The Independent
LONDON: A leading think-tank in Denmark has advised that, due to the fact that raising cattle contributes to a 10th of global emissions, people should be “ethically obliged” to change their eating habits. A tax on red meat, they feel, may be apt to save the world.
Advising the world to eat less meat, I must say, feels a bit rich coming from a nation synonymous with flogging bacon sandwiches to the drooling masses.
Adverts for Danish bacon ran in seemingly every ad break throughout the 1980s, marketing the concept of fried bacon sandwiched between two heavily buttered slices of bleached white flour as something of a pinnacle of human endeavour – not, as the truth is, something that will lead in time to the sad rustle of the elasticated waist slack rail in Marks and Spencer.
But the Danes are, potentially, making amends for this now – not for our health, but in the name of climate change.
Our pig addiction does little to help the planet, but our craving for beef burgers is even more dire. Cattle breeding alone accounts for about 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the production of food as a whole makes up between 19 and 29%, the Danish council said.
This is a most curious set of circumstances.
The Western world appears to be hooked on ingesting lumps of meat, often in the form of burgers, which, although looking lovely on Instagram, will be barely remembered an hour later. Burgers that not only exacerbate diabetes and contribute to heart disease, but, if exponents of climate change are to be believed, are one of the singularly worst things for mankind’s future.
Put it like this: why did we spend so much time bullying the smokers? All they wanted was a fag in an indoor smoking room with other smokers. They were only poisoning each other. Now I realise we should have been chasing the burger vendors. The ones who’ve made us feel no high day or holiday was complete without a chunk of cow stuffed into a brioche bun. Tax them, I say. Bring in the burger tax.
Admittedly, I support this tax, despite my worries about climate change diminishing of late. In my moody teens I watched the protesters and deniers squabble with some sense of concern. Now, as I have no children and plan to be dead within the next 40 or so years, I file the matter of the ice caps under what Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It termed a “NoMFuP” (Not My F**king Problem).
But I do love animals. I wish we ate less of them. I am not a vegetarian, although I was for a long time, also in my moody teens.
This was during a point in the 80s when vegetarian catering consisted of largely the same frozen mass-produced vegetable lasagne on every restaurant menu, titivated with some forlorn Cos lettuce with salad cream garnish.
Vegetarians, led by our lord god Morrissey, got a bad name during the 80s for being miserable, but this was mainly because we’d eaten 11 lasagnes that week.
Nowadays, I eat some meat but try to eat a vegetarian diet as much as possible.
My diet is heavy on textured vegetable protein and Quorn, which I consume with guilt-free relish, even if some wags have suggested to me that these things are basically genetically engineered space fungus grown in silos. It still can still be tasty; it just needs a few herbs and spices and a little love.
And crucially, nothing with a brain was herded into an abattoir and killed for it. Nothing with the potential to be as headstrong and loving as my Labrador or as ruthless as my cats were killed unstunned and their bodies stuffed through a bleak factory process, packed into boxes by a sea of people on minimum wage wearing hair nets.
There is, I feel, no real need for so much red meat in the Western diet other than our spoilt, lazy palates. We seem so lost without brown dead stuff on our plates acting as something for all the vegetables to point towards. And there is a distasteful mood in modern times for fetishisation of meat and almost a glee in the cruelness of procuring it. Burgers which resemble road crashes festoon my Instagram. And in fancy London restaurants it is fashionable for the waiter to cite the cow’s CV as if killing it was a particular treat.
The more I hint to meat addicts that I disapprove of veal sweetbreads, the more excited they become about the size of the crate the poor bloody thing was kept in. I wish on these people colon blockages. I wish them the sort of piles that appear, ostensibly, to have healed and then rupture when they laugh, hopefully as they laugh about foie gras. Tax these people, I say, tax them till they cry.
It is odd to think that while parents smother and helicopter their children from life’s woes, the Danes could be right: a more crucial thing is removing their red meat addiction before it starts.
Educating future generations on how to structure dinners without mince, sausage or burgers may well be the key to buying them a few more years of Earth as we know it.
The problem with saying these things in public is one sounds like such a, well, hippie, a tree-hugging vegetarian. I don’t think I can save the planet, but I’d be happy if I could save the necks of a few harmless, albeit tasty, creatures.