'Milk, Meat, Forbidden'

My purchase of cheese on our recent trip to Castle Cary was a sort of temptation. I told myself I was supporting local suppliers, which I was, although the Calverley Mill Scorpion here pictured is local to Cheshire, not Somerset, but since discovering that soy milk and coconut-based cheese – vegetable fats – behave in pretty much the same culinary ways as, and produce not dissimilar results from, their animal equivalents, my dairy intake has been reduced to a splash of cow juice in tea and on cereal, as the vegetable milks are much less pleasing for those purposes. So I shouldn't really have done.

Generally, people seem to assume that you put a cow in a field of lush grass and it will automatically turn it into milk, which it won’t. The cow (or whatever) has to be pregnant or nursing, and in modern farming cows and calves are usually separated very early on, the calves being then fed artificially while their mothers’ natural milk is retained for human use. Modern cows are bred to maximise their periods of pregnancy, and very rarely get anywhere near a bull: insemination is usually artificial too. You don’t have to express this process in emotive and inappropriate human terms such as ‘theft’ and ‘rape’ to get the point that it isn’t a very natural life for an animal to be living; you can do it in a more natural way, but it’s very cost-inefficient and rarely happens.

The last time I bought any meat it was part of a cow I am pretty sure I would have met. Our Swanvale Halt butcher takes its Aberdeen Angus beef from a local herd which is sometimes pastured on the meadowlands around Hornington, so you can see the cows every time you walk along the main road during the season, or at a farm in Shintleham where I happen sometimes to go for meetings of a local charity. The butcher even tells you where the animals are slaughtered, a small, family-run slaughterhouse a few miles away. This is about as animal-friendly and environmentally-acceptable as modern meat production gets. When I bought it, I looked at my tiny, expensive steak and hoped I wouldn’t ruin it in the oven.

Most of our meat and dairy produce doesn’t come from farms like the one at Shintleham. It’s produced by vast agribusinesses, some of them international ones, the expression of an industrial farming system making cheap food out of specialised forms of animals designed to do one thing out of the many a given animal might do, at maximum efficiency. And, though I know that 1) an animal ending its life by becoming food is hardly an unnatural or unjust fate, and 2) you can’t have traditional, holistic, what is in modern parlance called regenerative farming without the poo of animals to fertilise the land where you grow your crops; despite all that, even the Shintleham cows are being bred so that I can eat them, when I really, really don’t need to. I can, with care, get my protein and vitamins elsewhere; and so, I have concluded, I should. My romantic attachment to the ideal of small-scale holistic farming, the sort my grandad would have been familiar with in the second quarter of the last century, is basically fed by delusion. That’s not what farming usually is in the first quarter of this one. I don’t like animals and wouldn’t share my home with one, apart from the insects I can do little about, but I can’t justify eating beings that have been created for me to eat by a colossal global industry, whose five biggest companies pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than Exxon, when it isn’t necessary.

The other evening The Moral Maze on Radio 4 was discussing proposals to enshrine the sentience of animals in law. Roman Catholic commentator Tim Stanley came out with the following extraordinary statement:

There is a practical consequence of an all-out war on abuses against animals, and that is the decimation of industries around which human beings have built their lives, leisure, food etc. … Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and really confronted what eating meat means. We would be appalled with ourselves, we would regard ourselves as genocidal maniacs. It has a huge impact on our moral view of ourselves, not just our treatment of animals but our entire moral identity. That’s why it’s right to be cautious, because there are huge consequences for doing something that seems so obviously benign.

Mr Stanley finds his way to reconcile knowing what happens to animals in the meat industry with his belief that they should be treated justly, through the Christian idea of dominion, a God-ordered structure of relationships which includes humans within a natural order of killing and eating. My question is whether what actually happens in the 2020s genuinely reflects that. Instead I have found myself (as Christian does in the Pilgrims Progress) living in the City of Destruction. ‘Arise, Peter, kill and eat’, it says in the Book of Acts; but now, it isn’t the animals that are unclean, it’s our human usage of them. 

(I didn't spoil the wee steak, but I didn't enjoy it that much either).