I see that the anti meat brigade are airing the same old arguments about plant based food being more efficient than eating meat in terms of calories. It’s an argument that was used in court by fundamentalist Christian creationists to ‘disprove’ evolution, claiming it broke the 2nd law of thermodynamics. That was wrong, because that law applies only to closed systems and the earth is not a closed system. It is powered by a massive external energy source. We call it the sun. In fact the whole of life and its evolution on earth depends on climbing up an inefficient thermal gradient from simple molecular compounds to increasingly complex organisms. That process is driven by the sun, and without it there would be no life at all on earth. Life forms a pyramid of complexity, of which we are a part, and it is a part of us. We cannot exist without it. In fact our bodies are made up largely of less complex micro-organisms without which we cannot survive.
As a species we have evolved to be an apex predator at the top of a pyramid on which we are completely reliant. We rose to that position by developing brains which rely on complex biochemistry to function, and those biochemicals only became available to us through eating meat supplementary to our previous diet. Without it, the brain development of small children is seriously impaired, resulting in stunting and irreparable mental impairment. Food isn’t about calories. It’s about nutrients, and how we gain access to those complex biochemicals nature provides for us.
Why is this agenda of plant based food being pushed so hard at the moment? It’s about money, pure and simple. There is little profit in animal products. Global food corporations can make far more money from taking cheap ingredients such as palm oil, soya and chemicals, and forming them into ultra-processed products. The rest is marketing, including claims that they are somehow healthier or better for the environment. They are neither, in fact they are disastrous both for our health and our planet.
Fossil fuels are the main but not the only threat to our planet. Since the inception of fixed nitrate fertilisers, pesticides and fungicides, there has been an acceleration in the global degradation and loss of soils, and with it a loss of biodiversity which rises from the base of the pyramid on which we depend, namely soil micro-organisms. That drive for agricultural efficiency is destroying our planet. A significant factor in this has been the separation of animals from mixed farming, and the creation of ‘efficient’ factory farms both for arable and livestock farming.
How were soils formed in the first place? It was not by geology, but by plants forming symbiotic relationships with micro-organisms and with the animals which came to rely on those plants, namely grazing ruminants. The deep fertile soils of the US mid western plains were formed by millions of bison migrating, creating grasslands which used sunlight and co2 to photosynthesise complex carbohydrates which their roots exuded into the ground to feed micro-organisms which in turn transported to plants the nutrients they needed to grow. It’s ironic that those bison were massacred and removed to ‘efficiently’ grow cheap wheat which has now utterly depleted those soils into sterile dust.
We desperately and urgently need to reduce agrochemical use and reintegrate animals into mixed farming, especially grazing ruminants. This provides our best hope for restoring soils and biodiversity, while taking carbon out of the atmosphere and returning it to the ground. It can also provide us with a much healthier supply of plants and red meat from healthy soils. Resilient food security comes from the complexity of nature, not the efficient supply of calories. Calories are the language of slave labour camps, and if the global corporate elites have their way that is what our entire planet will become, a massive, sterile, unhealthy profit-extracting totalitarian regime ruled by an ultra rich elite who right now are planning to decide exactly what you can and can’t eat.
Chronicles 