ETHICS AND AN ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIENCE // are enough for many to reduce their meat consumption. But is factory farming solely the result of demand or is it also an issue of supply? Are we forgetting one of the biggest issues that got us into this mess in the first place?
If you’re swapping meat for a more grain based diet, depending on where you shop and which supplier you support, you may be contributing to the wealth and power of the very bad guys that undermine the problems we face in farming and environmental degradation today. Companies like Cargills dominate so much of the world's food production, predominantly due to their heavy hand in the corn industry as well as their dominance in factory farming, and most of the processed food in our supermarkets have come from their crops and is supporting their use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides as well as supporting their strong hold in politics. So what might seem to be a noble ethical decision to avoid meat consumption, if then swapping this meat for processed foods and a heavy grain diet, might actually mean your ethical contribution is wrongly directed and playing into the same dirty hands that have created industrial scale food manufacture at the expense of not only our gas emissions and animal welfare but also our fast eroding topsoil and disappearing bee colonies as monocultures continue to dominate our supply system.
What’s the solution? Personally I would say it comes down to who you support more than what you eat. There are small scale regenerative farms out there doing amazing things for the environment, respecting the top soil and creating farms which use no chemical intervention and keep water usage to a bear minimum. In truth they are making a better impact than a lot of vegetable farms out there which need large amounts of water to produce mono-crops all year round and to support the demands of global food industry which now relies on food to be supplied out of season at the expense of the environment. The reality, it is going to come down to individual choice, and rather than blindly following fads (even though they are often with plausible good intention) it's better to start educating ourselves in the underlying problems which have gotten us into this mess in the first place. Whilst my family predominantly follows a plant-based diet, we do eat meat which we buy from a small scale local supplier whose ethics and values lay in regenerative farming techniques. We eat such a small proportion and respectfully, choosing different cuts and making them last several meals by boiling down bones and eating every last scrap. But more to the point, we know who supplies the food we eat and we believe in their values and that they supply us food which is in season and made without intervention.
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