think that all animal based agriculture is wrong because of factory farms, you should read this book.
Read
May 9, 2025A very densely systematic study of 'meat' broadly, and its implications on human and more-than-human worlds.
It serves as a great follow up Chris Smaje's 'Saying No to A Farm Free Future, as it pursues the same solution to many of the land and food related problems of today - agrarian re-ruralisation.
The only criticisms I can level on this work is that it's figures are now, understandably, out of date (from 2010), and that in some sections the diligent numerical 'working-out' of hypothetical food systems for Britain were hard to maintain enthusiasm for.
The functional necessity of meat and animal agriculture more generally is well defended - especially on the grounds of the role that animals play in low-energy systems of transporting nutrients (especially so for phosphorous).
I especially enjoyed the movement from describing industrial trajectories in agriculture and rural areas, to critiques of motivation, ultimately pointing out that 'the world not be this way', that not too long ago it was entirely different, and that both social pretensions and economically motivated entities stand in our way of a return to a more resilient, balanced, and equitable food system.
It serves as a great follow up Chris Smaje's 'Saying No to A Farm Free Future, as it pursues the same solution to many of the land and food related problems of today - agrarian re-ruralisation.
The only criticisms I can level on this work is that it's figures are now, understandably, out of date (from 2010), and that in some sections the diligent numerical 'working-out' of hypothetical food systems for Britain were hard to maintain enthusiasm for.
The functional necessity of meat and animal agriculture more generally is well defended - especially on the grounds of the role that animals play in low-energy systems of transporting nutrients (especially so for phosphorous).
I especially enjoyed the movement from describing industrial trajectories in agriculture and rural areas, to critiques of motivation, ultimately pointing out that 'the world not be this way', that not too long ago it was entirely different, and that both social pretensions and economically motivated entities stand in our way of a return to a more resilient, balanced, and equitable food system.
May 6, 2017
Fairly researched topic, challenging read. Well written, but the language is not always straightforward which might be a minor problem for a non-native english language users like myself. I have only one major objection: the author seems to be uncritical towards concept of "organic" farming. He advocates "organic" above "chemical", but never mention the fact that what "organic" means is actually defined by local legislation. It not necessarily means that farmers are using duck to fight the slugs. Using pesticides which are not synthesized in laboratories (labelled as "organic"), but nevertheless dangerous (even more than "chemical" ones) is more accurate description of so called "organic" farming. I didn't like so much the last part of the book. It's rather opinionated defense of a rural lifestyle than factual analysis. Furtunatelly there's plenty of that in the previous parts of the book.
June 2, 2018
Balanced, intelligent and well-researched, this book carefully examines the place of livestock in an ecologically sustainable world. While the author addresses in detail many of the ethical issues associated with livestock and meat-eating in the context of population growth and climate change, he sidesteps entirely what many regard as the principal moral issue--whether it is ethical for humans to kill and eat animals. Some readers may be frustrated by this. Likewise the author's emphasis on the social and ecological condition of Great Britain may cause some to question the relevance of the book to the rest of the world. But I found his analysis helpful and compelling, and had no trouble projecting his conclusions onto societies outside Britain.
July 4, 2017
Extensive and intensive investigation of livestock, their uses and misuses. Some valid points about the critical role livestock play in agriculture and livelihoods. Towards the end a low-energy rural permaculture idyll is sketched out, which mixes reasonable criticism with luddite fantasy. We are not getting to the stars by shepherding cows.
May 30, 2023
An outstanding contribution to the debate on sustainable farming and diet. Still as relevant today as when it was written. If you are an organic being and care about your ecosystem and health, read this.
January 28, 2019
Not always exactly an enjoyable read, as it is essentially a research document. However, for those interested in the environment, ecology or farming this is essential reading material.
August 20, 2021
A meticulously researched and beautifully written account of the complicated modern world of eating meat.
March 20, 2012
The book has gone back to the library, however, I've read enough to give it at least three stars. I intend to finish it. If you are a vegetarian / vegan looking for a book by an opponent of vegetarianism, this is a much better read than "The Vegetarian Myth." It has some problems, though, and I think he's really misunderstood Goodland and Anhang's thesis on "Livestock and Climate Change," and made some basically illiterate attacks on their point of view.
One of the nice things about Fairlie's book is that he clearly understands much of the logic of the vegan / vegetarian argument. Sometimes he will start to describe an idea favoring animal agriculture, and you'll say to yourself, "wait a minute, that's not right" -- but then sure enough, in a paragraph or two, he'll refute the idea he has just brought up himself. So he's not just a parrot for the meat industry, or even for organic agriculture, by a long shot.
In general, Fairlie's defense of meat seems to be based on the idea of meat as economically efficient (those cows can mostly take care of themselves), and the idea of meat as a storage device (what are you going to eat this winter or if your crops fail?). This is coupled with a fall back defensive strategy: meat produced on factory farms, and/or on a large scale, is bad; but on a small scale, not so bad. In fact the somewhat minor problems small-scale meat production causes, in Fairlie's view, are outweighed by the economic advantages and flexibility of an omnivorous diet.
"Small scale meat production" (compared to today's meat production, anyway) caused massive damage to the world in the form of overgrazing (Northern Africa beginning in the 6th century, the southwestern U. S. at the end of the 19th century, etc.). If we defined our terms, "small scale meat production" could wind up being pretty massive and could still wind up doing a lot of damage. When you talk about small scale meat production, you convey to western readers the idea of meat 2 or 3 times a week, but in practice "sustainable meat" would be much less frequent even than that, or would be the practice only of a small elite, with resultant social problems of inequality -- or both. And even at small levels animal agriculture can be bad; in several ways grazing cattle is actually worse than feedlot cattle. It is very destructive both of the soil and of biodiversity. I understand Fairlie's argument, but I am not convinced.
The health disadvantages of meat consumption are also very problematic and are not adequately addressed. We adopted meat consumption as hunter-gatherers when people frequently didn't live to be 30, so heart disease and cancer were of marginal importance. If we want to go back to that life expectancy, then meat might be excused as a "benign extravagance," but otherwise, we are going to pay for it one way or the other.
"Wasted food" (food thrown away, grasslands, and inedible parts of crops) is a big issue with Fairlie. My basic response to this is that this concept of "waste" is an economic concept. Food thrown away can be composted. Grasslands can be left alone or allowed to revert to forest. Inedible parts of crops should likewise be left on the ground or composted. Soil underpins our civilization, and to undermine the soil on the basis that it shortchanges our economy is a misguided economy.
One of the nice things about Fairlie's book is that he clearly understands much of the logic of the vegan / vegetarian argument. Sometimes he will start to describe an idea favoring animal agriculture, and you'll say to yourself, "wait a minute, that's not right" -- but then sure enough, in a paragraph or two, he'll refute the idea he has just brought up himself. So he's not just a parrot for the meat industry, or even for organic agriculture, by a long shot.
In general, Fairlie's defense of meat seems to be based on the idea of meat as economically efficient (those cows can mostly take care of themselves), and the idea of meat as a storage device (what are you going to eat this winter or if your crops fail?). This is coupled with a fall back defensive strategy: meat produced on factory farms, and/or on a large scale, is bad; but on a small scale, not so bad. In fact the somewhat minor problems small-scale meat production causes, in Fairlie's view, are outweighed by the economic advantages and flexibility of an omnivorous diet.
"Small scale meat production" (compared to today's meat production, anyway) caused massive damage to the world in the form of overgrazing (Northern Africa beginning in the 6th century, the southwestern U. S. at the end of the 19th century, etc.). If we defined our terms, "small scale meat production" could wind up being pretty massive and could still wind up doing a lot of damage. When you talk about small scale meat production, you convey to western readers the idea of meat 2 or 3 times a week, but in practice "sustainable meat" would be much less frequent even than that, or would be the practice only of a small elite, with resultant social problems of inequality -- or both. And even at small levels animal agriculture can be bad; in several ways grazing cattle is actually worse than feedlot cattle. It is very destructive both of the soil and of biodiversity. I understand Fairlie's argument, but I am not convinced.
The health disadvantages of meat consumption are also very problematic and are not adequately addressed. We adopted meat consumption as hunter-gatherers when people frequently didn't live to be 30, so heart disease and cancer were of marginal importance. If we want to go back to that life expectancy, then meat might be excused as a "benign extravagance," but otherwise, we are going to pay for it one way or the other.
"Wasted food" (food thrown away, grasslands, and inedible parts of crops) is a big issue with Fairlie. My basic response to this is that this concept of "waste" is an economic concept. Food thrown away can be composted. Grasslands can be left alone or allowed to revert to forest. Inedible parts of crops should likewise be left on the ground or composted. Soil underpins our civilization, and to undermine the soil on the basis that it shortchanges our economy is a misguided economy.
May 10, 2017
The central argument of this book-- that a modest amount of meat and dairy production is not only environmentally benign, but is in fact a necessary part of ecologically sustainable food production-- is pretty thoroughly laid out here. This is an equation that is explicitly calculated in terms of the number of calories that can be sustainably produced, ie. sans considerations of animal welfare-- although the author can't help but keep dipping his toes into those waters as the book progresses. In his pursuit of the various threads of his argument, he is rigorous to a fault; the fault being that the book is overly long and really drags in parts. Oddly, the author seems nonchalantly aware of this, even recommending to his readers that they skip one of the chapters. I certainly took his advice.
Curiously, near the end of this book, he kind of goes off the rails and, like a kid kicking his own sandcastle, brings so much of this turgidly accumulated credibility crashing down. This is where his Vegan Conspiracy is finally revealed: Apparently, veganism goes hand in hand with the cult of transhumanism; that is, the desire to replace humans with a superior beings via a combination of genetic engineering and cybernetics.
Several months after I finished reading this book, what bothers me more is that the emphasis is given to the positive case for (some) meat and dairy consumption, rather than the equally compelling (but perhaps less marketable) case for eating a lot less meat and dairy than we currently do. The facts presented support both arguments, and to be fair, the author does make the latter point, but it is rather in the manner of a casual aside. But there is surely a greater need to make the case for reducing meat and dairy consumption given that the status quo (according to this book) is a destructive and unsustainably high level of consumption. Fairlie argues that "a vegan diet, laudable though it may be for the individual, is neither sensible nor attainable for society as a whole". Maybe so, but to reduce overall consumption, perhaps the best course of action we can take as individuals is to eliminate these things from our diet.
Despite its faults, this book does a worthy job of providing a big picture of how we produce food. There are lots interesting (and worrying) issues touched upon, not least the one-way flow of nutrients from farmland to urban parks and oceans that has resulted from mechanised, large-scale food production. Kudos is also due for pretty thoroughly destroying some of the more absurd disinformation bandied around the internet, like the '20,000 litres of water required to produce 1kg of beef' claim, which I always suspected was bunk and now know to be so.
It also provides food for thought for those who (like me) follow Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida et al, in celebrating cities as a solution to problems rather than their cause. I can't say I'm anywhere near convinced we should all go back to living in villages-- his arguments along those lines are approached from a pretty narrow perspective-- but I must admit I'm a bit less confident than I was before.
Curiously, near the end of this book, he kind of goes off the rails and, like a kid kicking his own sandcastle, brings so much of this turgidly accumulated credibility crashing down. This is where his Vegan Conspiracy is finally revealed: Apparently, veganism goes hand in hand with the cult of transhumanism; that is, the desire to replace humans with a superior beings via a combination of genetic engineering and cybernetics.
Several months after I finished reading this book, what bothers me more is that the emphasis is given to the positive case for (some) meat and dairy consumption, rather than the equally compelling (but perhaps less marketable) case for eating a lot less meat and dairy than we currently do. The facts presented support both arguments, and to be fair, the author does make the latter point, but it is rather in the manner of a casual aside. But there is surely a greater need to make the case for reducing meat and dairy consumption given that the status quo (according to this book) is a destructive and unsustainably high level of consumption. Fairlie argues that "a vegan diet, laudable though it may be for the individual, is neither sensible nor attainable for society as a whole". Maybe so, but to reduce overall consumption, perhaps the best course of action we can take as individuals is to eliminate these things from our diet.
Despite its faults, this book does a worthy job of providing a big picture of how we produce food. There are lots interesting (and worrying) issues touched upon, not least the one-way flow of nutrients from farmland to urban parks and oceans that has resulted from mechanised, large-scale food production. Kudos is also due for pretty thoroughly destroying some of the more absurd disinformation bandied around the internet, like the '20,000 litres of water required to produce 1kg of beef' claim, which I always suspected was bunk and now know to be so.
It also provides food for thought for those who (like me) follow Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida et al, in celebrating cities as a solution to problems rather than their cause. I can't say I'm anywhere near convinced we should all go back to living in villages-- his arguments along those lines are approached from a pretty narrow perspective-- but I must admit I'm a bit less confident than I was before.
September 28, 2012
This book advocates that meat has a rightful place on the farm. It's falsely cited as a case against veganism. This author isn't against veganism or vegetarianism, and clearly believes it has its place. It's more accurate to say he's very strongly against what you might call a sort of totalitarian approach to veganism, the idea that we must transform the entire world to vegans, eliminating all animal products entirely. There's an interesting chapter that paints a pretty bleak picture of what such a world would look like, followed by a chapter showing what kind of world he's advocating. It's certainly not what most meat lovers would have in mind. It's extremely rural, almost luddite.
This book sure was painful to trudge through. It's very, very dense. The author isn't a scientist, but damn does he know his farming. I scarcely understood much of it, but enough to get his gist. Here's an example of how this book reads: "During the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945, the average number of animals put down per outbreak was just 1.5. Since the slaughter policy was reintroduced in 1963 there have been nearly half a million pigs slaughtered at an average of 275 per outbreak. In 2001, there were 16 outbreaks, in which 74,000 pigs were slaughtered - an average of 4,625 per outbreak." Got all that?
But I think it was worth reading. At least parts of it were, and the rest worth skimming. The two aforementioned chapters, and especially the chapter on global warming, which is the real reason I read it. There is one U.N. study quoted everywhere, that 18% of human-caused green house gases are emited by livestock raised for food. I believed this for a while, but I had a little niggling feeling something was wrong when I never found any other studies to confirm this surprisingly huge number. This book breaks down that number, and everything that went into creating it, in excruciating detail. He spells out all the flaws with it, and adjusts the number to what he thinks is more accurate. When added up, he gets 10%, which sounds more reasonable to me anyway.
I was so persuaded by this book, and found it so impressively researched, that I'd love to give it four stars, but it was just too painful to read. Every page was a slug-fest, and by the end I felt exhausted, not enlightened. So I'm settling on three stars. Definitely read it if you love numbers and understand farming and permaculture fairly well. Otherwise, just read the chapter on global warming, and then read The Omnivore's Dilemma instead.
This book sure was painful to trudge through. It's very, very dense. The author isn't a scientist, but damn does he know his farming. I scarcely understood much of it, but enough to get his gist. Here's an example of how this book reads: "During the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945, the average number of animals put down per outbreak was just 1.5. Since the slaughter policy was reintroduced in 1963 there have been nearly half a million pigs slaughtered at an average of 275 per outbreak. In 2001, there were 16 outbreaks, in which 74,000 pigs were slaughtered - an average of 4,625 per outbreak." Got all that?
But I think it was worth reading. At least parts of it were, and the rest worth skimming. The two aforementioned chapters, and especially the chapter on global warming, which is the real reason I read it. There is one U.N. study quoted everywhere, that 18% of human-caused green house gases are emited by livestock raised for food. I believed this for a while, but I had a little niggling feeling something was wrong when I never found any other studies to confirm this surprisingly huge number. This book breaks down that number, and everything that went into creating it, in excruciating detail. He spells out all the flaws with it, and adjusts the number to what he thinks is more accurate. When added up, he gets 10%, which sounds more reasonable to me anyway.
I was so persuaded by this book, and found it so impressively researched, that I'd love to give it four stars, but it was just too painful to read. Every page was a slug-fest, and by the end I felt exhausted, not enlightened. So I'm settling on three stars. Definitely read it if you love numbers and understand farming and permaculture fairly well. Otherwise, just read the chapter on global warming, and then read The Omnivore's Dilemma instead.
January 12, 2015
Jam packed with real information. The print is small & the pages are thin, so you really get a lot of brain food. This isn't a fun entertaining read like 'Holy Sh-t Managing Manure To Save Mankind' This is pretty much the exact opposite of 'Holy S' The author breaks down all the different point of views on farming. Everything you can think of he analyzes. From the meat eaters perspective, to the Vegans & everyone & everything in-between.
Exactly how damaging to our planet is eating animals??? Is the information we are given correct? He even points out how the information given to us as fact on the same subject changes based on the audience. Are you on a Vegan website? Then the info. he uncovers shows that eating animals is wrong! Death to us & the planet. How about the Pro Meat groups? Well, they say something different.
What does the author do? He breaks down both, trying to uncover the REAL truth.
Is farming with animals better than farming without? How much does it really cost to raise grain for animals vs. grain for humans giving the value to the end product in what we can eat from it. Example, a cow eats so many tons of grasses or grain depending on if the cow is from a disgusting CFO or pasture raised as nature intended. There is so much to pull apart.
As you can see, it is not only the Pro-Meat Anti-Meat view, but also the Organic, Non Organic view. The CFO data vs the pasture raised data. CFO animals use vastly more water than pastured animals. What about how much water is required to grow the grains & grasses? What about the waste from animal products that are no longer allowed for human consumption - though they were at one time. All of these factor into the REAL cost of animals & the humans that eat them.
It is simply too much info. to cover it all easily in one review. If you find yourself falling asleep at books giving you a lot of facts & not a lot of chit chat along with the info. (like in 'Holy S' - I know I keep using this book as an example, but I just can't help myself, it really fits. It has virtually the same point of view as this book, but puts it in a humorous short & easy read, though it lacks the in depth technical stuff that this book contains. Really both books are the perfect companions for one another!) then you will not want to read this book. You will most likely find 'Holy S' exactly what you want. However, if you are a facts junkie & like your proof, then by all means this book is the book for you.
Bottom line, if you care about the raging debate on our food. No matter if you are a Vegan or a Omnivore, this book is filled with facts. You will leave it educated & empowered!
Exactly how damaging to our planet is eating animals??? Is the information we are given correct? He even points out how the information given to us as fact on the same subject changes based on the audience. Are you on a Vegan website? Then the info. he uncovers shows that eating animals is wrong! Death to us & the planet. How about the Pro Meat groups? Well, they say something different.
What does the author do? He breaks down both, trying to uncover the REAL truth.
Is farming with animals better than farming without? How much does it really cost to raise grain for animals vs. grain for humans giving the value to the end product in what we can eat from it. Example, a cow eats so many tons of grasses or grain depending on if the cow is from a disgusting CFO or pasture raised as nature intended. There is so much to pull apart.
As you can see, it is not only the Pro-Meat Anti-Meat view, but also the Organic, Non Organic view. The CFO data vs the pasture raised data. CFO animals use vastly more water than pastured animals. What about how much water is required to grow the grains & grasses? What about the waste from animal products that are no longer allowed for human consumption - though they were at one time. All of these factor into the REAL cost of animals & the humans that eat them.
It is simply too much info. to cover it all easily in one review. If you find yourself falling asleep at books giving you a lot of facts & not a lot of chit chat along with the info. (like in 'Holy S' - I know I keep using this book as an example, but I just can't help myself, it really fits. It has virtually the same point of view as this book, but puts it in a humorous short & easy read, though it lacks the in depth technical stuff that this book contains. Really both books are the perfect companions for one another!) then you will not want to read this book. You will most likely find 'Holy S' exactly what you want. However, if you are a facts junkie & like your proof, then by all means this book is the book for you.
Bottom line, if you care about the raging debate on our food. No matter if you are a Vegan or a Omnivore, this book is filled with facts. You will leave it educated & empowered!
August 15, 2013
Fortunate timing meant that I happened to finish reading this book on the same day on which the world's first synthetic burger was unveiled.
This is just one of the topics discussed in Simon Farilie's book, and is a good representation of the purpose of the book.
Some reviewers have commented on the author's missing issues around ethics etc, as well as his visions of a vegan-run world, but this really misses the point of Meat: A Benign Extravagance.
I am not in a position to comment on the validity of Simon's facts and figures. This is a pretty figure-heavy book, and he actually warns us of this at the beginning, encouraging the reader to skip bits without guilt if it is not to their taste.
To begin with, I did find it quite heavy-going, but soon got into the book as it went on with some fascinating case studies to accompany the numbers, although I will concede that I did glaze over a little in the carbon section. I buy my scythes from Simon Fairlie, but will probably not admit this to him!
Everything seemed to be properly referenced and overall seemed fair, so even if there are some errors, I really don't think it undermines the overall point of the book, which is to show, not only do we not have to stop eating meat in order to feed our growing global population, but that sustainably-reared meat is an integral part of a sustainable food system.
This is not a book for everyone - aside from the figure-heavy nature of the book, the author has a very dry sense of humour, which I very much enjoyed, but of course, others may not appreciate it to quite the same degree. As the book progresses, "The Vegans" begin to resemble (to me at least) almost something of the pantomime villain, on the surface anyway, however if you follow the author's logic, this portrayal is perhaps not quite so ridiculous as it may appear; it is merely a light-hearted tool with which to tackle the various very common-sense issues inherent in the different farming visions he presents.
Overall, for anyone interested in issues around sustainability, farming, permaculture etc, this is a very entertaining, thought-provoking book that is well worth reading, as long as you are prepared to roll up your sleeves and delve into the numbers.
This is just one of the topics discussed in Simon Farilie's book, and is a good representation of the purpose of the book.
Some reviewers have commented on the author's missing issues around ethics etc, as well as his visions of a vegan-run world, but this really misses the point of Meat: A Benign Extravagance.
I am not in a position to comment on the validity of Simon's facts and figures. This is a pretty figure-heavy book, and he actually warns us of this at the beginning, encouraging the reader to skip bits without guilt if it is not to their taste.
To begin with, I did find it quite heavy-going, but soon got into the book as it went on with some fascinating case studies to accompany the numbers, although I will concede that I did glaze over a little in the carbon section. I buy my scythes from Simon Fairlie, but will probably not admit this to him!
Everything seemed to be properly referenced and overall seemed fair, so even if there are some errors, I really don't think it undermines the overall point of the book, which is to show, not only do we not have to stop eating meat in order to feed our growing global population, but that sustainably-reared meat is an integral part of a sustainable food system.
This is not a book for everyone - aside from the figure-heavy nature of the book, the author has a very dry sense of humour, which I very much enjoyed, but of course, others may not appreciate it to quite the same degree. As the book progresses, "The Vegans" begin to resemble (to me at least) almost something of the pantomime villain, on the surface anyway, however if you follow the author's logic, this portrayal is perhaps not quite so ridiculous as it may appear; it is merely a light-hearted tool with which to tackle the various very common-sense issues inherent in the different farming visions he presents.
Overall, for anyone interested in issues around sustainability, farming, permaculture etc, this is a very entertaining, thought-provoking book that is well worth reading, as long as you are prepared to roll up your sleeves and delve into the numbers.
July 22, 2012
Meat is a collection of well-sourced, almost scholarly essays written by a small-scale farmer about meat, meat production, and meat eating. It was far more comprehensive than I expected, and one of the main things I took away was the importance of critical thinking about the subject- particularly when it comes to numbers and statistics! As it turns out a good number of them are something someone pulled out of... somewhere at some point, and subsequently acquire an aura of Holy Writ as they are cited and re-cited by authors who have never bothered to dig into where they came from and how they were calculated.
Another important point was the applicability of many of those numbers and statistics. A number calculated for small-scale production of grass-fed beef may not apply at all to a large-scale CAFO produced animal (or vice-versa). Also, these numbers and whether or not they are applicable tend to get politicized by the various factions (of which there are many- meat-eaters, vegetarians, BigAgriculture, small organic farmers...)
The long and short of it: meat, if raised properly as part of balanced agriculture, is something we can work into our diet without wrecking the planet. The large scale CAFO practices, probably not so much. But in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, don't take my word for it...
Another important point was the applicability of many of those numbers and statistics. A number calculated for small-scale production of grass-fed beef may not apply at all to a large-scale CAFO produced animal (or vice-versa). Also, these numbers and whether or not they are applicable tend to get politicized by the various factions (of which there are many- meat-eaters, vegetarians, BigAgriculture, small organic farmers...)
The long and short of it: meat, if raised properly as part of balanced agriculture, is something we can work into our diet without wrecking the planet. The large scale CAFO practices, probably not so much. But in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, don't take my word for it...
February 26, 2016
A fascinating treatise on the effects of meat consumption on society and environment. An astonishingly well-done argument for the inclusion of meat in our diet and agricultural systems. Fairlie addresses many of the most commonly circulated 'reasons' to exclude livestock from our lives and diets from the idea that we could feed the world to the concept of cows causing more global warming than cars. The depth of his research and analysis is astounding, coming together in a convincing case to keep livestock around.
This book is divided into chapters, each of which is a stand-alone essay on a particular topic, and don't need to be read in order. While the subject matter is extremely interesting the in-depth nature of the essays can be daunting. It took me several months to chip through them all just for the sheer magnitude of the information he manages to convey. If you've ever wondered about the impact of livestock keeping and what level of livestock is sustainable you should certainly read this. If you are in the vegetarian/vegan camp you should also definitely read this.
This book is divided into chapters, each of which is a stand-alone essay on a particular topic, and don't need to be read in order. While the subject matter is extremely interesting the in-depth nature of the essays can be daunting. It took me several months to chip through them all just for the sheer magnitude of the information he manages to convey. If you've ever wondered about the impact of livestock keeping and what level of livestock is sustainable you should certainly read this. If you are in the vegetarian/vegan camp you should also definitely read this.
July 5, 2016
This isn't actually a book about eating or not eating meat. What it is actually about is how we have to revert to rural living, which would necessarily entail the utilisation of animals. The author presents a lot of very well researched arguments as to why eating meat isn't that bad from an environmental perspective (only slightly worse, and for much gain in terms of protein/energy consumption) but through the whole book a rhetoric for going rural is built, and it goes off the deep end towards the conclusion. I enjoyed the book more when it discussed specific animals and food usage (there is basically a whole chapter on milk) rather than the later chapters that discussed grass and trees. These are still important factors and the chapters contained some great insight, but I mostly skipped over them. Nonetheless, this book is full of great information and provided me with some potential story writing material, particularly as the author projected into the future with both vegan and rural potentials! Highly recommend it if you are interested in the effect of agriculture on the land.
February 19, 2011
Holy cow (har!), this is dense. Not for the mathematically or philosophically faint of heart, but it's a very intriguing read.
Fairlie walks through exhaustive analysis of efficiency and ecological impacts of all kinds of food production methods over the course of 17 chapters. I learned some fascinating things: the concept of stockfree agriculture, for example, was totally knew to me; and the idea of livestock (particularly pigs) as a hedge against lean crops years makes a lot of sense. It also made me rethink a reliance on imported, soy-based products as a way to reduce animal product consumption.
I felt like I should have received 3 or 4 undergrad credits after working my way through. But even without those, it was worthwhile. Fairlie's well-supported argument for small-scale, integrated, rural livestock farming is a challenge to viewpoints at every extreme.
Fairlie walks through exhaustive analysis of efficiency and ecological impacts of all kinds of food production methods over the course of 17 chapters. I learned some fascinating things: the concept of stockfree agriculture, for example, was totally knew to me; and the idea of livestock (particularly pigs) as a hedge against lean crops years makes a lot of sense. It also made me rethink a reliance on imported, soy-based products as a way to reduce animal product consumption.
I felt like I should have received 3 or 4 undergrad credits after working my way through. But even without those, it was worthwhile. Fairlie's well-supported argument for small-scale, integrated, rural livestock farming is a challenge to viewpoints at every extreme.
October 18, 2012
This was an interesting look at livestock's place in permaculture, but also a bit of a slog in places due to the heavy focus on calculations of crop yields, carbon sequestration, and similar topics (the introduction recommends skipping around between chapters, but I am sadly too much of a completist for that).
The main conclusion, as I interpreted it, is that animals can play a positive role in food production, but that it needs to be quite different from the current arrangement (involving reduced meat consumption, Salatin-style rotation of cattle through different areas of a field, the elimination of CAFOs, etc.). I found Fairlie's writing to be persuasive but haven't done enough reading on the topic to have an opinion on the accuracy of his claims.
The main conclusion, as I interpreted it, is that animals can play a positive role in food production, but that it needs to be quite different from the current arrangement (involving reduced meat consumption, Salatin-style rotation of cattle through different areas of a field, the elimination of CAFOs, etc.). I found Fairlie's writing to be persuasive but haven't done enough reading on the topic to have an opinion on the accuracy of his claims.
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