快猫短视频

Earlier this year, my wife alerted me to . A 1950s-style family is sitting around the dinner table. 鈥淗ow do you know if someone鈥檚 vegan?鈥� asks the little girl. 鈥淒on鈥檛 worry,鈥� answers the dad. 鈥淭hey鈥檒l tell you.鈥�

It was a gentle dig at both of us; we gave up eating meat in January and have been banging on about it ever since. We鈥檙e not even vegetarian, let alone vegan. We still eat fish and dairy, and we buy meat for our two teenage sons. But meat is off our plates for the foreseeable, and I鈥檓 boringly evangelical about it. I feel virtuous, physically healthier and morally cleaner.

But after my wife鈥檚 satirical nudge, I realised I had climbed on a high horse and needed to get off it. Evangelicals of any kind are boring 鈥� born-again types the worst. In any case, I鈥檓 increasingly preaching to the converted. According to in November, a third of Britons have either quit meat or are making an effort to eat less.

This rise of the various flavours of no-meatism 鈥� veganism, vegetarianism, pescetarianism and flexitarianism 鈥� has been one of the trends of 2018. As a cultural barometer as well as a science magazine, 快猫短视频 covered it at length. My decision was informed by editing, writing and reading a series of articles which convinced me that eating meat was ethically and environmentally indefensible. Meat production is one of the pressures that has led us to the brink of climate catastrophe. It consumes more than 60 billion animals every year.

I also picked up messages from my wider cultural consumption. As a fan of on BBC Radio 4, I tuned into a number of thoughtful and informative episodes about plant-based diets that it ran throughout the year. And as somebody who likes eating and cooking, and who gravitates towards the food section in bookshops and menus in restaurant windows, I have seen a flood of titles and dishes catering to the trend.

But what hit my cultural radar hardest is a book called by Kathryn Gillespie, a fellow at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. It is a brutally frank account of four years studying the US dairy industry, with a focus on the lives of the cows trapped in it from cradle to slaughterhouse. I knew the industry was probably barbaric, but just how barbaric is jaw-dropping. At least animals raised solely for meat are killed young. Dairy cows lead an unremittingly grim life for years 鈥� and are then slaughtered for meat. Cattle, Gillespie reminds us, has the same etymological roots as chattel.

Consider this passage about Sadie, a former dairy cow living out her twilight years on a sanctuary for former farm animals in California. 鈥淪adie was born and raised on a fairly large dairy farm housing approximately three thousand cows in the San Francisco Bay area of California. At the farm, her tail had been docked and her ears were tagged for identification.

鈥淪he was impregnated by artificial insemination at eighteen months old and then once a year every year after that. Her calves were taken away from her after birth, and she was milked three times a day until her productivity and reproductive capacity waned. At the age of five鈥� she was sent to slaughter with many other cows who had been used for dairy production.鈥�

By chance Sadie was bought by a veterinary teaching hospital, where she spent two months before being sent back to the slaughterhouse. Another stroke of luck saw her rescued by the sanctuary.

Her post-farm life may have been highly unusual but the preceding five years were not. At any one time there are 9.3 million cows enduring this existence in the US alone. Without anthropomorphising or getting sentimental, Gillespie describes in excruciating detail how these animals are exploited, traumatised and then slaughtered.

Before I read the book I had already been wrangling with my conscience. Since quitting meat, I still eat a lot of cheese; halloumi, paneer and parmesan are my beef, chicken and pork. But dairy farming is appalling for the climate. Cows produce vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that no known technology can prevent from being vented into the atmosphere. I was already worried that I had dropped one environmental vice only to take up a worse one. I now worry that I have committed an equivalent ethical sin.

My 2019 resolution was going to be to stay off the meat but I鈥檓 having second thoughts. I think I need to cut out the cheese. Maybe I鈥檒l put chicken back into my diet to make it easier: the overall suffering and environmental impact would be less, I think. Or maybe I need to go the whole hog and quit animal products altogether.

If I do, I promise not to go on about it.