Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Jan 13, 2012 Sarah Clement rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think this book had a lot of potential, and I was intrigued to see what a fellow environmentalist would have to say on the topic of the sustainability of meat. While I think Fairlie did a phenomenal job overall, there are many glaring and not-so-glaring errors in his book, both in terms of data and in terms of conclusions. The best part of the book is, by far, the scenarios he develops involving different agricultural systems and how they would relate to the dietary patterns of the public. He...more I think this book had a lot of potential, and I was intrigued to see what a fellow environmentalist would have to say on the topic of the sustainability of meat. While I think Fairlie did a phenomenal job overall, there are many glaring and not-so-glaring errors in his book, both in terms of data and in terms of conclusions. The best part of the book is, by far, the scenarios he develops involving different agricultural systems and how they would relate to the dietary patterns of the public. He discusses these in a way that I wish vegetarians and vegans would do more frequently, although I think he sometimes makes very large assumptions that don't necessarily stand up to scrutiny. The worst part of the book was his discussion of a vegan vision of the world. He essentially trolled around the internet to develop this 'vision' and as such it is more the rantings of random vegans from the web than an actual alternative, as presented by informed people. For someone who only peripherally follows the topic, this would look like vegans are just lunatics who have no insight into a future without meat, which is far from the case. I think this book could make a really valuable contribution to the discussion around environmentally sustainable food systems, but I don't know that it will ever take off given his dry approach. And while I know that he deliberately avoids the other aspects of this issue (e.g. ethics, social and economic aspects of sustainable food systems), I think it is left lacking in so many areas that most people can relate to, I think the book will always have a limited reach. While other writers on the topic of sustainable food systems like Pollan have perfected the art of engaging the reader through a mix of narrative and facts, Fairlie all but drops the narrative altogether and expects the strength of his facts to carry the reader to the same conclusions as him. Unfortunately, if you're not well-read on the topic, I suspect you may tire of his number crunching, and if you are well-read, you will spend a lot of time circling errors and commenting in the margins.(less)

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Jan 10, 2012 Shawndra rated it 2 of 5 stars

Meh, I respect that he did good research and blah de blah and I myself really dislike CAFO practices, however this book COMPLETELY IGNORES the staggering health statistics that suggest our overly processed cheap grain based foods are killing us. Fatal heart disease numbers are still staggeringly high despite all the medications available, kids and adults are becoming "allergic" to everything under the sun, childhood obesity has exploded, and I could go on and on. Yes its a bummer that not everyo...more

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Dec 30, 2010 Zach Cohen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Since this can be a contentious subject, I will begin this review by disclaiming my personal positions on the core issues of this book, so that my appraisal may be interpreted in light of my bias. I am very passionate about diet, food, and ecology. My concerns regarding this subject matter are nutrition, ecological issues (in which I include agricultural economy, environmental consequences, and sustainability), social issues, and lastly morality. I have lived several years as a vegan, before neg...more Since this can be a contentious subject, I will begin this review by disclaiming my personal positions on the core issues of this book, so that my appraisal may be interpreted in light of my bias. I am very passionate about diet, food, and ecology. My concerns regarding this subject matter are nutrition, ecological issues (in which I include agricultural economy, environmental consequences, and sustainability), social issues, and lastly morality. I have lived several years as a vegan, before negative personal experience and review of previously ignored evidence led me to believe it was not the nutritional and ecological panacea I had been led to believe it was. Similarly to the author, I now consume modest portions of traditionally raised animal products along with a whole foods plant based diet.

With that said, I found this book to be thought provoking in the extreme. More than anything else, my biggest takeaway was a deeper appreciation for the incredible complexity involved in the various sciences charged with evaluating the environmental limitations and effects on food production.

Given how broad this field is, Fairlie naturally must limit the scope of the book. Nutritional factors and the morality of animal eating are completely excluded from consideration in this work. Meat is purely focused on an analysis of how much of what type of food can be produced on how much land under what conditions. Also, as noted in the book, each chapter consists of a stand alone essay, so the overall work feels a little disjointed. I didn't find that to be much of a negative.

Despite the author's status as an enlightened carnivore, I found this book to be highly free of bias and polemics. He gives equal space to proponents of veganism and omnivorism, permaculture and industrialized agriculture. All arguments are critically examined using rigorous scientific, statistical, and historical evidence. Furthermore, extensive portions of the book are devoted to analyzing common scientific data, exploring the presumptions and ideological biases that formed potentially unreliable conclusions. One of the first chapters includes a detailed investigation into various productions methods for livestock and plant matter, and what actual yields of each under different conditions really are. Later in the book, this information is used to analyze the food producing capacities of four different models: chemical vegan, chemical livestock, permaculture vegan, and permaculture livestock. I found these sections especially interesting, as most mainstream vegan literature does not include technical analyses of what vegan agriculture actually looks like. When the advantages and disadvantages are weighed, some critical problems arise.

However, again due to the limited scope of the book, the author chose to apply much of his analysis to the unique circmstances of the United Kingdom. While the principles are interesting and informative, it's hard to know how much different his conclusions would be in other locales. Another limitation is that Fairlie assumes that the fossil fuel age will end in the near decades without a new infrastructure based on renewable, zero carbon energy. While the prospects for the future energy economy are varied and beyond the scope of the book, it's worth noting that much of his analysis presumes that there will be no new easily accessible mass source of energy. However, his explanation of the difficulties in properly managing the nitrogen and phosphate cycle and the maintenance of soil fertility, which as he and others argue is vastly harmed by urbanization and chemical agriculture, highlight extremely important issues that must be addressed in the development of a sustainable food system.

Overall, the book succeeds most where it is deconstructing conventional wisdom surrounding the role of livestock. The vegan establishment ubiquitously decries the caloric inefficiency, the extreme use of water, and the contribution to climate change associated with livestock production. These are often cited as reasons to abolish animal agriculture. Fairlie conducts a meticulous investigation into those claims, and the nuanced truth he uncovers suggests that they are fallacious. The 10:1 ratio of animal feed to meat often cited turns out to be a very limited snapshot of the marginal efficiency of grain fed animals in a concentrated industrial operation. Even in that setting, given that most of the animals' weight comes from grass prior to the CAFO, the ratio drops considerably. There are a number of considerations that can affect it, but it seems 3-4:1 is a more reasonable assessment. Similarly, the water usage statistics tend to come either from a calculation of all of the rainwater that fell on grass that animals ate, or an extrapolation of one specific region in a desert climate where pasture land needed to be irrigated. Since the former does not represent water that was available to humans for alternative use, and the latter represents about 1% of overall production, the water use claims are irrelevant to general livestock production. Finally the greenhouse gas contribution claimed by opponents (18%, according to a UN report) was based on a highly subjective calculation that was designed to promote intensive CAFO operations by allocating emissions from deforestation (which are not recurring emissions, and based off a year with vastly higher rates than current trends) arbitrarily to pastured live stock. A more realistic analysis results in livestock production contributing far less green house gases.

Fairlie advocates a return to decentralized, rural based agricultural systems where animals (what he calls default livestock use) are integrated with the land, serving as a source of fertility and a way of converting non arable pasture land (in the case of cows) and food waste (in the case of pigs and chickens) into a source of human sustenance. This would require that advanced industrial economies eat about 50% of the meat that they currently consume, but Fairlie convincingly argues in favor of the role of default livestock production in a sustainable food economy.

As the pressures of population growth and the costs of technological development continue to pose a threat to human civilization, the debate on how to balance the needs of human food requirements and ecological carrying capacity is increasingly critical. This book is a meticulously researched, well documented, and informative investigation of the various problems and potential solutions, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who eats and cares what the world their grandchildren will live in looks like. (less)

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Jan 17, 2013 Wendy Knerr rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The best book I know on the very complex ecological issues involved in raising and eating animals. I continue to grapple with the ethics and other implications of including animal products in my diet, and Fairlie's controversial book takes on the overly simplistic vegetarian and vegan arguments that abound. It skillfully challenges interpretations of the statistics that come up in every article, book, report and online forum about the influence of livestock on the environment and world hunger. I...more

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May 25, 2011 Phoenixfalls rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ecology, nonfiction, animals, cities, england, globalization, science

Within the first few chapters I thought that this book might become one of those that I proselytise for; at the end of it, I find myself fighting the urge to order ten more copies so I can pass them out come the holidays.

And all this despite the fact that I was really turned off by the hyperbolic jacket description.

Part of the reason I don't immediately buy ten more copies is that it's not an easy read -- Fairlie's argument is scientifically rigorous, and even though he explains the math in a wa...more Within the first few chapters I thought that this book might become one of those that I proselytise for; at the end of it, I find myself fighting the urge to order ten more copies so I can pass them out come the holidays.

And all this despite the fact that I was really turned off by the hyperbolic jacket description.

Part of the reason I don't immediately buy ten more copies is that it's not an easy read -- Fairlie's argument is scientifically rigorous, and even though he explains the math in a way that a lay audience can understand, it's still more of a 201 text than a 101 text. And, unfortunately, the subjects of food security and permaculture don't appear (yet) to be of interest to a general audience.

But they should be. The underlying message of this book, the Big Idea that we have so much trouble accepting, is that the Earth is a closed system -- a fabulously complex one, and one that we understand very imperfectly, but one which we cannot escape taking part in and affecting. From this premise, Fairlie examines the two ends of the ideological spectrum: the arguments for continuing industrialization of agriculture and high meat consumption; and the arguments for a vegan lifestyle, whether achieved organically or through technological fixes.

Being, as I said earlier, a 201 text, Fairlie spends most of his time taking down the vegan argument, assuming that anyone reading the book is already fairly convinced that industrialized agriculture is an unsustainable system. The way he does this is by showing, again and again, the sorts of cycles various nutrients pass through, and the many ways that domestic animals have been bred to faciliate those cycles. Industrialization has usurped those roles by making it possible to mine for or synthesize much of that; but this creates vast inefficiencies, and it is those inefficiencies that vegans hold up as reasons to eliminate livestock altogether. Fairlie is quite convincing in showing the way numbers have been manipulated by both sides of the argument, and in making the reader question whether the low-tech sort of agriculture practiced by humanity for thousands of years was perhaps the most efficient system yet designed.

I do not agree with him on every point; being from the urban elite, his picture of a re-ruralized future was, quite frankly, frightening to me, and I am not so dead-set against developing technologies that mimic the roles livestock traditionally held rather than going entirely back to animal-power. But the greatest strength in this book is that Fairlie invites the reader to argue with him, making his own prejudices transparent and giving the reader as much unbiased information as is possible. He is also, being English, understandably most knowledgeable about (and interested in) the British Isles and their ecology; there are several sections that are useful to an American reader only for the template they provide, rather than any of Fairlie's specifics. Still, this is overall an important book, and one I hope finds a wider audience.(less)

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Sep 28, 2012 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: food, europe, 5-stars, nonfiction, science

First off, before I start, I heard about this book through a caveman diet blog, so you know where my biases lie.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, as it says, a defense of eating meat. The author explains and then knocks down one vegan myth after another: that it takes 10 pounds of edible plants to get one pound of meat (this is only true if you ignore one of the main reasons our ancestors kept animals; namely, that they eat things humans don't), that it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise a sin...more First off, before I start, I heard about this book through a caveman diet blog, so you know where my biases lie.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, as it says, a defense of eating meat. The author explains and then knocks down one vegan myth after another: that it takes 10 pounds of edible plants to get one pound of meat (this is only true if you ignore one of the main reasons our ancestors kept animals; namely, that they eat things humans don't), that it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise a single cow to adulthood (yes, if you include every single drop of rain that falls on every blade of grass the cow eats), that grazing ruins the soil and leaves nothing but scrub and desert behind (it can, but if done mindfully it can equally rejuvenate desert into lush grassland), that the rainforest is being destroyed to farm cattle (this has as much or more to do with soy farming as cattle grazing), or that animal methane emissions are one of the main contributors to global warming (Here, his words say it best:

The exaggerated emphasis on the alleged four or five percent of [greenhouse gases] emitted by cattle, and the mendacious rhetoric about cows causing more global warming than cars, look suspiciously like an attempt to shift some of the blame for global warming from below ground to above ground, from fossil fuels to the natural biosphere, from the town to the country and from the rich to the poor.

The vision of a vegan England (well, one vegan's vision of) given later on, where in order to live in harmony with nature and prevent having to kill millions of pest animals in the course of agriculture, they literally wall themselves off from the natural world, was also especially ironic.

However, the book is in no way an unbridled paean to the joy of meat. There are two major caveats I'll add after my above list:
1) Simon Fairlie does not deal in any way with the ethical (that animals should have equivalent rights to humans, that killing merely for food is wrong when alternatives are available, etc.) or the evolutionary (that humans are natural herbivores, that meat was only a secondary food source, that humans are ill-adapted to digest meat, etc.) arguments for veg*nism. Meat: A Benign Extravagance is, by design, concerned only with the ecological and economic impacts of meat eating.
2) The current paradigm, in which a fraction of the global population gets all the meat they want, some people only get it occasionally, many basically never get it, and everyone's environment suffers to provide that unequal supply, is not sustainable in any way. In the face of soil depletion, climate change, peak oil, and a myriad of other pressures, something will have to change, and probably quite drastically. Meat is benign, yes, but is also extravagant.

The book is quite dense and full of references, but is written in a conversational tone with several anecdotes about the process of research. There are a number of instances where the author writes about the difficulty he had trying to find the source for claims made by either side, and in once case after being repeatedly given the run-around he resorts to just typing stuff into a search engine and seeing if he can find out where the source got the information for her claims. For the record, it's a source claiming that climate change can essentially be solved through carbon sequestration of pastured land grazed by cattle.

For me, I actually think the most interesting points were the times when he departed from his usual recounting of statistics and facts and talked about the emotional impact of eating meat; that doing so keeps us close to nature, which is, after all, red in tooth and claw (though this obviously doesn't apply to city-dwellers who get all their food prepackaged like myself!). A society in which no animals are eaten, even if it doesn't follow the lines of some of the more extreme vegan ideologues in gengineering most of the animal kingdom to eliminate predation entirely, is farther from nature than the omnivores are. I don't tend to think of my own meat-eating in moral terms--I tend to default to the nutritional benefits, especially over the available substitutes--and it was kind of eye-opening, even if of limited benefit to an urbanite.

The vision of a pastoral society given at the end is likely to provoke a strong response from quite a lot of people, but as the author points out, it is a lifestyle led by a significant portion of the world's population right now, and while I doubt many people would adopt it out of choice, we may have to do so out of necessity.(less)

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Aug 10, 2011 Angela Alcorn marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-2019, 21st-century, second-hand-bookshop-wishlist, non-fiction, change-the-world, environment-and-gardening, young-adult-educational-material, politics-law-war-activism, bruce-wants-to-read, cooking-food-drink

Bruce told me he wanted to get Good Food For Everyone and Meat: A Benign Extravagance after reading this article and listening to the Radio 4 food programme podcast.

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Jul 21, 2012 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: food, non-fiction

Meat is a collection of well-sourced, almost scholarly essays written by a small-scale farmer about meat, meat production, and meat eating. It was far more comprehensive than I expected, and one of the main things I took away was the importance of critical thinking about the subject- particularly when it comes to numbers and statistics! As it turns out a good number of them are something someone pulled out of... somewhere at some point, and subsequently acquire an aura of Holy Writ as they are c...more

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Mar 20, 2012 Keith Akers rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Vegetarians / vegans looking for "the other side" of the debate

The book has gone back to the library, however, I've read enough to give it at least three stars. I intend to finish it. If you are a vegetarian / vegan looking for a book by an opponent of vegetarianism, this is a much better read than "The Vegetarian Myth." It has some problems, though, and I think he's really misunderstood Goodland and Anhang's thesis on "Livestock and Climate Change," and made some basically illiterate attacks on their point of view.

One of the nice things about Fairlie's bo...more The book has gone back to the library, however, I've read enough to give it at least three stars. I intend to finish it. If you are a vegetarian / vegan looking for a book by an opponent of vegetarianism, this is a much better read than "The Vegetarian Myth." It has some problems, though, and I think he's really misunderstood Goodland and Anhang's thesis on "Livestock and Climate Change," and made some basically illiterate attacks on their point of view.

One of the nice things about Fairlie's book is that he clearly understands much of the logic of the vegan / vegetarian argument. Sometimes he will start to describe an idea favoring animal agriculture, and you'll say to yourself, "wait a minute, that's not right" -- but then sure enough, in a paragraph or two, he'll refute the idea he has just brought up himself. So he's not just a parrot for the meat industry, or even for organic agriculture, by a long shot.

In general, Fairlie's defense of meat seems to be based on the idea of meat as economically efficient (those cows can mostly take care of themselves), and the idea of meat as a storage device (what are you going to eat this winter or if your crops fail?). This is coupled with a fall back defensive strategy: meat produced on factory farms, and/or on a large scale, is bad; but on a small scale, not so bad. In fact the somewhat minor problems small-scale meat production causes, in Fairlie's view, are outweighed by the economic advantages and flexibility of an omnivorous diet.

"Small scale meat production" (compared to today's meat production, anyway) caused massive damage to the world in the form of overgrazing (Northern Africa beginning in the 6th century, the southwestern U. S. at the end of the 19th century, etc.). If we defined our terms, "small scale meat production" could wind up being pretty massive and could still wind up doing a lot of damage. When you talk about small scale meat production, you convey to western readers the idea of meat 2 or 3 times a week, but in practice "sustainable meat" would be much less frequent even than that, or would be the practice only of a small elite, with resultant social problems of inequality -- or both. And even at small levels animal agriculture can be bad; in several ways grazing cattle is actually worse than feedlot cattle. It is very destructive both of the soil and of biodiversity. I understand Fairlie's argument, but I am not convinced.

The health disadvantages of meat consumption are also very problematic and are not adequately addressed. We adopted meat consumption as hunter-gatherers when people frequently didn't live to be 30, so heart disease and cancer were of marginal importance. If we want to go back to that life expectancy, then meat might be excused as a "benign extravagance," but otherwise, we are going to pay for it one way or the other.

"Wasted food" (food thrown away, grasslands, and inedible parts of crops) is a big issue with Fairlie. My basic response to this is that this concept of "waste" is an economic concept. Food thrown away can be composted. Grasslands can be left alone or allowed to revert to forest. Inedible parts of crops should likewise be left on the ground or composted. Soil underpins our civilization, and to undermine the soil on the basis that it shortchanges our economy is a misguided economy.(less)

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Sep 28, 2012 Marshall rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ecology, non-fiction, politics, science

This book advocates that meat has a rightful place on the farm. It's falsely cited as a case against veganism. This author isn't against veganism or vegetarianism, and clearly believes it has its place. It's more accurate to say he's very strongly against what you might call a sort of totalitarian approach to veganism, the idea that we must transform the entire world to vegans, eliminating all animal products entirely. There's an interesting chapter that paints a pretty bleak picture of what suc...more This book advocates that meat has a rightful place on the farm. It's falsely cited as a case against veganism. This author isn't against veganism or vegetarianism, and clearly believes it has its place. It's more accurate to say he's very strongly against what you might call a sort of totalitarian approach to veganism, the idea that we must transform the entire world to vegans, eliminating all animal products entirely. There's an interesting chapter that paints a pretty bleak picture of what such a world would look like, followed by a chapter showing what kind of world he's advocating. It's certainly not what most meat lovers would have in mind. It's extremely rural, almost luddite.

This book sure was painful to trudge through. It's very, very dense. The author isn't a scientist, but damn does he know his farming. I scarcely understood much of it, but enough to get his gist. Here's an example of how this book reads: "During the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945, the average number of animals put down per outbreak was just 1.5. Since the slaughter policy was reintroduced in 1963 there have been nearly half a million pigs slaughtered at an average of 275 per outbreak. In 2001, there were 16 outbreaks, in which 74,000 pigs were slaughtered - an average of 4,625 per outbreak." Got all that?

But I think it was worth reading. At least parts of it were, and the rest worth skimming. The two aforementioned chapters, and especially the chapter on global warming, which is the real reason I read it. There is one U.N. study quoted everywhere, that 18% of human-caused green house gases are emited by livestock raised for food. I believed this for a while, but I had a little niggling feeling something was wrong when I never found any other studies to confirm this surprisingly huge number. This book breaks down that number, and everything that went into creating it, in excruciating detail. He spells out all the flaws with it, and adjusts the number to what he thinks is more accurate. When added up, he gets 10%, which sounds more reasonable to me anyway.

I was so persuaded by this book, and found it so impressively researched, that I'd love to give it four stars, but it was just too painful to read. Every page was a slug-fest, and by the end I felt exhausted, not enlightened. So I'm settling on three stars. Definitely read it if you love numbers and understand farming and permaculture fairly well. Otherwise, just read the chapter on global warming, and then read The Omnivore's Dilemma instead.(less)

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Oct 17, 2012 Daniel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was an interesting look at livestock's place in permaculture, but also a bit of a slog in places due to the heavy focus on calculations of crop yields, carbon sequestration, and similar topics (the introduction recommends skipping around between chapters, but I am sadly too much of a completist for that).

The main conclusion, as I interpreted it, is that animals can play a positive role in food production, but that it needs to be quite different from the current arrangement (involving reduce...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Anna rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: gardening-homesteading

I would give the first half of Meat five stars and the last half three, but Goodreads doesn't work that way.

Here's why the first half was awesome: It's a well-researched and unbiased account of the impact meat animals actually have on our environment. Yes, the text looks dense due to the font and footnotes, but it's actually quite easy to read.

Maybe because I'm much less interested in philosophizing about societal changes, I found the second half to be a slog. But it also felt much more opiniona...more

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Feb 19, 2011 Kat Lynch rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: eating-the-week

Holy cow (har!), this is dense. Not for the mathematically or philosophically faint of heart, but it's a very intriguing read.

Fairlie walks through exhaustive analysis of efficiency and ecological impacts of all kinds of food production methods over the course of 17 chapters. I learned some fascinating things: the concept of stockfree agriculture, for example, was totally knew to me; and the idea of livestock (particularly pigs) as a hedge against lean crops years makes a lot of sense. It also m...more

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Sep 07, 2011 Josie is currently reading it

Shelves: own

Really excited about this book. The first chapter was really interesting. Unfortunately it's rather dense and scholarly so it'll be awhile before I slog through all of it but it's a topic I'm always interested to better educate myself about so I'm excited.

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Jan 06, 2013 Dan Allosso rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: permaculture

Really good, in-depth look at mostly UK/Euro agriculture. Too much detail, and reads like a series of essays, but contains a lot of important ideas and info.

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Sep 22, 2010 Mark Newton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Excellent book. The best critical and balanced approach to agriculture and the environment that I've read, and one full of original ideas.

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Mar 06, 2013 Eugene rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 24, 2011 Dave Riley rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: gardening, ecology, food

An important, must read book.

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Shelves: food

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Shelves: non-fiction, science, ebook, book

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