Cut the Cow, pass on the pork, leave the lamb ...

Christmas, as you might imagine, can be a testing time for vegetarians. All that ostentatious consumption of meat along with the mental picture it conjures up of mass-slaughter and factory-farm conditions for the vast majority of hapless victims. It is more particularly testing for those of us who are vegetarian for reasons of environmental impact and planetary justice. We don't have the fairly absolute inner prohibitions in place that our animal-welfare sibling-vegetarians and vegans have. We are merely 'tactically' vegetarian; that is we are not refraining from meat because we think that eating flesh is simply wrong. On the contrary we think that there may be a time for some meat-eating if the world were not so screwed up. So our difficulty is the treacherous sense that we could eat some meat, it's a special occasion, and it does look so nice, and everyone is enjoying it so, and just one little bit wouldn't hurt...

But of course, that would be the slippery slope to rejoining the overconsumption that is now normal in the global-North /West. I've been there and got the t-shirt. You see, I became vegetarian when I was about 22, mostly because I was convinced by Ron Sider's position in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Basically Sider pointed out that in a world where many died of hunger and malnutrition, it was scandalous that we made meat a regular part of our diet given that it was so expensive, in resource terms to produce. His figures were (if memory serves me aright) that it took roughly 8 units of vegetable protein to produce one unit of beef, 6 for lamb or mutton and 4 for poultry. Our mouthfuls of meat were taking the bread from the mouths of the global poor, as we could outbid them to feed our livestock..

Later on, I got fed up of the way that my diet seemed to inconvenience people in my parish; so I decided I'd eat meat from time to time mainly to not put others out. (It takes a re-vamping of the culinary imagination to be able to menu in vegetarian and a lot of people were clearly flummoxed when their invitation to a meal became a bit more of a drama than they had anticipated). The problem was 'occasionally' slipped into 'regularly' and before long the idea of being a lower meat-consumption body was away with the fairies. So a few years later, I realised what had happened, prompted partly by the keeping company with vegans and vegetarians and partly by my daughter's dislike of most meat, and I re-became vegetarian. It was good, also, to return to the major reason and renounce meat for the ecological footprint reasons.

These reasons are well-stated by Philip Sampson in a recently-published article in Third Way (December 2009, in fact). Let me quote some of his pithy summaries of the argument.

Industrial meat production is a profligate consumer of grain and water. One kilogram of beef requires 16 kilograms of feed and the same volume of water as 200 kilograms of potatoes. Worse, more than one third of the world's grain harvest is fed to livestock, and two thirds of cattle food in the industrial world is imported from countries where there is a shortage of grain. ...

Current meat consumption in the UK requires six times more land than we have available. We therefore import feed, and fatten animals on other people's land. Cattle grazing and animal feed are the main drivers of deforestation worldwide. ...

The livestock industry generates some 18 per cent of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Reducing meat consumption is the most effective single thing a family can do to combat global warming. ...
Our abuse of animals is certainly unsustainable, and it would be foolish to continue a pattern of consumption that robs our children.

There you have it: these seem to me to be huge reasons to reduce, if not eliminate, meat from our diets. You may as well start and get in practice now because when peak oil hits and carbon trading effects kick in, we're going to notice quite big hikes in price of meat and of products which hiddenly rely on meat production. It is a matter of justice for the globally-marginal and precarious. It is a matter of creation care for the beleaguered ecosystem that God has let us have in trust for future generations and the dignity and beauty of what it has become.

Lord when did we see you hungry and fed you? ... When you forewent meat and helped to feed the hungry, you did it to me.

Lord, when did we see you naked and clothed you? ... When you ate only vegetables, you saved forest from the plough; then you clothed me in the verdancy of the planet.

In as far as you did this for one of these little ones and for my creation, you did it to me.