HOLY COW: IN PRAISE OF ETHICAL CARNIVORISM (AND HOW TO SLAUGHTER VEGANISM).

'I propose a Medievalist ethical carnivorism, whereby we can have our meat, save the planet, and save ourselves'.

There is an ingredient common to every vegan dish. A pinch of sanctimony. After all, while we meat eaters are massacring the planet with our methane-belching cows and tree-eating sheep, the shiny, happy ‘plant-based’ people are saving the place. As George Monbiot of the Guardian, the high priest of British veganism, memorably explained to his readers, ‘The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy.’

Is veganism really our salvation? They say revenge is a dish best served cold. So is reason. Here are some inconvenient truths about the gospel of veganism its prophets would like you to ignore, starting with the vegan favourite, tofu.

Tofu, for those of you happily unacquainted with the stuff, is curd made from soybeans that have been soaked in large tanks and churned into a slush that is then heated, filtered and coagulated into slabs, before being chopped up, packaged, and pasteurised. All these steps require a lot of carbon dioxide-emitting energy. The amount of soya beans grown in the UK is negligible (3000 tons in 2019: the isles are insufficiently warm for the crop), meaning the soya beans imported for any national tofu-maker come with carbon dioxide-emitting travel miles from Japan, Canada, Italy, and the US. So UK tofu-makers such as The Tofoo Co might come over all artisanal and down-home (their tofu is made "int Yorkshire", as they put it on their website), but the raw product is shipped from Canada and Italy. Despite all this, if you run “tofu” through the BBC’s climate change food calculator Climate change food calculator: What's your diet's carbon footprint? - BBC News you will be informed that your “personal consumption” accounts for 12kg of your annual greenhouse gas emissions, on the basis of two servings a week. Two servings of beef come out at a whopping 604 kg per year. A clear win for tofu?

Well, no. The BBC calculator, like so much of the modelling that governments take as good coin, is based on work by Oxford-based environmentalist scientist, Joseph Poore…He who appeared in a promo for the “Go Vegan for Lent” campaign, organised by pressure group Million Dollar Vegan. Poore's claims to have calculated the universal carbon footprint of an entire food type based on air miles and packaging, as well as production, are nonsensical: it is impossible to do so, given the diversity of packaging, the global nature of distribution. Vegan stalwart brand Bjorg sells its 200g smoked tofu in thick plastic you could use as kids’ shoes at the beach; the plastic packing weighs 10g, actually measurable on analogue kitchen scales. Worse, climate change calculators based on crude protein or calories, such as the BBC’s, are flawed in a way that would be amusing if the consequences were not tragic. Tofu has a seemingly respectable 10g of protein per 100g — but not all protein is equal. For humans, soy protein is less digestible than meat protein. In other words, you have to eat proportionately more tofu to get the same protein allowance. Tofu also has significantly less riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, Vitamin B6 and Vitamin B12 than meat. To make up these deficiencies, tofu-eaters have to either take supplements, or eat additional food — both of which produce Green House Gases (GHGs). The deficiencies of tofu go beyond its nutritional value. The stuff is tasteless. Nobody ever said, ‘I could murder a nice juicy lump of tofu’. The consequence of this blandness is that consumers in the US throw away 30.5% of all tofu purchased; this food waste increases the environmental impact of tofu by a whopping 43.9%. The figure for meat thrown away is 20%.

By now you may have understood why the Rothamsted Institute’s Dr Graham McAuliffe, an expert on modelling the environmental impacts of food over their lifecycle, concluded:

“If you look at tofu, which is processed so there is more energy going into its production, when you correct for the fact that the protein in it is not as digestible compared to the meat-based products, you can see that it could actually have a higher global warming potential than any of the monogastric animals. To get the same amount of protein, tofu is worse.”

Anybody who believes that tofu is a green alternative to meat has no idea how industrialised soya farming works. Around 94% of the world's soy is genetically engineered, mostly to be resistant to the glyphosate herbicide Roundup made by agri-chemical giant, Monsanto. Soybeans produced on commercial farms in the USA, Brazil and Argentina accumulate an estimated 2500–10,000 metric tonnes of glyphosate per year. The adverse effects of glyphosate on the environment only begin with the destruction of soil microflora, bee colonies, and aquatic organisms. Soybean is probably the most environmentally dangerous agricultural crop in the world. Tofu does not have a light carbon footprint; it’s a stamp on the face of the planet. Oh, and there is the vegans’ other staple, rice, which is responsible for ….3% of green house gas emissions. Then the vegans’ synthetic trainers, which account for 1.5% of GHGs.

And without manure from farmyard animals, how do you fertilise crops? Well, you use soil-killing, watercourse-polluting artificial fertiliser made principally from …GHG-producing oil. Artificial fertiliser is responsible for no less than 2.1% of global GHG emissions. The intensively farmed arable lands of East Anglia -which grow the vegan’s daily bread- suffer soil erosion to the tune of thousands of tons per acre annually. (A recent study in the Environmental Science & Policy journal calculated that about 3.07 tonnes of soil are lost per hectare of agricultural land per annum in Europe.) At this rate we will die of hunger before we drown in the rising sea of climate change.

Humans were born to eat meat. We have canine teeth, and a stomach more resembling that of a dog than a sheep. Meat-eating is natural. Your genes tell you big time; it's why you salivate over frying bacon, and don't drool over a pot of porridge. We would not be the verbal, intelligent humans we are without meat. According to Harvard University evolutionary biologists Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman, in Nature, 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16990 “Whatever selection pressures favored these shifts[towards bigger brains, smaller teeth, generally being Homo sapiens sapiens] they would not have been possible without increased meat consumption combined with food processing technology.” Big brains required the big calories of meat. Despite all the above, 12% of the UK population, 6.4 million people, reportedly followed a meat-free diet in 2024 https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/uk-diet-trends.

Of course, the success of veganism is no mystery at all; Veganism , with the majuscule, has become a crusade untroubled by science, untouched by rationality. When humans killed God, they needed a replacement for religion. Veganism is the just latest faith for the lost middle classes. But here's the rub. Vegans are absolutely correct that plant-based food can be healthy, and that Daisy the cow is implicated in climate-change. More, the welfare standards for much of the globe's farmed livestock are pitiful. I've farmed for twenty years and wouldn't touch an intensively reared pig with a pitchfork, let alone a table fork. By definition, a factory farm entails intensive rearing, with the livestock in close proximity, beak to beak, snout to snout. The overcrowding of animals in factory farms enables easy transmission of disease. Additionally, stress from the overcrowding (often on bare concrete or metal slats), the inability to display normal behaviour compromises the animals’ immune system… which increases their susceptibility to disease. A vicious circle of malady.

In 2018 a group of scientists analysed 39 ‘conversion events’, or antigenic shifts, whereby a pathogenic avian flu strain became more dangerous, exactly the sort of incidents that could cause a pandemic among humans: all but two were reported in intensive commercial poultry production systems. Aside from the quotidian cruelty inflicted on the animals, factory farming will kill us humans.

So, yes, I have a beef with the intensive end of my industry, with its beak-clipping, tail-docking, permanent ‘in-housing’, zero-grazing, Frankenstein cattle-making, prophylactic antibiotic-dosing, disease-making ways. Raising of livestock in this fashion is not farming, because it abjures any sense of husbandry. It is senseless, inhumane Fordian food-production, with sentient animals reduced to numbered “units.” The produce from such factory systems, be it milk, meat or eggs, is tasteless, in every sense. Veganism and intensive livestock farming. The Charybdis and Scylla of contemporary food production.

What can be done? I propose a Medievalist ethical carnivorism, whereby we can have our meat, save the planet, and save ourselves. This commences with the understanding that the eating of meat from correct sources -traditional, organic- is a private good. Pasture fed sheep-meat, for example, is a significant source of protein, omega-3 fats, valuable amounts of CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), vitamin B12, selenium and niacin, zinc and phosphorus.

Beyond this, the public good of eating such meat: i) enables historic livestock breeds to exist, and we have a debt of honour to our farm animals: it was wool off the sheep’s back that gave Britain its wealth — symbolised to this day by the woolsack on which the Lord High Chancellor sits in the House of Lords. ii) aids the rural economy, especially of upland areas iii) manures the land for the growing of crops iv) benefits biodiversity. Manure from an organic outdoor cow supports up to 250 different insect species. I do not wish to be a nerd about turd, but that cow’s poo feeds nearly 2.2 million insects annually. In the British countryside, a chain of wild things feed on these insects, up to the apex predator, the fox (a decided scavenger of beetles in dung.) Why the decline in swallows and bats in the veggie-growing arable areas like the prairies of East Anglia? In all likelihood, not enough good old fashioned cow pats in the fields. Veganism entails the extermination of our farm animals. Go Vegan… and de-Nature the countryside.

The consumer, though, has obligations as well as sensuous pleasures and moral satisfactions under ethical carnivorism. To appreciate the value of correctly farmed livestock all school children at the age of 16 should visit an organic mixed farm (livestock and crops, the two must go together), then witness the slaughter of a cow or a pig or a sheep. An animal’s life can only be truly appreciated when its death is witnessed.

Currently, meat is disconnected from the animal from whence it came, atomised and anonymised as a “choice cut’” wrapped in plastic on a Tesco shelf. In the UK, the days are gone when we ate an animal, nose to tail, everything from the pig except its squeal. When nothing went to waste. When bones went to soup. When brains went to a “rissole” with breadcrumbs and eggs. When sheep's innards, lamb's heart, lungs and liver went into haggis. The national dish of Scotland used to be a poor man’s meal rather than a Burns Night prop. Even wedding cakes used to be made from animal innards. According to the recipe book The Accomplisht Cook, writtenby Robert May in 1680, the traditional “Bride’s Pye”, the precursor of today’s tottering towering wedding cake, contained a filling of oysters, pine kernels, cockscombs, lambstones, sweetbreads, and spices. Sweetbreads are either the thymus or the pancreas; lambstones are testicles. Bring it back, the whole eating of the animal — something the French manage. I know, since I live in France, where the local boucherie will array on its counter everything from the pig’s head to the ox’s tail as a matter of course.

Offal does not mean awful, though I grant you the French sausage andouillette is an acquired taste. People shudder at the very thought of tongue or lungs yet unwittingly scoff a chipolata or spread foie gras on their toasted brioche. Offal, the entrails and internal organs of an animal, can be delectable, as well as nutritious. And offal is invariably cheaper than prime cuts. For the squeamish, try an offal gateway dish such as the French classic of warm chicken liver salad with apricots. (A recipe which is its name: flash fry the livers and apricot halves, place on bed of green salad, dribble with shallot and balsamic vinegar dressing.) Or buy a meat grinder and make burgers. I do recommend, as per the lead photo, beef kidneys in madeira sauce with bubble & squeak.

As well as being nutritious and cost-conscious, eating offal demonstrates respect for the animal. The respect which is missing in our times. Not a bit of animal should be wasted. The lives of the farm animals are too valuable for our wastefulness. My proposed ethical carnivorism is a social compact between consumer and farmer, since the farmer has grave and great responsibilities. Farmers must go back to the future, to a holistic and considerate view of farm animals such as existed before the 18^th Century when the commodification of livestock, its keeping primarily for meat, began. Henceforth I propose all farm livestock is kept for multiple purposes and killed for its meat only at the end of a working life, which is very near its natural lifespan. (As was the case before Bakewellian ‘improvements’ in the 1700s). Thus, sheep for wool and milk (and derivatives), cows for motive power and milk (and derivatives), both as walking muck-spreaders. Yes, let us eat the meat of mature sheep, not lamb. Let us eat mutton. A Medievalist ethical carnivorism, then.

Inevitably, the dispatch of livestock late in life will decrease the amount of meat entering the market — not wholly a bad thing — and realign consumption with historic levels, when it was not the centre of every meal 24/7 and subsidised by EU and government agency. To partially offset decreased meat supply, we should, in addition to “nose to tail” cookery, add horse to our diet, rather than add it to the knacker’s incinerator. Yes, horses for courses. Why not? The horse is a grass-fed herbivore, just like cattle and sheep. As a horse hors d’oeuvres how about cheval de tartare, or raw horse meat: (it’s a real dish in France); for mains, horse steak, fried in olive oil, or, personal favourite, made into steak and kidney pie. In case you are wondering, horse meat is lean, with a stronger taste than beef. Let’s put truth into the expression, “I could eat a horse”. The watchwords of Medievalist ethical carnivorism: quality of meat, quality of livestock life, quality of environment. The livestock necessary for Medievalist ethical carnivorism are our native breeds, developed for our climate and habitats, able to thrive without shiploads of imported soya or the vet’s constant administrations. Modern “commercial” breeds, usually imported, are constitutionally weaker, commercially more expensive to raise. Bring back the old breeds. Slower to grow, perhaps. Less meat perhaps, but better meat absolutely.

There is evidence that Veganism in the UK has reached its apotheosis, and even Gen Z, the most Vegan-influenced cohort, is developing a taste for meat, largely on health grounds. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/10/anti-vegan-britain-loves-meat. But let it be good meat. As a Medievalist ethical carnivore, you get to put a whole ladle of feel-good factor on your food. Traditional livestock grazing on grassland increases topsoil and therefore takes carbon out of the atmosphere. Grassland stores carbon, whereas arable farming does the opposite.

When Vegans bleat about methane emissions, they fail to understand the crucial role of such old-fashioned pastoralism in both restoring soils and putting carbon back into the soil. You can eat grass-fed meat from traditional systems guilt free. In 2020 an employment tribunal in the UK ruled that ethical veganism was a protected belief, its adherents secure in law against discrimination. Ethical carnivorism needs the same status. Join my church.