Linda Price counts the cost of meat

I’m not a vegetarian, but I’m working on it. I eat meat very occasionally, and when I do, I can no longer enjoy it because I know it’s not only the biggest cause of cruelty to living creatures on the planet, it is harming me and the earth. I can, however, choose how the particular animal or its produce on my plate has been farmed. This alternative to going completely vegetarian, of making ethical choices and cutting the amount of our meat consumption, is an action everyone can take to make earth a safer, kinder place for all beings.

In this column last year (“Christian Activist”, July/August), the Revd Alex Mabbs talked about his church becoming the first to disinvest from fossil fuels. I believe that there will come a day when the first church will take the brave step to disinvest from factory farming. Today’s intensive food-animal industries promote the destruction of life on earth, so individual shoppers, restaurants and hotels, are turning away from buying animals that have been raised as industrial commodities.

The mass production of animals for food is an environmental catastrophe. The methane British cows produce at a rate of 1bn litres a day is much more dangerous than CO2; it is 21 times more powerful, responsible for almost as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases combined. While concentrations of CO2 have risen by 30% since pre-industrial days, methane concentrations have more than doubled.

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This is an extract from the February 2015 edition of Reform.

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