With the emergence of meat-free meats as a mass consumer option via fast-food outlets like Hungry Jack’s and an increasing diversity of meat-free products in supermarkets, even the trivial objections to ceasing to use mammals as a food source have now vanished. The shuttering of the livestock and dairy industries would be a sensible policy goal in any polity that actually embraced, rather than simply spoke about, evidence-based policy.
Meat and dairy are monstrously cruel, poorly regulated industries, even if you’re OK with the ethics of killing intelligent, social creatures of the same animal class as us for the production of meat and milk that we don’t need to consume. And even if you’re OK with mammals being killed, abused and immiserated for your taste buds, the environmental impact is frightening: while livestock’s climate impact has been overstated, it is still a major source of greenhouse emissions worldwide and only likely to increase as incomes in developing countries grow, bringing meat into the diet of more and more people.
Beyond those, there remain only trivial reasons for not ceasing to eat meat, mainly around special dietary needs that can be addressed through supplements, and the diversity of substitute products on offer for those who refuse to subsist on vegetables, free-range chicken and sustainably sourced fish. As the humble Not Burger is being supplemented in supermarket freezers by products that, with greater or lesser degrees of success, mimic the taste and texture of meat, that reason is vanishing. And as a greater variety of non-dairy milk products become available (with soy milk probably being the least worst in terms of environmental impact, given almond milk production relies heavily on water consumption), continuing to consume dairy milk also becomes an egregiously unethical act.
The politically powerful livestock industry, however, isn’t going to go quietly. Meat producers have used their influence in a dozen states in the US to ban producers of non-meat product from using words like “meat”, a tactic that may end up not flying in a country with a guaranteed right to free speech. Other, bigger US meat industry players, however, are anticipating the shift and moving into non-meat themselves. In Australia, where there are precious few rights to do anything, Nationals MPs have called for bans on non-meat products themselves, and recently began lobbying to impose Arkansas-style bans on the use of certain words for non-meat and non-dairy milk products. In the UK, meat producers are either dismissive of the “fad” of non-meat, or think a better marketing campaign will convince Britons to eat more mammals. A new European pro-livestock group is warning consumers that they need “livestock’s contribution to biodiversity, bioenergy and the rural economy”.
Marketing campaigns and attempts to ban product descriptions by the minions of the animal slaughter industry are one thing; more problematic is that the livestock industry receives massive handouts from taxpayers. Currently the government is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the livestock industry on the basis of drought relief, despite decades of advice from sources like the Productivity Commission that the government should be funding resilience, not relief. But that’s on top of ongoing assistance, including tariffs, calculated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is an industry that should, in the long-run, become a niche contributor to our dietary needs at best, to minimise its dire impact on the planet and its horrific animal welfare outcomes. Instead, we’re propping it up at taxpayer expense.
Is the end of the meat and dairy industries in sight? Will substitutes take over our menus? Let us know your thoughts at boss@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication.
Surely it is time to stop the faux moral support of the agriculture sector by ceasing to use the word “drought”. Droughts come to an end. This is not a drought, this endless dry is the new normal. Saying you are praying for rain is simply patronising those poor bastards facing the end of their way of life.
Bernard, until there is a severe reality check why would the LNP stop treating most of the agricultural sector differently. They have been able to buy the votes from the rural sector more cheaply than other areas with a range of often very short term and heavily subsidised proposals. On their benefit cost calculations, they see throwing around inattentive taxpayers money as low risk while conning much of the rural sector that they are better managers of all things important!
Spot on Bernard.
What I don’t understand is that the meat and dairy industries clearly see the drop off in their market share particularly with people like myself reducing or eliminating meat and dairy BECAUSE of their cruel practices, especially live exports and dairy. But they appear impervious to the market. Their only response is draconian laws against those shining a light on their cruel practices with lickspittle politicans, including Labour name calling, ‘Vegan Terrorists’.
And the public subsidies are pervasive. I own rural land in NSW and I am compelled to pay an annual fee to the local livestock board even though I object to the industry and the animals on my land are only wombats, kangaroos and antechinus. In the Shoalhaven Shire dairy farmers only have to pay half the municipal rates of other agricultural users too. So I’m paying higher rates to subsidise them to boot.
It’s about time we levelled the playing field.
AGREE, I am in the same position, apart from the wombats, assorted hoppers, echidnas, platypus in the little stream, I have two very old horses. No grazing livestock at all, ever.
I don’t buy the cruelty bit. For all animals, humans included, suffering is part of life. But I do buy the the massive damage that introduced grazing animals do to the environment. It is not just the level of carbon gas emissions, it is also the profligate consumption of water it takes to rear an animal. For a cow >15,000 litres of water per annum. It is the environmental factors that cause me to think I should at least reduce my meat consumption. Dairy is another thing. Full cream cows milk, to my taste, is essential for a good flat white.
In Australia, we have a perfect solution – farm or at least harvest kangaroo in substitution for beef and mutton.
I guess you don’t buy the cruelty bit because you don’t have skin the the game so to speak! Pretty offensive for those animals who live and lose their lives under some unpleasant conditions! and the difference is that humans understand suffering while animals just have to suffer and not know why!
Yes that is a good point but binary is the new normal! No-one wants to give an inch and see the shades of grey
Which I will do now by saying that yes if we are to eat meat then our native animals and particularly kangaroo is our most sustainable source and healthy to boot!
Kangaroo is not only healthy but also very tasty. All the meat is wild caught by professional hunters with a head shot. We buy the kanga bangers off the shelf at the supermarket and we also buy kanga mince to make shepherd’s pie. Good stuff, cheap and lean.
Yes, suffering is a part of life, but for some animals, like sows in stalls and battery hens, it is pretty much all of life, and might better be called life-long torture.
I deplore unethical and cruel animal husbandry practices. My remarks assume that ethical practices are deployed.
Which is why we must source food from sources that farm ethically.
Exactly that plus sustainability.
Animal welfare requirements change the conditions of animal husbandry.
Industrial production transform an animal into simple units of protein or so many kilograms in such a length of time from X amount of feed. You see the same mindset in modern forestry where they talk in yields of fibre per hectare. It is that mindset that needs challenge and simply switching to a vegetarian diet resolves nothing. Look what the production of almond milk, tofu and humus does to the environment. Soy for instance requires 19” of rain at the right time to deliver a crop. Where it is mostly grown in Oz doesn’t get that amount of annual rain reliably, never mind when it is required. Where does the water come from, irrigation, mostly out of the Darling catchment and you can see how successful that has been managed. The idea that vegetarianism or veganism doesn’t have a significant environmental impact is a complete fallacy. The huge growth in the planting of almond in the irrigation areas of Oz and California is adding significant water stress to areas already in trouble, almonds have to have X amount of water or they die where the stone fruit and citrus they have displaced would survive with a reduced crop.
The 15,000 litre figure is a misrepresentation. The cattle don’t gulp it all in one sitting. They drink some, consume more as fodder and wet pasture and then push it out the other end where it eventually ends up in more grass or even more rain over the course of a year.
I call it misrepresentation as no allowance is made for that portion of water supplied by rain. What should concern those who like to quote such figures is ‘what is the water deficit that has to be made up, and how is it to be made up’ our local livestock farming will have a water deficit of zero.
OK Bernard, come out on the rangelands and work out how to get food from it. Then show me an indigenous culture that has NO animal products at all. Tell me of a vegan who does not need some kind of industrial supplement? Humans were hunters and gatherers. Shall we not have beehives? Tell me how you grow anything without affecting animals adversely. I am listening. And yes I eat meat and yes I have killed my own meat and butchered and dressed it as humanely as I could do. The livestock on my farm were not treated cruelly unless by mischance.
Are you agnostic or atheistic on the matter of animal cruelty?
Why make it so binary?
But we can’t tell because the Government’s have passed laws that effectively allow farmers to conceal animal cruelty. They all SAY they treat their animals well. …its only when those brave kind ‘vegan terrorists’ expose them that we find out.