Customer Reviews

definitely in the top 5 books I have ever read Review by Will Edwards, The Campaign for Real Farmin

Review

As a first time reader of Simon Fairlie`s work, I found Meat to be an all embracing experience and definitely in the top 5 books I have ever read.

In this, his latest book, Mr Fairlie examines the role of livestock in the British countryside and as a onetime vegetarian, he pulls no punches. Whether you are a committed vegan or a carnivore and just want your prejudices caressed, then this is not the book for you. However if you are prepared to have your beliefs subjected to the utmost scrutiny, then this book will be a thorough workout.

The book is a veritable cornucopia of references and research on the whole world of food and land use and yet it is somehow irresistibly readable. Anything you ever wanted to know about sustainable agriculture is somewhere in "MEAT." It is incredible to believe that this is the work of just one man.

We are led through some of the absurdities of our time, such as the British government`s almost superstitious banning of the use of pig swill and meat and bone meal which now tends to be replaced with soya shipped in from cleared rainforest land. Fairlie`s answer is simple, recycle our food waste properly into feed for pigs and poultry and use grazed grass for ruminants.

Fairlie talks of preserving the country`s "default livestock" which is how he describes those animals which are necessary to hoover up our waste food(pigs and poultry) and graze our land only fit for grazing together with building fertility in arable rotations. He also thinks that after oil, the equation will be tipped again in favour of animals as we value once more their traction, leather, wool and fat together with animals ability to heat a rustic house and move nutrients to where they are needed.

Very few escape his attention, not the least The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, whose " Livestocks Long Shadow" is so comprehensibly disassembled as to be revealed as either a work of gross incompetence or ideological fiction. Carefully he takes us through the fraud used to calculate the FAO`s claim of livestock being responsible for 18% of green house gasses and shows us how this damagingly discredits climate science. (Posted on 11/01/2011)

A tour-de-force Review by Rob Hopkins, http://transitionculture.org

Review

A tour-de-force from Simon Fairlie. He sets out to argue that livestock farming has a key role to play in a low carbon food system, and that eating meat is an ethical response to climate change, countering the “the best thing would be if everyone was vegan” argument with in-depth analysis. This is the book which changed George Monbiot’s mind, not an easy achievement! One of the most important books about food and farming published recently. (Posted on 13/12/2010)

Have your steak and eat it Review by Christine Haigh

Review

Remember that statistic about how it takes 100,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef? Or that livestock production is responsible for a greater contribution to climate change than transport? They are so frequently quoted that their basis is never questioned. In this dense but readable volume, former Ecologist editor Simon Fairlie does exactly that.

In what began as a personal quest to justify not giving up on his taste for meat, Fairlie argues that, in a future sustainable society, we can have our steak and eat it – although we might have to take it in turns.

The book’s central thesis is that a low, ‘default’ level of livestock, where animals are used for what they’re good at – namely disposing of food residues and in return producing a range of useful stuff, including food, fibre and manure – can be part of a sustainable food system. Moreover, a sustainable system that doesn’t include some domesticated animals has a whole new set of problems to deal with in providing fertility for arable production and a varied year-round diet that doesn’t rely on fossil-fuelled transport to deliver it from the other side of the world.

Along the way, Fairlie demolishes a host of myths, including the water inefficiency of meat production (it turns out that your two pounds of beef only requires that much water if it’s fed on irrigated feed from the Californian desert). He also challenges the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s famous statistic that livestock generates 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which Fairlie argues confuses one-off emissions from land-use change with on-going emissions from production.

In doing so, he illustrates the bias of policy in favour of urban over rural patterns of settlement. He argues that this is a prejudice that is evident not just in planning policy the world over but even in the focus of climate change mitigation efforts on methane, a potent but relatively short-lived greenhouse gas largely generated by land-based activities, at the expense of the more stubborn carbon dioxide mainly arising from the fossil-fuelled activities of urban consumers.

The book thinks big. Fairlie’s essay ‘Can Britain feed itself?’, previously published in The Land magazine (its regular readers might recognise one or two other chapters too), finds its way into the book, and is the basis for much of the thinking behind it. What, he asks, would Britain – and other temperate countries – look like under the extremes of various combinations of agricultural production? You can take your pick between vegan chemical, stock-free permaculture or organic with livestock (or any other possible permutation) and figure out which looks most like a world you’d like to see.

It’s a new look at a sometimes bizarre range of topics, from the relative merits of wheat and chestnuts (which used to be a staple in southern France), to the role of animals in food security. Fairlie spells out the importance of livestock for the landless (a way of sequestering whatever scraps of feed come your way, with harvesting on demand) and the way they provide a buffer for a population’s grain stocks. But in the context of his focus on temperate countries such as the UK, his promotion of the use of animal traction has no doubt raised a few eyebrows, however convincing his arguments.

While Fairlie clearly has an agenda, he doesn’t shy away from subjecting both sides of the argument to scrutiny. Perhaps most interesting is his detailed knowledge of Britain’s agrarian history: the book is peppered with snippets from thinkers on food and feed from days gone by. In essence, the book is a wake-up call for us to realise how disconnected we are from the land, and why it might be worth getting back to nature before we start planning our collective future.

Of course, we live in a world of compromises, and none of the scenarios in Fairlie’s thought experiments and back-of-the-envelope calculations is ever likely to be realised. But then Fairlie was never under the impression that the world was going to turn vegan. He accepts animal-free lifestyles as an option but rejects them as a global prescription. The real debate, his book recognises, is about how we produce food, and with key players like the UN demonstrating a distinct bias towards the type of intensive livestock production that sees animals being fed on increasingly valuable grain and generating huge waste problems that their surrounding environment does not have the capacity to deal with, it’s a battle we might all do well to be prepared for.

The book is unself-consciously anthropocentric, and Fairlie doesn’t go near animal rights issues, which makes much of it irrelevant for many vegans. But anyone for whom eating animal products raises issues of social justice and sustainability should certainly have a read – it’s a refreshing new take on the increasingly polarised debates about the role of animals in our food system. (Posted on 03/12/2010)

A thought provoking work written by a man who has deep knowledge of the countryside and farming. Review by Richard Williams

Review

Being a vegan or vegetarian is a perfectly reasonable position for those with a religious objection to meat eating or those who believe that killing animals is morally wrong. In recent years a growing number of people have gone further and declared that eating meat is bad environmentally. Before reading this book I often pondered on what would happen if animals ceased to be farmed for food and skins in Britain. No cattle grazing the lush, lowland pastures and no sheep on our hills. Instead we might see massive fields of grain grown in a monoculture and the uplands left bleak and non productive. What I never questioned were the statistics that appeared to prove that meat was a wasteful use of land.

In masterful fashion the author demolishes the, often accepted, figures on water consumption and methane production of food animals. In a scholarly, but readable, work he provides a counter argument with sources cited for those who wish to study this subject more deeply. He argues that meat production is essential to provide a balanced farming economy and that the real problem is over consumption of meat and the farming methods employed to deliver this abundance.

A thought provoking work written by a man who has deep knowledge of the countryside and farming. This book provides us with a sustainable, alternative future where meat is an important part of out diet but is eaten in smaller quantities and is treated as an indulgence, as our not so distant forebears considered it. (Posted on 08/10/2010)

I urge anyone who has an interest in this subject to read the book Review by Richard Barnett www.newforesttransition.org

Review

As a vegan I approached this book rather warily on account of its title! But as I read it I abandoned my caution and found myself nodding in agreement at most, if not all, of its key points. My veganism is not borne out of a rigid belief that humans are not meant to eat meat but rather it stems from a complete abhorrence of the cruelty and inhumanity that goes on in an effort to satisfy people’s enormous carnivorous demands coupled with a growing despair that such activity will speed up our process of devastating the planet we live on.
So I was encouraged to see that the central tenet of Simon Fairlie’s new book was that ‘we can’t go on like this’! And his reasoning is largely the same as mine. In the past, the amount of meat and dairy products that were consumed was more or less governed by the resources available. The number of pigs in a community would depend pretty much on the amount of waste food and crops there was. Pigs are great food recyclers. The number of other animals would be restricted to the availability of land after staple crops such as wheat and vegetables had been catered for.

But then came a change: Population growth, wealth and subsequent demand for animal food products outstripped the supply and broke the ‘permaculture’ type equilibrium. The result was that extra resources had to be put into rearing animals, and crops are now grown specifically to be fed to animals to give us food. It’s a very inefficient process energy-wise resulting in about 10 calories of energy being put in to get one back out in the form of meat protein. Additionally, the intensification of animal farming reduced livestock to mere commodities that were treated with increasingly horrific methods. I still find it amazing that most people who would express concern for animal welfare are prepared to countenance what goes on in order to allow them cheap meat and dairy products.

The environmental impact of this development is immense as was summarised in the United Nations report ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’. Fairlie calls into question the validity of its finding that 18% of global CO2 emissions result from animal processing (you can’t call it farming any more) but the fact remains that it is very harmful and uses an unsustainable level of resources quite apart from being barbaric. Amazingly the UN report, rather than suggest we all cut down our meat consumption, actually suggests a growth in the level of intensive farming especially in the developing world.
Given that we have to do something radical about the way meat/dairy is produced, Fairlie looks at the concept of veganism and works it through to its logical conclusion. Would it matter, for example, if we no longer had cows and pigs and sheep? The answer (which I have never really delved into too deeply up to now) is ‘yes’. Taken back to the basic level as already described, the presence of these animals is an important aspect of our ecosystem and they can exist without placing undue strain on energy demands as well as being treated with respect and high standards of animal welfare.
This book is an immense academic work and Simon is to be heartily congratulated for his attention to detail and his knowledge. He presents the argument for reducing meat/dairy demand in a really new way that has really given me cause to think long and hard. I am not about to start eating animal products again because the wretched system of intensive farming we have is not going to disappear. Even if it did, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. But I can only concur with his overall thesis and would urge anyone who has an interest in this subject to read the book.

I hope it will kick start a new debate about how we feed ourselves and that meat and dairy might just return to the sustainable position of being an extravagance that is reserved more special occasions rather than demanded every day for every meal by the majority.

Richard Barnett co-chairs New Forest Transition www.newforesttransition.org (Posted on 05/10/2010)