There’s no doubt that there is a tension between our professed love for animals and our willingness to kill and eat them. But in his new book, Rob Percival argues that this is more than a tension, it’s a paradox that cannot be resolved. He argues that meat eating creates what psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance, the simultaneous holding of two incompatible beliefs, something that can be ‘very painful to tolerate’. Percival builds on the claims made in a 2010 paper that ‘societies may be shaped by attempts to resolve dissonance’ arising from the Meat Paradox.
I’ve reviewed the book all too briefly for the Guardian and wanted to share some more thoughts about it here. I had a very long list of reservations about the book but in the review I focused on the positives, partly because I think reviewers should err on the side of generosity and partly because I genuinely believe the books has great merit. Also, the number of criticisms one can make of anything is not necessarily an indication of the total weight of that criticism. One major flaw can ruin something, while something else can have lots of minor flaws and still be wonderful.
There are a lot of compelling facts that Percival cites which I didn’t have time to mention.‘In the past half-century, the global population of farm animals has tripled, while populations of wild animals have declined by two-thirds.’ ‘Globally, roughly 40 per cent of all arable land is used to grow feed crops such as soy and maize, mostly for animals housed in intensive indoor systems. In the UK, roughly 50 per cent of arable land is used for this purpose.’ ‘Roughly 99 per cent of animals farmed in the US are reared on intensive “factory farms” for at least part of their lives. This includes 70.4 per cent of cows, 98.3 per cent of pigs, 99.8 per cent of turkeys, 98.2 per cent of laying hens, and over 99.9 per cent of meat chickens. Globally, over 90 per cent of animals are reared on such farms, including an estimated 74 per cent of birds and mammals, and virtually all farmed fish.’ And ‘The cancer risk of your average Italian carnivore – subsisting on a diet of cold cuts, salami, prosciutto and pancetta – equates to smoking three cigarettes per year.’ The book is worth reading for its factual content alone.
At his best, Percival also interrogates the more simplistic claims made for the evilness of meat. As Patrick Holden, farmer and founder of the Sustainable Food Trust says, animal grazing is important because ‘it helps to build fertility and it benefits the wildlife we have here on the farm. Ruminants get blamed for everything, from cancer to climate change, but a farming system without them leaves us reliant on fossil fuel fertilisers and chemical pesticides. That’s the problem.’
Percival is also good at explaining how nutrition is fiendishly complicated and can’t be reduced to a neat list of macro- and micronutrients. ‘Studies of healthy omnivores eating a diet rich in plants have failed to find consistent evidence that red meat is unhealthy. Context matters.’ He cites biochemist Joseph Loscalzo who says there are more than 26,000 distinct, definable bio-chemicals present in our food. ‘Some of these components are believed to affect our health, yet most have not been thoroughly studied,’ says Percival. ‘Loscalzo describes these biochemicals as the “dark matter” of our diets.’
But when it moves from fact to theory, I think Percival runs away with his own ideas. The Meat Paradox displays a common feature of big thinking books: the author alights upon an exciting idea and then sees everything through its lens. Just as to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, to Percival, everything looks like the result of the Meat Paradox. It is said to explain, or significantly help to explain, ‘why the rise of veganism has been correlated with increased meat consumption’, the function of traditional hallucinogenic rituals, and even why we ‘are careering headlong into an impossible future’ of unsustainable agriculture. (By the way, there should be a moratorium on westerners writing about their experiences of South and Central American hallucinogenic ceremonies. They are as mind-numbing for the reader as they seem to be mind-expanding for the writer.) Cave art, we are told, was born from ‘a terrible need welled up in Cro-Magnon to somehow deal with sensations that were internally tearing him apart’, all related to the Meat Paradox. This last theory is proposed by one poet, Clayton Eshleman. It’s highly speculative.
It irks me when the perfectly truthful ‘X might have something to do with Y’ becomes ‘X explains Y’. I suspect than in person Percival would tone down his claims, emphasising, correctly, that he never said the Meat Paradox explains everything. In a twitter exchange he has already said ‘I don’t think we all experience dissonance’. But the qualifications are used lightly in the book, which gives the impression the Meat Paradox explains more than it can.
As I allude to in the review, Percival also sometimes flips from Mr Reasonable to Mr Emotive. The comparison between the desensitisation of Nazi soldiers and slaughterhouse workers strikes me as crude, as is the suggestion that routinely killing animals gives rise to perpetration-induced traumatic stress, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. If that is even usually true than all or most hunter-gatherers are suffering from severe mental illness. Field observations suggest otherwise.
The most egregious slide from anecdote, impression and analogy to grand sweeping claim comes from a remark made by one hunter. ‘When killing an elk or a bear, I sometimes feel that I’ve killed someone human. But one must banish such thoughts or one would go mad from shame.’ The anthropologist Rane Willerslev says in response to this, ‘Killing the animal [is] rather like killing a fellow person’. Note the ‘rather like’ and ‘sometimes feel’.
From this, Percival says, ‘And what is it to kill a fellow person, but to commit a murder? And what is it to eat a fellow person, but to engage in cannibalism?’ From then on, meat eating is referred to as murder, and sometimes cannibalism, without any further justification. We’re told that ‘The hunter is haunted by the “phantom of cannibalism” and experiences “real feelings of moral anxiety when killing his prey”.’ Really?
Percival’s book deserves to be read because, paradox or not, dissonance or not, most people are not facing up the reality behind their meat and dairy. If Percival goes too far that is excusable because the rest of the world has not gone nearly far enough. And as evidence that I might have been too harsh, check out the gushing review by Bee Wilson, the best food writer in Britain today. If I were you, I think I’d trust her judgement above mine.
News
No microphilosophy podcast this week but I’ve seen the download figures and I know collectively you all have plenty to catch up on. (Apple users look here.) In lieu, try Philosophy Takes on The News, in which I appear with Fiona Macpherson, Josh Forstenzer and host Simon Kirchin, discussing duties to others, climate change and energy, beers in the metaverse, ‘plus cool tangents’.)
The aforementioned review of Rob Percival’s The Meat Paradox is here.
My short video introducing The Cosmological Argument is also now up on The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s website. In a word: irreverent.
A reminder that if you buy books online, you can avoid the tax-dodging giant and buy through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
On my radar
The Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lecture series on the theme of Expanding Horizons, which I convened and hosted, has finished. You can watch all talks from the series on YouTube. I think the quality was high and the range of topics suitably diverse.
How powerful is mere repetition in getting people to believe things? Worryingly so, suggests this study.
There’s a new documentary just out called Young Plato on the impact of teaching philosophy in schools. Set in post conflict Belfast’s Ardoyne, ‘where a marginalized, working class community has for generations been plagued by poverty, drugs and guns’ it shows ‘how critical thinking and pastoral care can empower and encourage children to see beyond the boundaries and limitations of their own community.’ If you live in London, Warwick, Sheffield or Manchester, there is a screening near you soon.
Other than that my radar has been mainly full of Ukraine-related material, but there is so much about I hesitate to recommend anything in particular other than Radio Four’s Ukraine: How Did We Get Here? in which Liudmyla Sharipova, Timothy Garton Ash and Anna Reid together give host Ed Stourton a grimly plausible answer.
That’s it for this week. So until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.