One more for good luck. From Richard King, writing in The Age, commenting on Meat and Livestock Australia’s attempt to tell us that we must eat red meat because we evolved to eat red meat:
… the advertisement tries to “position” red meat as a “foundation food”. Far from being a rearguard action aimed at assuaging recent fears that red meat may be linked to bowel cancer, the marketing campaign is a proactive affair, seeming at times to tacitly suggest that not eating meat may even be dangerous…
Most vegetarians do not object in principle to eating meat, but rather to the disgusting way in which animals are treated before slaughter. Sows confined to narrow stalls for the term of their reproductive lives; the trade in the live export of sheep and cattle; the systematic extermination of the majority of male chicks at birth; the appalling condition of battery hens – these are immoral practices perpetrated by the meat industry. The company tries to bypass morality with a direct appeal to evolutionary science. But to justify eating factory-farmed meat by reference to human evolution is a moral and intellectual cop-out. What if I tried to justify rape by reference to human reproduction? I’d be cast, quite rightly, as a moral imbecile.
Can I also note how dodgerama that Web site is? Calling it themainmeal.com.au and all those suggestions that it’s a health site and the complete lack of any branding to tell you who produced it or an ‘about us’ link. Grrr.