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Will meatless eating (really) save the planet?

2021-04-15T16:46:25.120Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - The debate on vegetarian menus has returned to the National Assembly, as part of the climate bill. Frédéric Denhez demonstrates that consuming meat is not necessarily polluting.


Frédéric Denhez is an author, columnist and speaker on environmental issues.

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The answer to this question deserves a closer look at its origins.

Meat is one of the debates on which every Frenchman must have an opinion.

With nuclear, GMOs, glyphosate, 80 km / h on departmental roads and Poitiers flying clubs, it is today one of the essentials of human comedy, which allows people to pretend to know and gives the illusion to have discussed.

Meat, like other divisive subjects, has the immense advantage of separating humanity between the good and the bad.

In France, we never debate, we prefer to separate into opposing camps, into certain and definitive visions of the world.

Imposed by a certain intellectual bourgeoisie, these discussions, which are not, have the interest of allowing it to mark its separation from the people, to consolidate its magisterium.

It is always from the top down that we tell people how to live.

When it comes to food, it is in the fridge of the poor that the talkers come to put their nose.

It is never the other way around.

Even when there was no fridge: food injunctions have always been one of the means of exercising power.

Here we are.

Eating meat is now a climate crime and at the same time an ecocide, it is worse than nuclear power.

Especially with meat, because since Man started raising animals, he wonders if he is right to kill them.

It has been two thousand years since monotheistic religions have made us live with the guilt of the killing of animals, framing our carnivorism by practices and prohibitions.

It has only been two centuries since Anglo-American Protestantism associated meat with flesh.

The double sin, which creates pleasure and spills liquids.

Incorporating a dead animal is a form of cannibalism because the animal is a creature of God, so close to us.

It is also a very dirty sin because it provides simple happiness, like making love.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the good English bourgeois outlawed the meat of Martin Eden's underclass, precisely on the pretext that it was already sufficiently wallowed in the sordid sins inherent in the urban working class.

Rather than improving his lot, offer him vegetable soup.

The nascent communism curiously did not say the contrary: to eat meat was to encourage capitalist oppression which used the same weapons to subjugate the animal and the proletarian, who, by the consumption of expensive barbaque, was per- above the market condemned to impoverish.

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In the 1970s, the punk movement renewed this historic veganism by re-issuing the communist theory in a well-structured political vision: the coherence of the fight against the consumer society required eating less, organic, without much slang.

To renovate this idea as old as the Old Testament, to pass it off as an innovative theory, part of ecology has recently stripped veganism and veganism of any political objective to make it the standard of saving the planet.

Here we are.

Eating meat is now a climate crime and at the same time an ecocide, it is worse than nuclear power.

Because a cow burps methane, fires carbon dioxide and eats transgenic soybeans that are grown instead of the rainforest with heavy sprays of fertilizer.

Livestock alone is responsible for almost a fifth of our greenhouse gas emissions, also two thirds of Amazon deforestation.

To make 1 kg of muscle, the cow must have swallowed in one way or another fifteen cubic meters of water… In fact, wherever they are, the cow and the pig, these are the seven plagues. 'Egypt.

The extraordinary variety of landscapes of France comes from the happy marriage between culture and breeding.

So let's stop eating them, and the planet will be better for it.

It will always remain to curb the other four fifths of our greenhouse gas emissions, those of our cars for example, or our digital life without which no vegan can petition, and which already counts more than air transport in terms of of carbon.

But it is already that, and above all, it is easy, because by shaking the piece of meat, we stir our collective unconscious structured by our good old Judeo-Christian morality.

Meat was already difficult to afford, it is even more so since we measure the carbon footprint - and we film the slaughterhouses.

The solution is obvious, simplistic as a sermon.

Go back to the original, to the whole vegetable.

It is not eating the body of Christ, but the idea is.

Without meat, there is no need to raise animals that would eat three quarters of the planet's farmland.

Thus freed, these would be covered with plants which would largely nourish all of humanity.

With the difference that the curves show that below 12 to 20% of meat in our diet (paleoanthropologists estimate that Cro-Magnon counted 15%), the consumption of land, after having fallen, starts to rise again. : the caloric intake being lower with plants, it is necessary to eat more of them.

On more surface, in particular in the necessary assumption where one does not cultivate any more while working very little the grounds in order to preserve the natural functioning, without practically pulverizing.

So the yields are a bit lighter, so you have to expand further.

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Extensive things take up space, but they are very useful.

Without breeding, no meadows, moors, causses, wetlands, groves, all these environments open to prosperous biodiversity.

The extraordinary variety of landscapes of France comes from the happy marriage between culture and breeding.

Without that, there is forest everywhere, or on the contrary interminable fields, two monotonies.

Some say they can replace cows and sheep with rotary chippers or, more consistently, with workers.

But it would take a lot to cut, the old-fashioned way, so that the meadow does not become covered with shrubs.

How to pay them?

Vegans buy ersatz steaks, which are only ultra-processed products, only enriching the same type of industrialists at the origin of what has become of breeding.

Realists, some claim that we can let animals graze as long as we do not kill them.

Why not.

But they are not made to age, after a while they suffer from joint diseases, infections, parasites.

An old cow is a suffering that only a lot of veterinary care can contain, at great cost, in vain.

It is difficult to envision open environments without breeding, while their merits are appreciated each year.

The soil of a meadow is a reservoir of water and carbon.

The dung of the cow which has eaten the pasture is a formidable fertilizer, the spreading of which on crops is one of the pillars of organic farming.

To do without it is to entrust the fertility of our soils to chemical fertilizers or digestates from methanizers, which does not encourage the plants to move the soil to find their nutrients, with the help of fungi.

Regardless of the realities, breeding must be abolished because the figures show it is harmful.

The apostles of veganism hoist respect for life as a standard with the help of scientific reductionism which sums up the functioning of ecosystems to a few global averages without nuances erected as a fetish.

A paradox, because the best way to reduce the value of these figures is to massify.

The more cows you put in the same place, the better you can control what they eat to the nearest gram, the better you export their effluents to recover them, the better your carbon, water and materials balance will be.

Long live intensive breeding?

No, because it is the very idea of ​​breeding that is harmful, whatever it is, and everything is good to convince.

Cantal or Amazonia, California or Normandy, it's the same.

Let's abolish and substitute.

Vegans buy ersatz steaks, which are never more than banal ultra-processed products, nutritional catastrophes only enriching the same type of industrialists at the origin of what has become of breeding.

Every now and then, eat the rib of a beef raised on grass by a well-identified breeder, which is a piece of this ecosystem that is so useful to us, the prairie.

As they earn less and less, they invest in fake meat and synthetic meat in order to create new added value.

With the moral guarantee of not killing any animal and the satisfaction of emitting little carbon and using skin of water because the industrial system is efficient, down to the molecule.

But after all, people are increasingly eating meat ores as an ingredient in their prepared meals.

They are ready for the next step.

Do you want to do something for the environment?

Every now and then, eat the rib of a beef raised on grass by a well-identified breeder, which is a piece of this ecosystem that is so useful to us, the prairie.

Forget the minced steak and the cut tab on a martyred Romanian cow, the chicken and pork at a few euros per kilo that will never see the light of day.

Forget the pile of additive-clumped lentils offered by fake new farmers.

Imagine the landscape behind what you put on your plate.

It will participate in the safeguard of the planet if it really contradicts the agro-food system which ended in the disaster of the concentration camps and is rebuilding its health with veganism.

Eat simple, well-fleshed meat.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-04-15

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