Why we should eat meat

Vegetarianism as sustainable behaviour... we heard a lot of reasons today to become a vegetarian, but in my opinion eating meat is part of a sustainable system.

Grazing and browsing animals are an unmissable link in our agricultural landscape. If we are to maintain biodiversity, and keep up our food production, we should not be vegetarians. We need animals to maintain our grasslands, eat our veggie waste, fertilize our fields, etc.

Then there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in being vegetarian instead of vegan. Because when you use milkproducts the lactating animal had to have a young...and you can't keep them all. So you can feed the dead bodies to the vultures (not too sustainable in my opinion), or eat them. I'm a vegetarian by the way, feeling all hypocrit, but I can't be vegan because of health issues, and don't think that animals are kept in a sufficiently proper way (even in most ecological farming) to eat the meat. So, as soon as I have a backyard there will be a cow for milk...and a calf in the freezer every now and then (poor thing!).

Then most eco-ideas we heard lean on organic farming. But this is a problem. Because large scale organic farming is not sustainable...sorry to destroy the fantasy. In organic farming the soil is treated like a steppic soil, but the UK was no steppe, it was forest, and this means that organic farming causes erosion of soils. And when you're flushing away your soil that's not really sustainable... There are better ways of ecological farming, such as permaculture, carbon farming, etc. But these are rarely applied, which is foolish, because you can increase production with 1000% (yes, really!) from the same piece of land, turn agricultural land into massive carbon sinks, save biodiversity, have a varied diet instead of the boring watery crap nowadays available, not have half of the countries inhabitants working the land to have sufficient food, etc. Many advantages...but it does involve occasional meat-eating ;-)