I don’t have a lot of well-formed opinions on food policy. I’m learning as I go. But I do have thoughts on meat. While I’m opposed to the way animal agriculture is usually done in the United States, I’m not against meat per se, and I’m troubled by the argument that meat, just by virtue of being meat, is bad for the environment. I’m sympathetic to many reasons people give for being vegetarians, but I think the environmental argument is a mistake and does harm.

For me the climate crisis comes down to two related issues. First, there are just too many people. That’s a huge topic, and I’m not going to pursue it any further here other than to say woe be unto us if we try to ignore it indefinitely. Two, industrial civilization is in need of a thoroughgoing overhaul if not a complete replacement. Tinkering isn’t going to cut it. Books have been written about all this, I’m sure; I’m not about to write another one. I’m just talking, briefly, about food and how meat fits into the food puzzle.

Food is a natural outgrowth of a flourishing ecology. Our preferred food production approach shouldn’t be to sacrifice square miles of land, killing every living thing on that land except for corn that’s been engineered to survive an onslaught of herbicides and pesticides in order to produce feed to finish cows in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). I’ve read that corn fields are eerily silent except for the sound of wind rustling in the stalks. No crickets, no toads, no birds. Not even any bees. Corn is sometimes self-pollinated, otherwise cross-pollinated by the wind; who needs bees?

That’s not an ecological system, it’s a corn factory.

One of the basic principles of a healthy ecological system is diversity, and that diversity must include a balance of plant and animal life. In theory you could take the manure and urine of the cow in the CAFO and spread it on the corn field to inch a bit closer to a natural system, but that turns out to be a challenge. Instead farmers rely on synthetic fertilizer.

A simpler approach is to put the cow in the field. Add a few chickens and pigs, sheep and goats. Grow some grain here and some vegetables there. Welcome the toads and the crickets, the ladybugs and gopher snakes and the cattle egrets. Put in an orchard; perennials are good news.

A factory producing fake meat from genetically engineered, industrially raised, trucked-in plant products is NOT a flourishing ecosystem any more than that cornfield is. It’s just another step away from a lifestyle in which people are an intimate part of the natural world around them.

I know. There are arguments, there are opposing facts, there are fears that more people will go hungry… but after mulling the issue for many months, I realized I could never amass enough data or do enough analysis to answer every question or calculate the one right path. I did a lot of reading and thinking, but eventually I chose to rely on what looks to me like common sense: your dinner should be a natural product of your own flourishing ecosystem. That may mean haggis in Scotland, gumbo in New Orleans, or jollof rice and egusi soup in Nigeria — all dishes that draw on foods suitable for the regions from which they spring — but it doesn’t mean artificial meat concocted from industrially-grown plants, packaged in a high-tech facility run by an international corporate giant and transported around the world on ships so big they may have trouble getting through the Suez Canal.