– guest editorial by Michael McDonald
Firstly, let me declare an interest: I have been a vegetarian for 49 years, so tasty cow parts are not high on my agenda.
My vegetarianism stems from ethical concerns – a retired journalist with ethical concerns? Oh come now – that are now more pressing given cattle farming’s connection to the climate emergency.
The move away from meat, particularly beef, has become more prominent in recent years. The latest convert has been Epicurious magazine, part of the Condé Nast publishing empire.
The magazine announced last week it will not be publishing recipes or articles featuring beef. Its senior editor declared the change is ‘solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders. We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet.’
According to National Public Radio (npr.org, an excellent US info source), Epicurious’s concerns include ‘the considerable quantity of corn and soybeans… grown using pesticides and fertiliser to feed cattle; the amount of climate-polluting methane that cows release into the atmosphere; high rates of deforestation to make space for cows and the amount of water that is alternately needed to raise cattle and polluted as a result of runoff from their manure’.
Of course there are other reasons not to eat bits off any once-living animals, as Byron’s PETA representative Desmond Bellamy has pointed out many times in The Echo’s letters pages. The move to the quaintly-named ‘meatless meat’ is growing, and it is an interesting psychological stop-gap to pretend to eat something you’ve decided not to eat.
The big money is behind the move, too, including dodgy-software giant Bill Gates, the chap the folks in silver-foil hats think tried to inject 5G into our brains through a virus, a clever shortcut through all the laws of physics and chemistry. It’s about more than meat, though, and the larger issue of ‘synthetic biology’ is riddled with positives and negatives.
‘We’ll all be rooned,’ cry the beef producers in accents most forlorn, in the spirit of the great Hanrahan created by bush poet John O’Brien, but I suspect we’ll be ‘rooned’ by climate change first before the eating public changes its habits. My evidence for this is the number of KFC and McDonald’s wrappers thoughtfully disposed of each night on the roadway outside my property.
However, if you do wish to cut down on eating cute hairy, furry, feathery and scaly beasts, there are plenty of sources of alternative dishes. SBS’s top 50 vegetarian recipes https://bit.ly/3sXdNZC and Animals Australia’s collection https://recipes.vegkit.com/ spring to mind.
News tips are welcome: [email protected]
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
