Now, while I hesitate to dilute the glory of The Smiths in any way, even I won’t suggest that ‘Meat is Murder’ is one of their finest moments. But it did sum up exactly how I felt at the time: “a death for no reason and death for no reason is murder”. Right enough. We don’t need meat for survival or even a lively spring in our step, so logically, to eat it was to put our culinary entertainment above animal life. Simple.

But my life doesn’t quite work like that anymore. When everything was black and white, yes and no, right and wrong, life felt easy. Philosophically it all made sense, but it didn’t seem to fit the world I found myself in. I was left with the possibility that out there, in front of the few authentic black and white truths were a whole palette of ‘greys’. Terrifying.

England. Everywhere I walk I’m amazed by the variety and beauty of our countryside. Contrary to childhood impressions, I now understand it as not just as the absence of ‘town’ but as the pattern and diversity of how we differently interact with our environment. This vital, evolving entity is as it is largely due to what and how we eat: we literally eat the view. And this is where things start to fall apart in my black and white world: in a world where we all stopped eating meat, the South Downs would be ploughed up and swathed in cereals rather than their characteristic sheep; the network of irregular stonewalls that structure many of our uplands would have no function, fall into disrepair and eventually disappear; hedgerows, as English as anything there is, would vanish, taking our main ecological corridors from the landscape. The variety goes, the particularity of place dilutes, animal and plant communities become fragmented and isolated and England becomes increasingly homogenous and species poor. I could go on, but you see my point. We don’t inhabit a blank new world: everything we do has a pre-existing context that it affects.

And while Morrissey never quite finished the middle eight for ‘Milk is Murder’, I imagine a verse explaining that in reaching across the breakfast table for my morning pinta I was condemning countless calves to slaughter, producing unnecessary packaging, CO2 and likely as not helping the supermarkets flex their muscles. The chorus would doubtless tell me that the only way out was to be vegan. And he’d be right. But then I’d need more unseasonal fruit and vegetables, other sources of protein, and dietary ‘substitutes’ with their packaging, and, more often than not, overseas production.

It is inescapable. This is no perfect world where I can avoid all impact. It’s hard to accept that even in my trying to do good, bad results. Whichever path I take there are varying degrees of death, climate change, habitat loss, food miles, unfair trade, declining seasonality, small producers going out of business, and a homogenising countryside. Consequences everywhere, shades of grey everywhere. So, even if you are right-minded enough to at least consider the size of your own ‘footprint’, the challenge soon deepens to the somewhat trickier conundrum of taking responsibility for exactly what you tread on: I have to put my ‘foot’ down somewhere.

So I grow as much as I can, but it’s simply not fulfilling the breadth of my dietary needs: what do I do for protein, milk, cream? I’m back in the old conundrum again. Back in the world of philosophising, rambling, and wondering, forming abstract imaginary futures, and still I get no nearer to resolving them. And I get no nearer to resolving them because I only know one of these futures, the one I live now, and its not enough. I need to put my ‘foot’ down somewhere else.

So I’m going to get pigs. And chickens. And sheep. Potentially it’ll put me a good step further away from the supermarkets, allow me to produce almost all of our food, give a happy, organic, healthy life to the animals, and reduce my footprint in everyway. But I haven’t eaten meat for fifteen or more years. I don’t know if I can eat them, if I can kill them, how to feed or house them, whether I’ll like them or they’ll like me, or whether I’ll just get stroppy if they don’t pay me enough attention. And I’m petrified. Of finding I can’t kill them. Of finding I can kill them. Of this being a dilution of a young, vital sense of right and wrong, replaced by middle-aged compromise. Of this being a misguided wrongness of the worst kind. And of finding that I don’t agree with Morrissey anymore.

 

published in delicious magazine november 2004