When I first became a vegetarian 30 years ago I used to find myself in passionate discussions about food issues all the time. The situation seemed so urgent. There were so many reasons to be vegetarian that I felt (and still feel) that the burden of justification should be turned around – not ‘why are you vegetarian?’ but rather ‘why on earth do you eat meat?’
There were reasons of dietary health – avoiding fat and cholesterol – and distaste for the idea of feeding on the flesh of another sentient being. But those rarely cut any ice with committed meat-eaters. There was also my abhorrence of the treatment of animals in factory farming. However, if I chose the ground on which to do battle, I tended to talk about the misuse of food resources in a world where people still went hungry – the enormous amounts of grain and pulses fed to cattle to produce a much smaller amount of beef. I saw eschewing meat as ‘a conscientious objection to a system with waste at one end and starvation at the other’.1
