Haute cuisine was unknown in Europe until the fifteenth century. Asia was more advanced in this as in other matters of luxury. But Western Europe ate more meat than Eastern Europe, and much more than China. Depopulated by the plague, Europe in the Middle Ages was rich in meat. Herds of horned cattle were taken to Venice by boat from Dalmatia or driven overland to Germany from Hungary. One such herd might contain as many as 20,000 oxen. Naturally, only large towns could handle such quantities of perishable food. The upper classes ate more meat than the lower orders, and more meat was eaten in capital cities than in the provinces. In Paris in the sixteenth century, pork was considered as poor man’s food; merchants and noblemen preferred venison. By the crisis-ridden seventeenth century, meat consumption was lower but nevertheless remained at the level of an average of 20 kilograms per year. On the eve of the French Revolution, the average Parisian consumed three times as much meat as his average fellow countryman in the provinces. 2
Many states saw controlling the grain supply as their strategic aim, but it was rare for them to pay similar attention to meat. Robert Malthus considered dairy and beef herds a luxury. Land given over to cattle doesn’t produce more food but decreases supply. Following his lead, vegetarian activists calculated that the amount of food from an acre would increase tenfold if people moved from a carnivorous to a vegetarian diet; they called for pasture land to be turned over to arable farming. 3 But the sparsely populated lands of the New World offered unheard of opportunities for cattle grazing. At the end of the nineteenth century, millions of semi-wild cows and bulls roamed on the Argentinian plains. The only tradable parts were dressed hides. The gaucho ate the tongues and left the flayed corpses to the coyotes. All this changed thanks to the discoveries of Justus von Liebig.
The founder of organic chemistry, Liebig remembered the terrible year of 1816, when Europe didn’t see the sun because of the eruption of a volcano on a distant island in Asia; in Darmstadt, where he was born, people were on the verge of starvation. All his future work would be concerned with food and fertilisers. In 1847 Liebig invented a method of making a meat extract which he decanted into glass bottles; 30 kilos of meat produced a kilo of the extract, which was as thick as syrup and kept very well. 4 The first factory was built in Uruguay; the sales in Europe were healthy. Then Liebig invented the stock cube and a method of preserving meat in tins. Argentina and Uruguay underwent an unprecedented boom; European hospitals, armies and the poor got a new source of provisions. Then the Chicago slaughterhouses invented a way of freezing meat. Refrigerated units were put on rails or installed in the holds of ships. Later, smaller refrigerators for domestic kitchens were produced. Frozen meat transformed the lives of billions of people. A scarce and expensive resource, formerly available only to the elite, became an item of mass consumption. Such inventions fed the growing cities, engendered new flows of commodities, created new fortunes. It was only at this point that long-distance trade started to compete with local trade. In the 1930s two Swedish economists, Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, described this effect; the model they constructed used the old production factors of land, labour and capital and took long-distance trade into account. 5 However, the model didn’t include the costs of the new wonders of trade – the emissions from the burning of coal and the pollution from the packaging waste.
Vegetarianism
One particular part of the story of meat is abstinence from it. Jews refrained only from eating pork, but the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans that Jesus advised against eating any meat. St Jerome thought that before the Flood people neither ate meat nor drank wine. During the Renaissance, vegetarianism was linked to the Pythagorean tradition, which promised dominance over nature and the immortality of the body. Following this, many freemasons abstained from meat. In the eighteenth century the most successful proponent of abstinence from meat-eating was the Italian doctor Antonio Cocchi, a fellow of the Royal Society and founder of the first Masonic lodge in Florence. Drawing on the experience of doctors and travellers, he was the first to show that scurvy was caused by sailors’ rations, which consisted of salted meat. The conquering of scurvy was one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment.
In the British Empire, vegetarianism was connected with Hinduism, which was often promoted by people returning from the colonies. John Holwell, a governor of Bengal, was a vegetarian. In retirement, he promoted vegetarianism and tried to prove that Hinduism was the root of Christianity. 6 Such vegetarianism was a manifestation of positive Orientalism, in which the centre – London and Manchester – imitated the periphery – India. In Europe, vegetarianism was considered an English fad. The first lifestyle movement, vegetarianism filtered down from the elite, captivating the middle classes and absorbing other new ideas. As one London newspaper wrote in 1878, ‘As a matter of fact, vegetarianism does seem somehow or other to be correlated to all sorts of strange “isms” … A vegetable solus eater is pretty sure to hold new and strange views on political economy, to be a member of the Society for Psychical Research, to dress in all wool clothing, to abjure the razor, or to wear soft and unsightly hats.’ 7 The Russians and Americans connected vegetarianism with the simple life, the rejection of luxury, and the love of nature. The popular sects – the Russian Khlysts, the American Shakers – didn’t eat meat. Henry Thoreau and Lev Tolstoy produced similar arguments in support of vegetarianism: meat was a symbol of luxury, lust and inequality between people. Vegetarianism was the subject of ideological battles and also a personal choice. There were notable vegetarians on both sides of the divide between good and evil – Shelley and Wagner, Gandhi and Hitler.
This debate gained another dimension in the twenty-first century. Meat and dairy products provide just 18 per cent of the global consumption of food calories, but their production creates 60 per cent of carbon emissions from agriculture. As a result, farm animals produce more emissions than come from the total of all kinds of transportation. Beef, for example, contributes only 3 per cent of the calories in the American diet, but emissions from cattle make up half of all agricultural emissions in the USA. Using up a great deal of oil and land, beef should be expensive, but agricultural subsidies halve its price in the consumer market. Governments are directly financing one of the main sources of pollution on the planet. If humanity gives up meat and milk, it will liberate three-quarters of the land currently taken up by agriculture. More water would become available as welclass="underline" worldwide, cattle are responsible for a third of water consumption and more than half of water pollution. 8 The only chance of feeding the growing world population while at the same time reducing emissions is to make radical cuts (up to 40 per cent) in cattle farming in the countries of the Global North. This is a realistic goaclass="underline" during the last fifty years the consumption of beef has already reduced by a third, in part thanks to the propaganda of vegetarian ‘cranks’.