Eating Less Meat? Eat Better Meat!

Meat production has expanded massively in recent years, and makes a correspondingly huge impact on the environment and global food supplies. Don't let your meat shopping support factory farming, with its heavy environmental burdens.

• Boycott factory farming and its ultra-cheap meat
• Choose organic meat, with its lighter ecological footprint
• Consume all parts of the animal, so nothing goes to waste

Our response to the "Eating Less Meat" message is a proactive alternative idea of "Eating Better Meat!" 

Juliet Kinderlsey highlights the issues in the article below.

After World War II, the Danish gave their wheat to make bread and fed their hungry people, unlike the Germans who fed their wheat to the pigs so many people starved!

There is enough food on the planet if we curb our desire for endless quantities of cheap, fast food meat. The Danish knew it took 9 tonnes of wheat to make 1 tonne of beef, and a similar amount for pork.

Eating Less Meat is not a topic you would expect us to dare mention, but the truth is that our eating habits can change the world.

The Sheepdrove idea of Eating Better Meat is about choosing carefully where your meat comes from. Take feedlots for example - where thousands of animals are crammed into a small area with no space to roam and fed high-growth diets with hormones and antibiotics. Feedlots consume vast amounts of cereal-based feed; this cereal could be feeding people.

Cheap feedlot meat is the wrong type of meat altogether – with the wrong balance of fatty acids and other essential nutrients. Just don’t eat it, nor encourage such inhumane systems by buying it!

And anyway wheat (or soya or sweet corn) is not a cow's proper diet! What they ARE really great at – with their quadruple stomach* – is turning grass and herbs into meat. It is an amazing gift to us!

Another damaging source of meat is ruined rainforest. Vast tracts of ancient forest land are cleared, every year, to make room for extensive livestock farms. They may not be factory farms, but the destruction of the forests and their precious soil stamps a very heavy Carbon Footprint as well as wiping out biodiversity.

Now that the Chinese and Indians are beginning to adopt parts of the Western diet – especially steaks and burgers - you can clearly see that Eating Better Meat is no idle thought. Meat consumption globally is expected to double by 2020. Think of the misuse of wheat if we continue down this path – many will starve in developing nations.

What's important is that we do eat some meat in our diets – after all it was probably raw meat that our ancestor hunter-gatherers were eating during the 500,000 generations of humans during which our bodies were selecting our particular group of genes that make us what we are today and what makes a healthy diet.

The meat back then was completely natural. Animals were as wild as could be - as too were we! There were no chemicals, no growth hormones and antibiotics, no welfare issues caused by man mistreating captive animals – it was all just completely natural.

I believe that wild is 'the Ultimate Organic' and at Sheepdrove we try to get as close to a wild environment as possible – that is what organic farming is all about. Where things can be wild, let them be – but where we need to farm we should be as close to wild as we can get.

Sadly not all organics is going that way. Industrial attitudes to organics are coming fast. For example, organic salmon is an impossibility unless you get rid of their cages, recycle their waste and allow them to feed themselves from their aquatic environment. It is sad to see that happen.

At Sheepdrove we stick to our own wild ways! All our animals – and plants too – are grown to mirror what happens in the wild. We want weeds in our wheat – they are home to helpful insects that clean our crops of aphids and other little creatures we don’t want too many of.

So do eat meat, but make sure it is good meat – meat that comes from animals that are loved and cared for, who can eat their natural diet and are not force-fed. That way, the meat you eat will be really nutritious and you won’t need to eat so much – just eat what you need – as your hunter gather ancestors did.

And try to eat the whole animal as they did – not just the fast food bits – steaks and fillets – there are many other nutritious parts such as stewing and braising cuts - and don’t forget all the delicious and very nutritious offal!

Juliet