Meat eating could save the planet | Letters

George Monbiot's demonisation of meat eating (Your festive meal could be worse than a long-haul flight, 23 December) is oversimplified and misleading. Factory farming is wasteful and horrific but other forms of livestock-rearing such as pastured grazing provide a highly nutritious source of food using land that is often unsuitable for horticulture. Pound for pound, pastured meat proteins are more diverse than those of cereals and are similar in terms of water use and carbon emissions. Livestock has an essential role in farming practices like permaculture, which may offer the only viable alternative for sustainable food production, utilising stubble and fertilising fields left to fallow. Pastured animals can improve soil health and repair damage done to it by incessant tilling, provided they are stocked at an appropriate level. Fatty meat provides almost three times the calories per kilogramme as cereals and contains almost every nutrient essential to the human body. Three billion people eat meat-free diets, and 4 billion suffer malnutrition. This does not make a case for going vegetarian.

Without doubt, the rich world needs to eat less meat, but the developing world also deserves to have a share of it. Steppe and other grassland converted to cereals supported huge populations of wild, methane-emitting herbivores, and is essentially neutral at sustainable levels (ie not artificially supported with feed). Similarly, termites emit twice the methane as livestock, but there is no great push for termite eradication. It is the intensity of meat production supported by oil energy that is the problem. Hence, the carbon costs of factory farming systems ultimately derive from the fossil fuels used to grow feed and artificially support the lives of these poor animals, and it must be stopped, if only for the sheer cruelty of the animals' treatment.
Chris Brausch
Katikati, New Zealand