A Game Of Chicken: The Demand for Real Meat

Meat production can be a tricky business. Everyone wants to consume real chicken and pork, but meeting this demand can be difficult for farmers and food companies. To ensure that we’re eating high-quality chicken and poultry, we must even out the demand for real meat.

The following is an excerpt from Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje. It has been adapted for the web.

How to Use Cropland Judiciously

We know that cropland is pretty bad for greenhouse gas emissions, wildlife and a bunch of other things. So we need to use it judiciously. Using cropland judiciously means we shouldn’t be growing cropland grains and feeding them to confined chickens and pigs (or to feedlot cattle for that matter).

On mixed farms with the right stocking densities, chickens and pigs are wonderful waste recyclers whose own wastes are a boon and not a disposal burden. In concentrated feeding operations they’re wasteful consumers of precious arable crops, which could instead feed people directly with much greater efficiency. They’re also incubators of flu and related diseases, threatening humans with pandemics far less likely to spread from local mixed farming.²⁴

Rangeland ruminants cycle otherwise inaccessible nutrition into the human food web and, worldwide, many are in the hands of third-agriculture local agrarians operating outside commodified market routes. Yet they seem to attract a lot more opprobrium than feedlot chickens and pigs through misleading claims about their supposed ‘inefficiency’.

A suspicion arises about exactly who’s pressing this anti-pastoralist narrative and why. Monbiot is no fan of feedlots, but I daresay that badly evidenced articles with titles like ‘The Most Damaging Farm Products? Organic, Pasture-Fed Beef and Lamb’ play pretty well in agribusiness boardrooms.²⁶ There’s a naïve irresponsibility here that’s hard to fathom.

Poultry Feed Lots: A Game of Chicken

Perhaps the best that can be said about chicken feedlots is that they’re the easiest way of producing meat worldwide in the kind of bulk that would be required if people in the Global South aspired to eat it in the quantities familiar in the Global North – and why shouldn’t they?

The five countries that have increased their chicken flocks the most over the last sixty years are Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, China and – way out in front – the US (there’s always the exception that proves the rule, and the exception is usually the US). The growth of soy production in biodiversity hotspots is intimately bound up with this trend.

To me, this is (literally) a game of chicken. Who’s going to call out the fact that, globally, we cannot keep growing production to meet the demand for meat along with endless other products so that the Global Standard Consumer can experience the kind of consumption patterns taken for granted in the Global North?

Who’s going to call out the fact that we cannot, either, techno-fix our way out of such problems with energetically extravagant wheezes like meat-mimicking manufactured food? As the dysfunctions of fossil-fuelled global economic growth and commoditised food chains increasingly bear down on us, it seems to me that the people who jump first and start charting a radically different path are the braver ones.

A Case for Meat Substitutes: Pros and Cons