From Raj Patel's excellent blog:

Is Meat off the Menu?

I've a piece in this week's issue of The Observer on meat, and my intention to stop eating it.

It was a much longer article before the wise people at the Food and Drink desk cut some of my excesses. But I'm sad that they lost a couple of references to Mark Bittman, to whom I'm grateful not only because I get to guest-blog at Bitten but because I find his work on meat, first here and more recently here, tremendously important and I wanted to thank him publicly.

Incidentally, in the same issue of the Observer Food Magazine, Joanna Blythman disagrees with me about meat. Her arguments are unusually flimsy. She suggests that, because the nomadic Masai have developed a complex system of nutrition dependent on livestock, the British have too, and therefore should be let alone. There are a range of other logical leaps, most of which I address.

You can read my position below the fold, and Blythman's at the Observer Food Magazine website.

America is the most overweight country on earth. Only three out of 10 Americans have a normal body weight. I should have guessed that one of the side effects of moving to the US would be bloating.

Since leaving London for America a decade ago, I've put on a couple of stone. It's easy enough to blame the food environment here. This is, after all, the land where Reagan pronounced tomato ketchup a fruit and, more recently, where French fries and chocolate-covered cherries were legally dubbed 'fresh produce' under a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulation known as the batter-coating rule.

I can't just censure America for my condition, of course. Getting older and stopping smoking have accelerated my middle-age spread. I'm more active now than I used to be, but that hasn't kept the podge at bay. And I'm convinced that part of the problem is that I eat meat. I came to America a vegetarian and I've lapsed into occasional chicken and fish (though, because of a residual Hinduism, no beef).

I'm not the only person to be blaming flesh for bad outcomes. In America, meat has been getting some bad press recently. The Humane Society of the United States earlier this year posted a widely circulated video, filmed undercover at an abattoir in California. It shows workers ramming cows with fork-lift trucks in order to persuade them to walk. There was a financial incentive for them to do it - 'downer cows', cows that are too sick to walk, are prohibited from entering the food system. By the time the story broke and the USDA announced a recall, most of the beef had already been distributed and fed to children through the school-meal programme.

Even Oprah has announced that she's going vegan, if only for a three-week 'cleanse'. Oprah has had run-ins with the meat industry before. In 1998, on hearing that American cows were being fed to other American cows in very British BSE-generating practices, she 'stopped cold' her beef consumption. A group of Texas cattlemen were aggrieved. They used one of the handful of legal restrictions to free speech rights in the US: you're not allowed to disparage agricultural products here. They claimed that Oprah had done just that. They lost in court. Twice. Yet the implication, not too far from the surface in Oprah's vegan detox diet, is that there's something fairly toxic about meat.

Meat consumption has come under attack on grounds of ethics, environment and health and has even been blamed for the global food crisis. A couple of weeks back, George Bush said: 'Worldwide, there is increasing demand. There turns out to be prosperity in the developing world, which is good... So, for example, just as an interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class... Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.'

More people demanding more meat means that more land is dedicated not to growing food for people, but food for animals - up to 9kg of grain for every kilo of beef. Ratcheting up meat consumption will drive up the price of feed grains, other things being equal.

Except that other things aren't equal. Evidence suggests that it's hard to impeach either India or China's meat-eating habits. According to Daryll Ray at the University of Tennessee, the US government's own figures show that China has been a net exporter of meats since 2001, subsidised to some extent by the running down of local grain stores, and an increased import of soybeans. Moreover, it has produced more grain than it has consumed for every year since 2005, and continues to export heavily. When it comes to India, Ray says the story is much the same as China's. In fact India has been a net exporter of grains and meat over nearly all of the past two decades even though it has the world's largest number of hungry people. So the problem is a little deeper than more Indians demanding things, as George Bush claims.

Blaming the world's two most populous countries, India and China, is a bit of misdirection, particularly when the facts point the other way. Although India's chicken consumption has gone from 0.2 million tonnes to 2.3 million today, beef consumption is more or less the same as it was in 1990 and, because of the cultural tilt against it, not forecast to change.

China is certainly the world's largest consumer of meat in aggregate, and that is because it is the world's most populous country. Meat consumption has increased from 24kg per person in 1980 to 54kg last year, and the chief of China operations for Tyson Foods, the world's largest meat packer, predicts that this is the last year that China will be self-sufficient in protein. Against this, soaring prices for meat in China are certainly taking the edge off demand. But until China's meat demand extends its footprint beyond its borders, country number three in terms of global population, the United States, remains a little more obviously culpable. Meat consumption here is rather less sustainable than in China or India. Americans eat an awful lot of meat - around 90kg of meat and fish per person per year.

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