meat head

Does such a thing even exist?

Let’s get one thing out of the way up top: meat is delicious. Every truly memorable meal I’ve had in my life has been anchored by meat. It’s the stuff of family gatherings, long dinner parties and celebratory nights out. When I think about the concept of removing meat from my diet, it’s not the practicality that strikes me—I was vegetarian for three years in my early twenties—it’s the feeling of losing all of that: the community, the experience, the memory. Meat is emotional.

Yet for many of us, our meat-eating is cut through with a growing sense of wrongness. We’ve seen the abattoir footage, we’ve read the articles about our ecological footprints and we’ve heard the warnings from global health authorities: being a carnivore comes with significant costs. Humans are famed for our powers of cognitive dissonance—that is, the ability to know that something is wrong yet do it anyway. And when it comes to meat, we’re willing to overlook an awful lot in order to keep ourselves happy. But is there a middle road? A way of both eating meat and doing it responsibly and sustainably? And what impact might such a change have on our kids?

Is there a middle road? A way of both eating meat and doing it responsibly