In Farmageddon, Philip Lymbery – chief executive of the charity Compassion in World Farming – suggests that mass market meat is leading to ‘the death of our countryside … and billions starving’. For two years Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott, political editor of the Sunday Times, travelled the world to investigate ‘factory farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and eyewitness accounts of the many grotesque landscapes – seabeds without oxygen, fields without wildlife, chickens without beaks – generated by our love of meat.
In Taiwan, Lymbery and Oakeshott see half-dead chickens being scooped into rubbish bags; in Argentina, they meet tribespeople forced off their land to make way for soya farms growing animal feed; in India, they track the wave of suicides among peasants no longer able to make a living; in California, they hear of children who have asthma because they live near a ‘mega-dairy’ housing around 10,000 cows; in China, they see a village where there is no clean water because of the excess of pig effluent from a nearby farm, run by a company producing a million pigs a year. Near the farm, they notice some strange poplar trees, whose trunks are bare and leaves and branches wilting. ‘We scrambled along the edge of a maize field, and then up a steep bank, and there we saw the source of the problem: a huge lagoon of putrid watery muck.’ This farm, ‘ironically’, had received accreditation from the UN ‘on the basis of its environmental record’.
One of the best, most truly alarming chapters investigates the fishmeal industry in Peru. The lunacy of this business is that it involves taking a valuable protein that very few people eat enough of – oily fish – and turning it into a protein that is less healthy and that we already eat to excess: broiler chicken.
Thanks in part to the lobbying power of bodies such as Compassion in World Farming, four British supermarkets now stock exclusively free-range eggs and nearly a quarter of the chicken sold is produced to higher welfare standards: ‘free-range, organic or RSPCA Freedom Food Standard’. Compassion in World Farming gives an award for the most compassionate British supermarket every year: it passes ‘back and forth between Waitrose and Marks & Spencer’.
In his final chapter, on ‘consumer power’, Lymbery states that ‘avoiding Farmageddon is easy.’ Which makes you wonder why he chose to call his book that in the first place – if Armageddon is easy to avoid then it can’t be Armageddon. But Lymbery hopes we can shop our way out of it, without doing anything extreme like becoming vegetarian: ‘As long as we buy products from animals reared on the land (free-range, organic), favour local producers or retailers that we trust, eat what we buy and thereby reduce food waste, and avoid overeating meat, we can fill our plates in ways that benefit the countryside, our health and animal welfare.’
- Review of the new book Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery
In Taiwan, Lymbery and Oakeshott see half-dead chickens being scooped into rubbish bags; in Argentina, they meet tribespeople forced off their land to make way for soya farms growing animal feed; in India, they track the wave of suicides among peasants no longer able to make a living; in California, they hear of children who have asthma because they live near a ‘mega-dairy’ housing around 10,000 cows; in China, they see a village where there is no clean water because of the excess of pig effluent from a nearby farm, run by a company producing a million pigs a year. Near the farm, they notice some strange poplar trees, whose trunks are bare and leaves and branches wilting. ‘We scrambled along the edge of a maize field, and then up a steep bank, and there we saw the source of the problem: a huge lagoon of putrid watery muck.’ This farm, ‘ironically’, had received accreditation from the UN ‘on the basis of its environmental record’.
One of the best, most truly alarming chapters investigates the fishmeal industry in Peru. The lunacy of this business is that it involves taking a valuable protein that very few people eat enough of – oily fish – and turning it into a protein that is less healthy and that we already eat to excess: broiler chicken.
Fishmeal is one of the filthiest secrets of the factory-farming industry, an environmental catastrophe that involves sucking millions of tonnes of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens. The process deprives millions of larger wild fish, birds and marine mammals of their natural prey, drastically depleting stocks of important species. It also pumps vile fatty waste into ocean bays, creating ‘dead zones’; pollutes the atmosphere around processing plants, causing widespread human health problems; and diverts what could be a highly valuable source of nutrition for people to industrially farmed animals.
Thanks in part to the lobbying power of bodies such as Compassion in World Farming, four British supermarkets now stock exclusively free-range eggs and nearly a quarter of the chicken sold is produced to higher welfare standards: ‘free-range, organic or RSPCA Freedom Food Standard’. Compassion in World Farming gives an award for the most compassionate British supermarket every year: it passes ‘back and forth between Waitrose and Marks & Spencer’.
In his final chapter, on ‘consumer power’, Lymbery states that ‘avoiding Farmageddon is easy.’ Which makes you wonder why he chose to call his book that in the first place – if Armageddon is easy to avoid then it can’t be Armageddon. But Lymbery hopes we can shop our way out of it, without doing anything extreme like becoming vegetarian: ‘As long as we buy products from animals reared on the land (free-range, organic), favour local producers or retailers that we trust, eat what we buy and thereby reduce food waste, and avoid overeating meat, we can fill our plates in ways that benefit the countryside, our health and animal welfare.’
- Review of the new book Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery
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