jerseyfabulous | 6 of 100: Meat, A Benign Extravagance (Reply)

I'm not entirely sure what to say about Simon Fairlie's Meat, other than it's not what I expected.

Full disclosure: I first saw it with this cover, and for all we all know about judging books by covers, I do. For some reason, that cover made me expect a foodie's approach to the subject. Then I got the book from the library, and it came with this cheerful, vaguely hippie-ish cover that looks like it ought to be on one of Joel Salatin's books. At which point, I wondered what I was actually getting into.

What the book actually is: a collection of essays written by a small-scale farmer. But these aren't just essays you read in the local paper (or even the Guardian). They're well-sourced, almost scholarly considerations of topics related to meat, meat production, and meat eating. It was far more comprehensive than I expected, and one of the main things I took away was the importance of critical thinking about the subject- particularly when it comes to numbers and statistics! As it turns out a good number of them are something someone pulled out of... somewhere at some point, and subsequently acquire an aura of Holy Writ as they are cited and re-cited by authors who have never bothered to dig into where they came from and how they were calculated.

Another important point was the applicability of many of those numbers and statistics. A number calculated for small-scale production of grass-fed beef may not apply at all to a large-scale CAFO produced animal (or vice-versa). Also, these numbers and whether or not they are applicable tend to get politicized by the various factions (of which there are many- meat-eaters, vegetarians, BigAgriculture, small organic farmers...)

The long and short of it: meat, if raised properly as part of balanced agriculture, is something we can work into our diet without destroying the planet. The large scale CAFO practices, probably not so much. But in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, don't take my word for it...