Joanna Blythman on meat

The "Go veggie and save the planet" lobby got a global leg-up recently when the UN's climate change expert, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, urged people to reduce their meat consumption. I'm guessing from his name that Dr Pachauri comes from the Indian sub-continent where the vast majority of the population, for a mixture of cultural, practical and religious reasons, is either vegetarian, or eats very little meat, so his "cut down on meat" prescription will not require him to change his eating habits.

I totally agree with Dr Pachauri that the affluent, developed world eats far too much meat and dairy produce. But his remarks have been picked up by eager vegan lobbyists (who eat no meat or animal products) as a universal prescription, applicable to all countries and all climate zones, and this is simplistic rubbish.

The first problem is that only 35% of the world's land area is suitable for growing crops. In the other 65%, livestock are the only realistic way of producing human food. Wet, green Britain has swathes of grassland and a plentiful supply of rain - the ideal conditions for livestock production. Scotland, like most of upland Britain, has lots of marginal land that can feed animals but which is useless for any other agricultural purpose. That's not to knock our growers. They can cultivate a surprisingly diverse range of fruit, vegetables and salads - that old potatoes-and-kale stereotype no longer applies. Cereals too - we can now grow quinoa as well as oats and barley. But plant foods are scarcely the strongest card in our food-producing portfolio.

Anti-meat and dairy arguments offer a constant (and totally justified) animal welfare critique of industrial meat and dairy production, whether it is offered to us in the form of Tesco's £2 chicken, Asda's 2p sausage or anonymous milk from "zero-grazing" cows housed permanently indoors. But this should not be confused with other types of livestock production that give farm animals a decent life and a compassionate death.

Factory farming is undeniably based on the inefficient, wasteful feeding of mountains of grain and soya to animals. Intensively-farmed animals do indeed compete with humans for food; they eat up half the world's grain. But the same is not true of their free-range, pasture-fed counterparts.

Discomfiting though it may be for vegetarian zealots, these animals can actually make a positive contribution towards feeding the world because they convert something which humans can't eat (grass) into something we can eat (meat and milk, both excellent sources of high-quality protein and nutrients).

Some sheep and cattle graze on land that could possibly be drained, ploughed and used for crop production. But grass pasture is our equivalent of the Amazonian rainforest; some of most significant carbon stores on the planet are locked into permanent grassland and heather moorland. By all means, plough these up and try to grow lentils, but then all that carbon the grassland takes out of the atmosphere and stores would be released into the environment.

And what about the practicalities, let alone the theory, of a UK-based vegan diet? I do 90% of my food shopping in local, independent shops and at my weekly farmer's market. Meat and dairy stalls form the dominant category there, a snapshot of the contemporary realities of small-scale food production.

I know many of these livestock-based stallholders, just as I do my family butcher who has valiantly seen off everything from the cloud of BSE to supermarket-generated shopping blight. I want to keep them in business, because from venison and veal to buttermilk and cream, they produce high-quality food and work extremely hard to be humane and ethical.

From a cultural perspective I respect their craft skills - everything from hanging a carcase of Aberdeen Angus to maturing a raw milk cheese. I admire the way they doggedly bring us native, traditional foods with a sense of place, history and landscape. In the event of a mass conversion to veganism, what are these producers meant to do? Diversify into tofu production?

I'm already an enthusiastic consumer of chickpeas, tahini, brown rice and more of that ilk, but if I was to give up meat, milk, yoghurt and cheese, in search of alternative protein I'd be forced to contemplate the challenging possibilities of tempeh, soya and miscellaneous processed vegan substances in tetrapacks with use-by dates several years hence.

My household would end up eating more of what US writer Michael Pollan calls "old food from far away" instead of the very fresh food from nearby that we have come to expect - more food from faceless people in foreign parts at the bottom of some opaque, convoluted food chain; less food direct from faces I recognise. Is that environmental progress?

The days when every meal revolved round cheap, factory-farmed meat or dairy products are drawing to a close thanks to global competition for food commodities like wheat and the drying up of cheap oil supplies. In this country, there's an intelligent response. Choose less, but better meat and milk produced from grass-fed animals, and waste absolutely none of it.