Back in our Covid Christmas, one of my sons told me that the most irritating thing about arguing with me was that I always spoke with the certainty of being right, which rather put anyone off feeling that I would or could change my mind, if that was the intellectual outcome.
It made me cross at the time, (actually everything made me cross at the time), but I can see now that he was right.
I have just spent the last eighteen months deep in the guts of the 10,000 year history of mankind and cattle, and where it might go from here. It was a journey that I began from the position of simply being intrigued at how the cow, which we have eaten in some from for two million years, these days seems to get the blame for just about everything.
It turns out that two works of science from the last sixty years are why.
First, that of American physiologist, Ancel Keys, who is dead, so I can say what I like. Ever since the early 1960s, when his celebrated ‘Seven Countries’ paper in the USA first pointed to the dangers to health in multiple ways of a diet that contained too much fat meat, carnivores and omnivores have been on the back foot, philosophically at least. The original theory became within the space of a generation mainstream and, along with it, came the idea that we would all probably be healthier if we dropped meat altogether. Omitting from his results the fifteen countries where the evidence inconveniently didn’t support his theory, and just keeping in the seven that did, Keys enthusiastically promoted the idea that the saturated fats from a high-meat diet led inexorably to cardiac problems, cancer, diabetes and obesity. With the tacit support of a US administration that was keen to sell more cereals, his hypothesis neatly overturned two million years of evolutionary logic, and quickly but unaccountably became received wisdom. The mistake, as it so often is, was to confuse correlation with causation, and anecdote as evidence: the real issue was that the kind of people presenting with, and dying of, these problems, were the kind of people who already had high levels of unhealthy foods in their diet, like fries, starchy bread and fizzy drinks, and a high probability of a sedentary lifestyle. Key’s trick was to link just the meat element with the high fat with the future illnesses, and take the plaudits. Meanwhile, the rest of us were encouraged to go on killing ourselves with sugar and salt, because it didn’t involve a cow, and had the tacit support of our governments.
Next up was the 2006 United Nations’ FAO report called The Long Shadow of Livestock in which the assertion was made (among hundreds of others, it has to be said, that were both useful and correct) that livestock were responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The science is fiendishly complicated, and way above my pay scale, but it relied on some extraordinary supporting material that sort of assumed that every cow we ate had travelled from a cleared Amazon rain forest in a business class seat via a Miami casino, and that they were driven to and from the abattoir in a Bentley Mulsanne. OK, I may have exaggerated that a bit, but you get my point. Their trick was to put in brackets any figure that was debatable, but then to mysteriously forget to tell the FAO PR people that they had done this, and the rest is history, boring history, around which activists on both sides have drawn their battle lines. I have probably read 20 papers and 3 books on the subject, and have found figures as low as 4% and as high as 36%. I still haven’t got a clue what the answer is, by the way.
The result is that the guidance now handed down to our children is that eating beef is both bad for us and bad for the planet, and we shouldn’t do it, and the evidence suggests that most of them don’t.
This strikes me as a pity. A committed vegetarian or vegan who has made their dietary choice based on proper knowledge and ethics is a happy one indeed; but one who has been bullied into it by overhearing recycled bad science is probably missing much more than they should.
So, whichever one it was of Tom or Alex who told me to learn to be wrong, I get it.
Sort of.
(PS Thank you to those who sent nice messages during the rather long pause in these blogs. Much appreciated.)
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