Classic Debate: There is Nothing Wrong With Rearing and Killing Animals for Human Consumption
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For today's episode, we're revisiting a classic debate from 2016: "Let them eat meat." There's nothing wrong with rearing and killing animals for human consumption. Arguing in favour of the motion was the late A. A. Gill, the Sunday Times' star restaurant and TV critic. Opposing him was George Monbiot, The Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner, and author of Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. The debate was chaired by writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch. Let's join Afua now.

Please be advised there is strong language from the beginning of this episode. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I am a former vegan myself. When I first became vegan 13 years ago, it was almost unheard of. I remember explaining to so many people what veganism meant. And when I stopped being vegan, and I am an ex-vegan, and I know some of you will hate me for that...

Six years ago, it had completely transformed into a mainstream movement that's now something everyone's familiar with. So I've done my share of sprouting quinoa and adding tofu and soya protein powder to my almond yogurts. But...

There is so much more to discuss about where the meat belongs on our table and I'm absolutely thrilled to have such distinguished and interesting, and I can tell you from some of the discussions I was just overhearing in the green room, they have some interesting and even counterintuitive views, which we will be hearing more about. So it's my absolute delight to welcome our first speaker. Our speaker for the motion is the Sunday Times restaurant and TV critic, you'll know him as A.A. Gill.

He's also worked as an artist and a chef. He says, and this is one of the less colourful quotes I've heard from him on the subject, he will eat anything that doesn't have a birth certificate. Please welcome A.A. Gill. Good evening. I'm Adrian. We start off by separating the cunts from the loonies. How many of you already are vegan, vegetarian stuff? Hands up.

We could just ask them to show us their shoes, couldn't we? And how many eat meat? What are you doing here? I mean, this always works the other way round. Whenever we do this, George goes off, held, shoulder high, and I'm kicked down the servant steps. This argument is always about vegetarians, vegans, Notting Hill nutters, who...

who want to change the way the rest of us eat. So let me first of all lay out my stall. I don't give a shit. I don't give a shit what you eat, any of you. I don't want to make you eat meat. I don't want to stop you eating meat. I don't want to improve your diet. You go and eat whatever you like. I'm an extreme libertarian. I just think that the point of life is to do as much as you can, as often as you can, as freely as you can. That being said, one of the most important things that ever, ever happened to us as a species...

was that we ate meat. G.K. Chesterton said, you know, it was a brave man who first ate an oyster. Well, it just wasn't. We all were derived from animals that had eaten oysters for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. The really brave man was the first man that ate a burnt animal. Can you imagine how terrifying that must have been? All you've ever seen of fire is horrifying.

And suddenly you come across this thing that stinks of death and burning. And the missus says, bet you wouldn't eat that. But he does. And it changes everything. Why does it change everything? Good. Protein. More important than protein, cooperation. Vegetable eaters do it on their own. Meat eaters do it together.

Eating big bits of meat, eating big animals means cooperation. If you cook it, you can feed old people with bad teeth and young people with no teeth. You can eat a huge amount more. The difference that makes in live births for your pregnant women, in being able to live three or four years longer and be productive, is enough to put us in this hall where they cut up the first dead body.

Meat eating is what makes us cooperative. It's actually what makes dinner parties. That may not be a good thing. The other thing I wanted to say before we go on, and I'm more interested in your questions really than my going on about meat, but I did want to say, have you ever thought about how little, how few things we actually eat? I mean, how few animals we actually eat? Very, very few. And there's a reason for that. There's an...

To farm animals, you have to have the acquiescence of the animal. You can't farm animals that don't want to be farmed. It's not us making them do it. They have to see a point in being farm animals. And not many of them do. The animal that most people wanted to farm more than anything else, right at the beginning of husbandry, over that great swathe in Iraq and the Middle East,

The animal they were desperate to be able to farm were cheetahs. You would, wouldn't you? I mean, who'd not want to have a cheetah? You could hunt with it. I mean, it's brilliant. Desperate to farm with cheetahs. But you can't. And they tried for thousands and thousands of years. And you can do it one at a time. If you find orphaned cubs, you can train them. They will live quite happily with people. What cheetahs won't do...

if they won't live with each other. Animals that are farmed have to be able to live not just with us, but with each other. And they have to do something which is very specific, which is neoteny. Neoteny? This is the ability to remain forever young. It's the ability of a dog never to grow up to be a wolf. So you remain adolescent even though your body becomes fully grown. You couldn't live with a real wild sheep. They're fucking rough. You probably couldn't live with a real wild cow.

Who would know? Has anyone ever seen a wild cow? No, none of you have. The last one died out in the 17th century. They don't exist anymore. Cows made a deal with us. We'd look after them, we'd milk them, we'd farm them, and they would be one of the most successful animals in the world. They are. The wild ones, the ones who went, fuck off, I'm the Jimmy Dean of cows, died in Hungary. Appropriately. Chickens. Anyone ever seen a wild chicken?

I mean, I don't mean just an angry chicken, I mean, you know, like a wild chicken. Hardly, we're not entirely sure where chickens come from. Probably from Far East, bit of India, jungle fowl. So useless at being birds. I mean, talk like drawing a short straw. What was that? Can't fly, looks stupid. The one thing they had to get them through to the next generation was an ability to lay an egg a day.

Very few things can do that. Or would want to. But it made them very useful to us. So we said, look, fuck it. We'll get rid of the leopards and the dogs and the mongoose and the rats. We'll lock you up, keep you mostly away from the foxes. Just keep laying the eggs. One a day. And they went, really, is that it? It's chickens. Anyway, that's my bid for meat eating.

I leave it now to George to tell you the really interesting stuff. Thank you, Adrian. I told you there were some counterintuitive things that would come out. Our speaker against the motion is a regular columnist for The Guardian. Having wavered for years between eating and not eating meat, he now says he's about 97% vegan. He eats, and I'm not making this up, roadkill meat.

and the odd bit of fish or egg. Please welcome George Monbiot. Well, Adrian and I disagree about almost everything, but I hate myself for laughing so much whenever he puts the opposing case. It is actually a pleasure to be contradicted by him, so thank you, even when I'm the boss of the joke. Anyway, I'm probably, by inclination, even more omnivorous than you are. I mean, I've...

I got lost once in West Papua and ran out of food and ended up eating rats, snakes, stick insects and got quite a taste for the unusual. And in this country, I've eaten grasshoppers and crickets and daddy longlegs and mayflies and caddisflies and earwigs and beetle grubs and woodlice. I don't recommend woodlice. They taste of soap.

And just about every possible cut of meat and offal there could be, including every variety of roadkill except cats, dogs, and as we established beforehand, cyclists, who get pretty sweaty under the micro. And...

And I don't have the sort of usual profile, I suppose, of an almost vegan. When I was a young man, I worked on an intensive pig farm. And one of my jobs was after a two-week freeze where quite a lot of the pigs died. And we weren't able to do anything about it because the whole farm was locked down with ice. I had to get rid of the pigs, the dead pigs.

And by then they'd blown out like barrage balloons and I had to burst them and then dig them out with a shovel. And after that, nothing can revolt you except parsnips, obviously, which are truly disgusting. So...

So why this change? How come someone with such gross appetites as myself ended up as a nearly vegan? Well, it's because livestock keeping and indeed fish catching is just wrecking everything I love and am delighted and enchanted by in the natural world.

And like all blindingly obvious things, it took me a long time to see it. It wasn't until I was living in mid Wales that I began to realise that something was very seriously screwed up about everything I could see. Because whichever direction I walked in, there is, well, yeah, OK, it's Wales, but whichever direction I walked in...

There was almost nothing there. Not just that there weren't any people. There were no trees, there were no birds, there were no flowers, there were no insects. It was just these wastelands of basically more grass than nothing else. And the reason for it was a single agent of destruction, the white plague, the woolly maggot, the invasive ruminant from Mesopotamia, the sheep. Their hills had been comprehensively shagged.

and not just across Wales, but across all the uplands of the UK. The places which should be our great wildlife refuges, because there's absolutely no sodding point in farming them because they're so unproductive, have been reduced to wet deserts by the sheep. They have been sheep-wrecked. And I did a calculation the other day with the help of a researcher, and we haven't quite refined it to the level at which I'd be happy with, but it's roughly this...

The first bit we know for sure, that meat from sheep, in other words lamb, mutton and hogget in this country, produces about 0.4% of our diet in terms of calories.

Yet, sheep keeping occupies roughly the same area as all the arable and horticultural crops that we grow in Britain. All the grains, all the potatoes, all the oil seeds, all the fruit, all the vegetables for 0.4% of our diet. It's a fantastically wasteful, profligate use of land to produce us with this boutique product, the lamb chop.

And when you think of what could be there, when you think of what was there before the sheep, this fully automated system for environmental destruction, is let loose to just nibble out all the palatable plants, the tree seedlings, all the rest of it, reducing the place to a wasteland, well, it breaks my heart.

And then when you look at what's going on worldwide, you see something very similar. We have television chefs all over the place saying, stop eating meat from these indoor intensive farms where the pigs and the chickens and stuff are kept because it's so cruel, as indeed it is. Eat free range instead. And all you're doing by that means is swapping a disaster for animal welfare with a disaster for the natural world.

Free-range chickens lay down this scorching carpet of reactive phosphate. Chicken shit. Which, whenever there's a heavy rainfall, straight into the nearest river. Pigs do so much damage to the structure of the soil that a friend of mine calls it open-cast pig mining. As for sheep and cattle ranching, well, they are now the foremost cause of wildlife loss and habitat loss around the world. Stupendous.

staggering amounts of destruction caused by our appetite for meat. And it's not like the indoor animals don't do any harm either. The amount of soya and maize, these two great planet-ripping crops which are fed to them, ensures that they too have a massive impact. In fact, if you want to eat less soya, eat soya. Because the really inefficient way of consuming soya is doing so through the meat of an animal which has been eating soya.

and you consume far, far less of it if you eat it directly. By consuming plant protein as opposed to animal protein, you reduce your contribution to the clearance of natural habitats by 96%. So much for meat, but for me now it goes beyond meat.

And the reason for this was something that happened when, and this makes me a very odd, almost vegan, indeed, I was fishing at the end of the last trout season in Devon on the River Cone. Well, I wasn't fishing. I went down there to fish, but I could smell the river from 50 meters away. It had turned into a farm sewer. It was just a stinking mass of cow shit. And

And the only life form in it was sewage fungus, filamentous, wavery, feathery sewage fungus, which now coated the entire bed of the river. So instead of fishing, I traced this thing upstream, got to this massive intensive dairy unit up there and found the broken pipe coming out of a slurry pit at the bottom, which was just pouring straight into the river, wiping it out.

went to the environment agency their pollution hotline ring our pollution hotline if ever you see any incident of pollution and we'll be on to it straight away in the pollution hotline oh very interesting sir yeah i'll send you the photos right okay thank you sir very interesting what do you think of them all very serious obviously a serious case right so i'll write it up in the guardian photos all the rest of it the environment agency are on the case two weeks later i ring them up and say so what what have you done about this oh we decided it's not a serious incident sir

What do you mean it's not a serious incident? Well, we found no evidence of a fish kill. Of course you found no evidence of a fucking fish kill. There are no fish left in the river. You'd expect a fish kill when you have an acute, sudden pollution incident. This is a chronic one. There have been no fish there for months. There's nothing growing there except sewage fungus. Well, thank you for your opinion, sir. We've decided not to enforce.

And then I wrote that up, and I had two separate whistleblowers from the Environment Agency got in touch. This is the instruction right across the board now. We do not enforce against basic farm pollution that's taking place in our rivers. I thought, right, sod it. If that's the case, I'm out of this. If you're not going to regulate the industry, I'm not going to buy the products.

And again, you look at the global picture and these vast plumes of cow shit just pouring down the rivers of chicken shit from the egg farms. It's just devastating to all the things that I love. What do you do with that?

want anything to do with the climate change it's causing I don't want anything to do with this erosion of everything that makes this world wonderful and this reduction this wearing away of the nap of the earth until we're just left with the same gray homogenous nothingness everywhere that's what the livestock industry is doing and fine you do that but I'm not I'm not going to be part of it anymore

And it seems to me that, yeah, sure, you know, this is a choice. This is your choice. I can't make you eat meat or not eat meat. I don't want to make you eat meat or not eat meat. But it seems to me that if there is a measure of human progress, it is not having to be what our ancestors were. It's not having to be governed by the choices that they made. Otherwise, I'd be talking to you in a bearskin leotard.

I agree with a lot of what Adrian says about the role of meat in human evolution. It was critically important. For all the reasons that you say, you're quite right about that. We don't have to do that anymore. We've found other ways of feeding ourselves. We've found other ways of sharing our lives together, of engaging communally, of doing lovely things together, of creating beautiful stuff like this without actually having to eat a mammoth before we do it.

And that, surely, is what makes us human. It's what makes us what we are, is the choice not to be what we were. Thank you. Thank you, George.

Adrian, whatever you say about food libertarianism, surely we have a collective responsibility to prevent the kind of destruction that George is talking about. I mean, if we see animals not as food, but as weapons of environmental mass destruction, don't we need to accept some responsibility in the way that we do?

contribute towards that? No, it's a sweet story and you do tell it awfully well. Bless you. But it's entirely fallacious. And the thing that's wrong about it is that how many of you believe that nature has a balance? That nature is this finely wrought...

even beautiful, complicated tapestry of interrelated things that all lean one against the other and make it all perfect and wonderful. Because if you do, and it's what George believes...

You're entirely wrong. Nature works on cataclysm and accident. We are all competitive. We were born competitive. We grew up competitive. We were evolved from competition. There is no right way for the world to be. There was no moment where Georgia's world was just, keep it there, don't move.

That's it, that's it, there, now, right there. There was no marvellous time when the uplands were just that nice little bit of woodiness and not too many thistles. And... It didn't exist. We all get on because something else fails. The natural role of existence is to lead to extermination. That's what happens to most things. We've been immensely successful as a species...

That's not our fault. That's our brilliance. What I mind about George's view of the world is that there is nature and then there's us. There's everything else. There's all the glory. And then there's me. Twat. LAUGHTER

Greedy, fat, farting, slovenly, slothful, uncaring, twat, eating things with eyes. I am as much part of nature as every other species here.

in this world. All of us are. And what I mind about this view of the way the world works is it stops me being part of my birthright, which is part of natural selection. It makes me a fucking zookeeper. And I don't want to be a park ranger in your park. You're not invited. LAUGHTER APPLAUSE

Well, it's very sweet of you to tell me what my beliefs are. Obviously, I see the world is full of cataclysm. It always has been. There's always been cycles of destruction and extinction and then rebirth and stuff. But what we're doing at the moment is holding it down. We don't let go. We don't suddenly hit it and then say, all right, well, we've done the damage for a couple of million years. We'll leave it alone for a bit. We just keep on the case all the time, just knocking and knocking and knocking it back. And within my own lifetime, I've seen massive changes.

And actually, my concern is not for some abstract thing we call nature, because as Raymond Williams says, nature is the most complex word in the English language. What does it even mean? We're part of nature, we're not part of nature. I don't know what that means.

My concern is for my own feelings and people who also have those feelings about seeing this mass destruction of something beautiful. That was the bit I was going to get to, the vanity. Yeah, it is vanity. Of course it's vanity. But then we are all vanity. Everything is vanity. We love this building because it reflects something that's inside us or we would like to be inside us. Anything we love is the same. We love our children out of accountability.

a kind of vanity in the same way but is that a bad thing is that vanity some form of evil i think not i think it's what allows us to be the outward looking generous spirited engaged amazing creatures that we are and to deprive us of the delight the wonder the joy in in what excites us

particularly in the natural world, that is a crime against ourselves, apart from anything else. George, let me ask you this. When I was vegan, one of the things that bothered me was the question of whether not eating meat is enough. I mean, if the destruction you're talking about is as serious as it is, then why is eating meat the solution? You could say anyone who shops at supermarkets or...

mass-produced clothes or buys anything that's produced through an industrial process is contributing to the same thing. So why the focus on meat as the problem? Well, you're right. It's never enough. Nothing is ever going to be enough. And so it's a question of compromise. It's a question of balance. Yeah, I've got leather shoes on. Yeah, I'll eat the fish that I catch. Every couple of weeks, I'll eat an egg. I'll still eat roadkill and stuff because no one killed it for me. But

And I know that just my very existence means I'm exerting an impact on the living world. Of course it does. Even a vegan diet, you are exerting an impact on the living world. It's a question of degree. But the impact of meat is so wildly, disproportionately ridiculous that anyone, even if you don't love the natural world, how about just hating waste?

And just the idea of hating waste should be enough to think, that's a really dumb thing to be doing. Just eating, you know, getting a modicum of pleasure from it. But, you know, you haven't tried my Thai green curry. You know, where you get a modicum of pleasure, the same pleasure from that. What do you make it with? Tofu, chickpeas, whatever, you know. Just throw in... Tempted. A lot of it of whatsoever, don't you? But...

You know, you get a little bit of pleasure, but the disproportion between that little bit of extra pleasure you might get from eating meat and the phenomenal amount of destruction required to produce it should surely commend it to anyone as a stupid thing to do.

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Adrian, have you ever killed anything? No. And what do you feel about mass intensive farming that is well known to cause hardship? Two things. Yeah, I've killed lots and lots and lots of things. Famously, I shot a baboon and I shoot for fun. I shoot birds. I've shot buffalo. I've shot deer. That's about it. I don't like fishing.

Wet nitting. Wet nitting. You clearly feel at ease with the idea of killing animals and not necessarily the consumption. But I eat everything. Or someone's eaten everything. I mean, I wouldn't ever kill anything because he's got a spotty coat. I mean, it's only about food.

And I started off as a vegetarian. I went to a vegetarian boarding school, the only one in the country, sent by my hippie parents. I suspect that has a lot to answer for you. I think we've just got to the nub of it, haven't we? We've just got the rest of the debate down. The only other inmate you'll have ever heard of was Michael Winner. Jeez, that place must be closed down.

And then when I stopped being a vegetarian, I decided that I would, if I was going to eat meat, I had to be prepared to do the whole business myself. You can't just jump in when it looks like a brick. So I started gutting animals and then killing them and eating them and cooking them and skinning them, and I still do that. And I derive an enormous amount of pleasure from going out and finding and capturing and getting my own food. Do I care about the pain that animals have inflicted on them?

Up to a point. I think that the obsession with the last three and a half seconds of animals' lives, which is what the argument always comes down to, is, again, a desperate vanity. It's about us. It's about how do I feel about killing this animal? It's about, you know, is an animal, a halal animal, slightly worse off than a kosher animal? Because they're fucked, really. Yeah.

Those things I don't care about. I think it's unpleasant if you see animals that are badly husbanded anywhere. Animals that are kept in crates that are too small. And as a food critic, how do you feel about meat that's produced that way? The worst thing, by the way, how many of you eat soft-shell crabs? Don't. If you ever saw the agony of a soft-shell crab home, you've never eaten another one. LAUGHTER

I didn't think we'd get some compassion from Adrian. George, your argument is more about the environmental damage than animal welfare. Even bursting those pigs didn't... Oh, no, it's not that I don't have concerns about that as well. I...

I suppose, I was going to say like Adrian, but actually there's nothing like Adrian. I don't have nearly as much of a problem with shooting a wild animal that's had a reasonable life than keeping an animal in really crap conditions for the whole of that life. And as I saw on the pig farm I worked on, as I've seen in endless broiler and battery chicken units and the rest of it,

animals are treated really amazingly badly. We think of ourselves as a nation of animal lovers and we lavish great affection on our dogs and cats, which means largely feeding them on

pigs and chickens and other animals which have been treated terribly in order for us to lavish that affection on them and yet you take a pig just as intelligent as a dog just as capable of suffering as a dog and they are kept in really really horrible conditions you know and and it's getting bigger the scale of it can i jump i don't want to interrupt you can i jump in there because i think there's this is another thing that i have a bugbear with is that the um is is the hierarchy of suffering

which is that the closer animals are to us, the more we can identify with them. Again, the vanity. The more responsibility we have for them and to them. Therefore, chimpanzees, obviously, they should be honorary people. But, you know, abalone... Fuck them. But isn't it about the capacity for suffering? No, I don't think in the natural world...

The threshold for the right to life should be having a nervous system that's nearly like mine. Well, I'm not really arguing about the threshold for the right to life. But it is hard to draw the line. It is hard to draw the line, isn't it? If you make a kind of sentient capacity to feel pain argument for not killing animals. But there's some evidence that can feel pain. That's why...

Some people believe in only eating things that fall naturally from the tree. Where do you draw the line? It's not about drawing hard lines. It's about saying, look, if the capacity for suffering is very high, then we should be more concerned about that suffering. It's as simple as that. It's not a complicated argument. And yeah, we have a particularly high capacity for suffering because we are so bright and we've got such a highly developed central nervous system.

But there are many other mammals in particular which are also pretty bright and have got just as developed central nervous systems as we have. Their capacity for suffering is very great. I don't think that should be the criteria. I think that everything is part of nature. Everything has the right to be part of it. But everything dies in it and everything gets eaten.

Everything gets eaten. Everything dies. But you see, that's not my objection in this respect. It's what happens when they're alive, which is the main animal welfare issue. Quickly, before we bring everyone else in, what about health? Adrian, there's evidence that meat causes disease, that a plant-based lifestyle is healthier. Do you think there's any merit in advocating plant-based diets from a health perspective? No.

Do you accept that there is evidence that it's healthier to eat a plant-based diet? Do you know what my job is? I am familiar with your work. No, there isn't. It's incredibly difficult to replace meat protein. It's a real, real problem for people who don't eat meat protein. And you either have to have hideous, textured, grown, manufactured protein, which has all sorts of problems with it. As a child in vegetarian boarding school, were you able to eat a balanced diet? Yes.

No, I think I basically ate eggs and cornflakes. No, I mean, it just is... That said, there are loads of people who are vegetarians and live perfectly healthy lives, most of India. But it would also be incredibly difficult to replace...

all of the meat production with an equal and valuable amount of plant production. I once went on a very interesting trip to Madagascar. If you haven't been, go. While stocks last. There's not a lot of it left. It's terrific, Madagascar. An amazing, amazing, amazing place. And I went with Kew Gardens, who were going to collect. They're doing the Millennium Seed collection.

One of the most pointless things ever conceived is that we're going to again collect 10% of all the seeds in the world and hide them. But I'd love them for doing it. So I went off with them and did that. And the thing that is eating, quite rightly as George will point out, the thing that's eating Madagascar cattle, zebu cattle, which were brought over by the Africans who were the second largest people who got to Madagascar. And I was there with a marvellously...

clever, sensitive, local Madagascan biologist. And every night we would watch the fires burn across the central ridge while they clear, they burn for grazing for their zebu cattle.

Huge amounts of stuff was gone. None of the bear babes are now producing young bear babes. There were no young bear babes left. Of the six or seven varieties of bear babes in the world, they're all in Madagascar, one in Australia, two in Africa. There were no young. They've all been eaten by cattle. And I talked to this man about the cattle. I said, the cattle are obviously a problem. And he went...

I know, you can't get enough of them. And I went, no, no, really? He said, well, but the cattle were always here. And I went, no, no, the cattle weren't always here. Cattle were brought over here in the 16th century. He went, no, no, no, cattle have always been here. They've always been Zibu here. As long as there have been people here, there have been Zibu here. My people came with the cattle. And you go, I don't think that's probably quite right. He was a biologist. He was a scientist. He'd been trained biologically.

He was incredibly clever, very nice. I couldn't argue with him. That was his culture. That was who he was. They are so tied up with the idea of being cattle-rearing people that that's what they do. That is who they are. I wasn't going to say, look, I'm terribly sorry, but George is going to really have a go at you when he gets back. LAUGHTER

You have to understand that the way people eat, what they do, how they live is as important as all the other stuff. It's as important as you getting fucking trees on Shafell or whatever it is you want. Those things, the way our culture works and the culture of our food and how it matters to us and what we grow up with, what we grow with is really important. And you can't just dismiss it because it ruins your view. Can't we have new cultures?

Go and invent one. Go on. I mean, it is culturally specific, isn't it? I can say as someone who's tried to be vegan and war vegan in West Africa, it's not a culture that's universal. Isn't there something problematic about us trying to impose our Western-centric ideas about wellness and veganism on other cultures that, as Adrian's saying, are fundamentally attached to meat eating? I'm not trying to impose it. I'm just making an argument that, you know, if we want to minimise our impacts, this is the way to do it.

As for the idea that you can't have a diet, you can't replace the protein, it's just simply not true. It's easy. Nowadays it is. It didn't used to be. Well, actually, maybe it was. We used to eat dhal, basically, in this country. Peas pudding, peas pottage, pea soup. It was dhal. And it's still there. We've still got all the pulses. You've got all the nuts and seeds and all the rest of it. It's actually easy. And I think it's pretty healthy. I've lost a stone.

And I stopped, you know, if we had carried on losing, it would have been a problem. But, you know, it's fine. But... And as for the health side, well, you know, if you're a total 100% vegan, there's a couple of supplements you might want to take. But that's it. I want to bring in the audience now. So if you could raise your hand if you have a question.

Actually, yes. Hi. I've got a comment and a question. My comment was on your point about cultures. We should just accept culture's choice to eat meat. You could equally argue that about slavery back in the day. We should just accept people's choice to traffic humans and, you know, if they want to do that and that's... I'm sorry, that's a really, really...

Interesting and silly point. Do you really think that all of gastronomy and slavery are equitable? I'm waiting for the light.

I think... Good, OK. Well, that's fine. Then we really disagree. I don't think they're the same. It's not the same, but there are parallels. There are really strong parallels. OK, fine. You're wrong. You can't undermine that by calling it silly. Did you say you had a question? But I have a question. And that's more on resilience and biodiversity because the way we farm... So we are...

our ancestors are something like 12,000 different human beings. Our genetic biodiversity isn't very strong and the way we farm means we have very specific types of animals and we've really reduced the amount of biodiversity that we're ingesting as well and so we're not resilient at all to superbugs and things like that. So there's a massive issue there as well. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes. There's one more question.

This is actually a question for you. For me? Yeah. Maybe it's a bit more basic, but I'm really interested in why people go down the path of veganism for as many years as you did and change. I was hoping no one was going to ask me that. So yeah, that's why I'm asking. Okay, thank you. George, on biodiversity and also the comment that the way we treat animals is akin to...

On the first thing, I think the more interesting stuff... Sorry. It's all right. I think we've got it. The first thing about the biodiversity, actually the more interesting point is the diversity of antibiotics.

And what we're now facing is the antibiotics which humans need being basically squandered on farm animals. And there's a finite supply of the diversity of antibiotics which can be used to treat us. And if they're being sloshed around all over pigs and chickens and cows and the rest of it, then that supply runs out. And that, to me, is another very powerful reason why we shouldn't be eating meat.

As far as the slavery analogy is concerned... I'm sorry, to make sure we get it right. The cultural argument that you should have a relativist approach to different cultures is like saying you should let people practice slavery if it's in their culture, for example. What do you say to that? I don't see a moral equivalence between eating meat and having slaves. I understand the point that was being made. I think there is an interesting...

interesting analogy between the anti-sugar campaigns in the 18th century and the anti-meat campaigns today.

In 1791, 300,000 people in Britain boycotted sugar, decided to just stop eating it altogether, because they could see the chain of causality between doing something which seemed sweetly innocent, what could possibly be harmful about eating sugar, apart from all the obvious things, but obviously that sugar was coming from somewhere. And sugar sales in this country reduced by a third. We could see the moral consequences of what we were doing.

We could see beyond the immediate and local implications of our behavior. We could see that they were global. We could see that our behavior and its implications spanned the world. Well, that's kind of the same thing that I'm calling for when it comes to meat. If you don't want to see environmental destruction, you stop eating meat, just as if you didn't want to see slavery, you stop eating sugar. That's where I think there is a valid analogy to be drawn.

Oh, and incidentally, there were people, there were slave owners and sugar traders who said it would be terribly bad for us if we stopped eating sugar. It would have massive impacts on our health.

Thank you. I don't know if anyone else is interested in the answer about me, so why don't you come and find me afterwards and I will tell you. No, no, no, come on. Oh, come on. I'm still about 90, I don't know, you're 97, I'd say I'm about 90% vegan and I love veganism. My problem was I took it too far and apologies to any of the raw food vegans here, but by being a raw food vegan I got a bit disillusioned

with the lifestyle because it was just so demanding and I think for me it was about thinking more about what I ate and taking more responsibility for the food choices I made but I think it's also unhealthy to spend all your time thinking about what you eat and the problem I had with raw food and I think it's easier now I mean this was about six years ago when it wasn't so easy to find products and raw food was that it took over my life a bit so I rebelled against it but I still love veganism

Thank you for your question. Okay, right, next batch of questions. Could you all raise your hands so I can see everybody? Got one, oh, oh, two up there, one there, there.

Is there a mic up there? Yes. Okay. Oh, you're the mic. Okay, thank you. Hi. Yeah, I have a question for Adrian. I was interested by two things. First of all, your kind of affection towards the liberal, natural order of things and the kind of chaos and so forth and how that leads you to feel quite comfortable with people taking whatever decisions they want around meat and so forth. But then also, counter to that,

A similar affection to sort of sustaining certain cultures around meat and meat cultivation and those kind of cultural practices around that. And I think that's actually under threat when you look at things like certain companies trying to synthesize meat. Obviously, it's possible that soon we will be able to synthesize meat that tastes as good but doesn't involve meat.

animal rearing or any of those kind of cultural practices that you also hold dear. So, you know, the question is, how do you feel about those new businesses that are emerging that are synthesizing meat that could taste as good but actually threaten the livelihoods of those old businesses? Thank you very much. Thank you. And just a reminder, can we keep questions...

This isn't personal to you, I should have said at the beginning. Try to keep questions brief, because there are a lot of people who want to ask them, and I'm keen to get everyone in. There's a young lady here, yeah. Hi, my question's for Adrian. It seems to me that you're very clear that you agree with meat-eating and you'd eat anything that doesn't have a birth certificate. But I was wondering what your reasoning would be behind that and what your justification would be, rather than just sort of, I don't give a shit, as you've said many times. And I appreciate your humour, you made me laugh, but on a serious note, how do you say...

How do you say, I justify my own sort of foodgasm, that sort of, oh yeah, I love foie gras, over that animal's rape and being taken away from their parents and their suffering and their murder and then your own health impacts and the impact on the environment. How do you say that? Okay, thank you. We get the question. APPLAUSE

Okay. Adrian, how do you live with yourself? That was a marvellous question. I love the crescendo. Yeah, I just do. APPLAUSE

come on Adrian give us more have you ever laid away what you know with the image of an animal you killed that day kind of haunting you or not haunting me no have you ever seen anything that's made you question killing and eating animals yes that didn't make you question um I didn't want to work there um

No, I, I, no, no, sorry. It's an old, you know, psycho thing, really. And while we're on you, Adrian, there's another question for you, which is... Oh, I tell you what is odd. Has anyone ever killed a hare? That's tough. There's a very weird thing that hares and rabbits do, which is they're mostly mute, but hares scream when they die. And they scream like children.

And it seems to be a completely altruistic response. It doesn't do the hair any good. It doesn't do it at any other time in its life. And that's quite tough. It's not terrible, but I do love hair. Go on.

Lost me there. Is there not a contradiction between the two things you're saying? It's the gentleman up there. You advocate the natural chaos of things, but at the same time, we'd like to preserve cultures that enjoy meat. I mean, if there's chaos, then cultures get wiped out. I agree with George. It's the cultures come and go. There's lots and lots of bits of culture that have disappeared or come back in other places and in other ways. But one of the most fundamental bits of culture we all share is

It's food. And it is absolutely central to our sense of ourselves and who we are. I mean, you only have to think about it. Just look at Italians and how Italians feel about Italian food. I mean, that is, it is what they are, who they are, what your mother fed you, where you grew up. In Scotland, we have an expression for the food of your calf country. These are not things that you can just say, well, you know, actually, why don't we just get rid of it?

Adrian, our food culture has changed beyond recognition in this country. Of course, all the time. Constantly. I mean, we've gone from being completely indifferent to it, completely obsessed about it, with no happy medium in between. No, no, I think what you're obsessed with is the medical and the... No, come on. All the supplements are just...

aft with recipes for things where you can't possibly find the ingredients and all people talk about now is the three R's is recipes, resorts and renovations there's no other topic of conversation laughter

You go into a pub now, you know, to get a pie and chips, and you go, oh, bertholonia on croutons. Wait, did you turn it to 95? 1595. No, really. You can have a pelvic bowl on it. But pie and chips, what's wrong with that? Why do you have that fucking old foreign stuff? But George,

what I'm saying is that these things are about as unfixed as they could possibly be. It's this incredibly dynamic food culture we've got in this country. It's all new. I'm not disagreeing with you, but it is dynamic and it is a culture. But are you not... So why do we have to latch on to things that were in the past and say we've got to preserve

I'm not saying that. I'm saying it should all be movable and it should all be what you want it to be, not necessarily what you think would be better for us to keep sheep off hills. I'm not even going to bother. Let me just ask you, food culture is so fluid and dynamic, but are you not underestimating the kind of emotional attachment people have to things that maybe they did grow up with or to them evoke part of their national or...

religious identity and those things might involve meat and is it really fair to expect people to abandon that? One of the most powerful, powerful meals in the world is Passover. I mean, it's a really properly moving thing to take part in. It's shit food. LAUGHTER

You really enjoyed that. Of course it's true. Of course it's true. People have attachments to that. That's fine. And I also have attachments to the living world. And I say, well, there's my attachment, there's your attachment. I would love you to be more attached to the living world and maybe that other attachment will change. Fine. That's how cultures evolve. That's how things change. Moral questions bear upon cultures.

bear upon cultural questions they help to shape culture and in response the other question from up there i mean isn't this not an issue of excess if we all ate meat more responsibly if you know we weren't eating too much then uh that would naturally at least mitigate if not solve the problem of course it would mitigate it and it's all a question of degree you know and and if i mean yeah it would be hugely beneficial as far as the wildlife and the habitats and all the rest that i love and the

Earth's atmosphere and everything if we just stopped eating meat altogether. But I know that for most people that's too much to ask. So fine, cut it down. That's also fine. But I think we're pretty unambitious about it. People say, oh, well, okay, I won't eat meat for one of my four meals a day. I think we could take things a bit further than that.

Adrian, what's your view on meatless Mondays, cutting down on meat consumption generally? I'm really against rules of any sort for anything. I mean, I want a world that has fewer rules. I'm much more fundamentally Voltairian than I think you are. And don't eat what you don't want to eat. If you don't want to eat meat, don't eat it. I mean, the idea that you're going to go, oh, it's Monday. Silly. Silly.

Right. Next round of questions, please. Yes, this gentleman. My relatively superficial understanding of libertarianism is that it's about maximizing autonomy and freedom of choice. And I just want to unpack whether there's an inconsistency there between valuing your own personal autonomy and freedom of choice and

and not valuing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. And I wonder if the only reason that you've been privileged with the rights to pursue your own desires is a society that has been sustainable up until this point, and does that not therefore mean that you have a responsibility to future generations for them to provide for themselves? Thank you very much. APPLAUSE

Adrian, we're borrowing the earth from our children. Oh, do you want me to answer that one? The difficult one. Why can't I do the easy one? You can ask Paul now. Start with him. No, that was an absolutely spot-on question. And I don't have the answer to it. I think you're right, and I think that we absolutely have to think about what we leave behind us.

But we have to also equally think about what it is we discard for our own vanity and our own sense of medical, social insecurity. But I think that's a very valid point. Okay, we've got time for one, possibly two more rounds of questions. The two people at the back there have had their hands up very patiently.

This is for George, actually, being as he hasn't been very busy. Given that we're unlikely to convince the meat-eaters here to change their lifestyle, but given that I think you've convinced them that what they're doing is devastating the planet, what's the one thing that you would ask them to do, short of giving up meat? What would be the one thing they could do that might make a difference? Thank you. OK, George.

Right, well, look, it's just really difficult to get people to do anything which is in the wider public interest or the interest of the living world. Whatever it happens to be, fly less, get a smaller car, stop using your car, whatever it happens to be, it's really, really hard because it requires, apart from anything else, a leap of the imagination.

You have to be able to connect that action with its consequences. And a lot of people, most people don't want to go there. Cognitive dissonance is something we will go to horrendous levels to avoid. People go to war in order not to resolve cognitive dissonance. Is there not one practical doable thing? In a way, what we're talking about is the easiest thing of all.

In some ways, certainly reducing your consumption of animal products is so easy nowadays. We're surrounded with such an incredible diversity of amazing things to eat. And a whole load of those things are not meat. It's really easy to have great meals which don't involve meat, in fact, which don't have any animal products in at all. So I would put this actually at the easy end of the wedge of things which I want people to change, not at the difficult end.

Tomorrow, you could say to yourselves, I'm going to eat 50% less meat. The next week, you could say, I'm going to eat another 25% less meat. And you could just taper it down. You're not going to have some huge disruption, painful disruption to your life. It's generally going to be pretty good. Okay. Yes. Yes.

George, as a meat lover, I'm finding your arguments depressingly convincing. Tell me, if we took the sheep out of Wales, realistically, what would the land be used for? Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Yeah, no, interesting question. Very good question. I mean...

The first thing to realize is there's been massive change. You know, the farmers were constantly telling you, oh, it's always been like this. But no, it's been entirely driven by either the market or by the subsidy scheme. You know, before, I mean, go back a couple of generations, they had cattle, they were growing oats, they were growing barley in the hills.

They had geese in the hills, all sorts of stuff going on. And then you had these headage payments where you were paid by the number of animals you put on the hill. So suddenly everyone, oh, you get more sheep than anything else. Bye-bye cows, bye geese, bye-bye oats, bye-bye barley, sheep everywhere.

And then they changed that and they said, you're now going to be paid by the hectare. You're paid for owning land, like Adrian said. So, all right, OK, but the one thing you have to do to be paid is the land has to be bare. If there's trees on the land, you don't get paid for it. So, basically, you've got a €55 billion incentive for mass habitat clearance across the entire European Union. That's what's going on. It's one of the biggest environmental disasters on Earth at the moment. No one's talking about it.

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of land have been cleared solely to meet the criteria for the subsidies. The easiest way of clearing the land is to put sheep in it. They keep it clear, they mow it. An automated system for environmental destruction. So you take the sheep off and yeah, there'll be change again. To begin with, you'll see bracken and thistles and stuff come in and that'll last for a few years and then the trees start to come in among them.

Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I actually want to see, I don't actually want to see the end of farm subsidies. I want to see those subsidies redeployed to environmental goods. And that means bringing back wild, beautiful, amazing places and stopping floods downstream and doing all sorts of other benefits. There's loads of work required for that, loads of work. And the farmers actually could do better out of this. If you pay them the same amount of money...

for environmental restoration, as they're currently being paid for sheep keeping. Because the environmental restoration is that much cheaper, they'd be taking home a lot more, keeping a lot more of that money than they would otherwise be doing. Chasing sheep across rain-sodden hills costs the average Welsh farmer £20,000 a year. What's not to like? Yes, sir.

I'm sorry, I've got to...

And that, you know, when you take into account the hydrological damage you're doing to farming downstream in far more productive places through the cycle of flood and drought you get from keeping the hills bare, its net contribution to human nutrition is probably negative. Okay, thank you. Thank you for the question. So before we go, we want to know how many of you, after having heard the arguments tonight, would seriously think about making...

about making a change in your diet and reducing the amount of meat in it. So could you raise your hands if you're seriously considering making a change as a result of what you've heard here? Wow. Rich Bird.

Everybody wins. I think that was a good number. Did you ask people if they seriously think about eating more meat? Is anybody more determined to eat meat or seriously considering eating more meat as a result of what they've heard? You've got some...

got some hands, Adrian. You've got some hands. That's more than we thought he'd get for that argument. Thank you so much. I must say that our side has never, ever, ever won. That represents progress for your cause. We have to close now. Thank you so much for being a brilliant audience. Thank you. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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