Why you should turn vegan to end factory farming’s daily carnage – author’s manifesto for change

We continue to eat meat and wear animal furs because we won’t face up to the horrors inflicted on sentient beings by industrial farming, Roanne van Voorst says
Having aroused our compassion for farm animals, she seeks to channel it into action with advice on how to cook plant-based food and what to listen to and read

COP26

Stephen McCarty

Published: 7:45pm, 11 Dec 2021

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Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals: The Future of Food by Roanne van Voorst, translated by Scott Emblen-Jarrett, pub. HarperOne

Death toll: 150 million a day.

And that’s a conservative estimate. As youanticipate gorging on your Christmas turkey, consider that the above is the figure author and anthropologist Roanne van Voorst puts on the number of “fish, chickens, pigs, cows, goats, sheep” our species slaughters for food.

It does not include any of the millions of animals killed in laboratories every year in tests on the latest cosmetics or cleaning agents, or those slaughtered for fur coats or other attire. Or male calves and chicks, designated “waste products” by a food industry that has no use for them and kills them immediately after birth, or animals used in bullfights, dog or horse races, aquariums or “waterworld attractions”.

Workers process pig carcasses in a slaughterhouse in Germany. Photo: DPA

“Every week,” continues van Voorst, “more animals are killed for human consumption than humans who have died in all wars in human history combined.” This carnage is made possible, she says, because although most of us might consider ourselves humane in outlook, we are not prepared to face the horrors inflicted on sentient beings by, primarily, the business of factory farming.

The scale of our behaviour, she says, is simply too overwhelming to contemplate. Hence this manifesto for veganism calls for our compassion first to be aroused, then to be put into action: the book closes with advice on what to watch, listen to, read and cook; on how to reject what is considered “normal”.

Cows are milked by machine at a milking station in Inner Mongolia, China. Photo: AFP

So appalling are some of the hideous cruelties inflicted on the animals we eat that it would be easy (and justifiable) for the author to spend all 250-odd pages moralising. She doesn’t, nor does she absolve herself for her past, hazy views of how she was being a “good” person while failing to realise she was still inadvertently supporting “big ag” and “big dairy” through her food and fashion choices.

Changing our lifestyle of comfortably, compliantly ignoring our vile conduct is not a beacon some way off in the future, van Voorst argues, because she believes that future is already here. Tyson Foods, the biggest meat producer in the United States, had a stake in “alternative-meat” commodity Beyond Meat. Australia, that insatiable consumer of flesh, has one of “the fastest-growing vegan markets on the planet”. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates and China, she writes, lead the way in the numbers of people adopting a plant-based, vegan diet. The times, they are a-changin’.

Whether you approach this book as a vegan sceptic, or as a convert who has required no persuasion from the author to stop consuming animal products, what is in effect the systematic, daily torture of innocent beings (evidence of which is presented here not for the first time) should prove reason enough to change our ways.

Chickens feed in their cages at a poultry farm near Amritsar, India. Photo: EPA-EFE

And that extends to wherever you happen to live, be it a Western country with its appetite for cow, pig, horse or goat, or “China, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria, parts of Indonesia” where eating dog meat is unquestioned.

But what the author calls the “myths of carnism” aside, we now, of course, also have the elephant in the room to consider: the climatic imperative. In light of the recent COP26 climate-change jamboree and the “immense social, economic and cultural changes” van Voorst says we face, will factory farming and its greenhouse-gas emissions be reined in? Whatever politicians’ promises are worth, we can but hope.

At the end of her “extensive research and dozens of interviews with international experts” in farming, energy, climate and food, van Voorst hopes to usher in “a more animal- and environmentally friendly world” than the one we currently occupy. And yet for her, even if successful, the remorse and amazement will remain: why did it take us so long to question what we once regarded as acceptable?

This correspondent is reminded of a former Hong Kong food writer who liked to boast: “Animals – I eat ’em, wear ’em, use ’em.” I’m ashamed to say that at the time she went unchallenged. We are all guilty.