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Hungry for a solution to the food crisis
April 15th, 2008 at 16:13
I was reading George Monbiot’s column in the Guardian today – you’ve got to keep up with the competition after all – and it contained some excellent information, that now that I think about it, is blindingly obvious.
Despite positioning myself as a rationalist, and a militant Dawkinsian (I’m coining that now), there’s one part of my character that before I’ve never really been able to justify: my vegetarianism.
Even though Stephen Law, in The Philosophy Gym, in his philosophical judgement, puts the burden on the meat-eaters to justify their murderous lifestyle, and even though there’s stacks of reports condemning the treatment of animals raised for their meat, my vegetarianism has been driven mainly by the arguably irrational position that “killing is wrong”, and more importantly the notion that “you can’t hurt cute little animals!”
However, it turns out that I can link my irrational lifestyle to a firmly rational topic: the global food crisis. For those out of the (honey-nut) loop, various tedious economic factors have sent the price of basic food staples, like grain soaring, meaning loads of people haven’t been able to afford food – hence stuff like the riots in Haiti – and its only going to get worse.
The thing is, there’s apparently loads of food to go round, its just that animals used in meat production are getting it instead of humans, and so the production of meat uses more food resources than non-meat products. Which is obvious when you think about it – if you’re growing up a cow so that you can mercilessly slaughter it, it does all of things that the “MRS NERG” mnemonic (Move, Respire, er, Something, Nutrition, Something, Something, and Something) states whilst its still breathing.
Anyway, to cut a long story short (just read the damn article), Monbiot reckons that if everyone cut down on meat consumption, the global food crisis would be solved. So this means that next time anyone questions my vegetarianism I can trot out an altruistic answer and claim I’m saving the world. Excellent.
This almost makes up for my gigantic carbon footprint.
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