It’s been a big couple of weeks for animal welfare. Hugh’s been doing fantastic things with the fish fight campaign. It’s struck an amazing chord with the public with over half a million people having now signed the petition to the discard problem. What’s more, the shows have provided a balance in crazy, cruel fishing methods while offering an education in a sustainable alternative. I have a can of tuna in my cupboard and having seen the show, I revisited the label. Dolphin friendly? Apparently so. Line caught? No. There lies the dilemma, oxymoron even. Without the guarantee of an individually caught tuna, Greenpeace exposed horrifying footage of dolphins, sharks, mantaray and turtles being caught up in Ghanaian nets sourcing Tesco, among other suppliers. So, dolphin friendly? No, not even a little bit. In contrast, it was a good night for Sainsbury’s.
On Tuesday I was lucky enough to get a ticket for a sold out Festival of Ideas event in Bristol. Funnily enough, the previous event I attended by the same organisers was with Hugh FW.
Jonathan Safran Foer, most well known for his debut novel Everything is Illuminated, spoke on the approach to the release of his new non-fiction book, Eating Animals. He admitted this veer into non-fiction was accidental, but inevitable following the details he had discovered about factory farms and farmed animals’ welfare. Articulate, passionate, funny and devoted are just some of the ways I’d describe JSF, but, refreshingly, at no point did I feel he was preaching. Instead, he laid out his argument like a hand he’d been dealt, the knowledge he now had could not be un-known.
During his talk, he spoke of his friends who strived to be conscientious omnivores. I too, fall into this group – including the ‘striving’ part. The easy part is being in control of what you put on your own plate. Buy free range, outdoor reared, non-imported meat and to keep monetary (and environmental) costs down, appreciate foods other than meat a few times a week. The problem falls when you go out to eat, when your friends or family cook for you, or when you buy a sandwich on the go. To truly call yourself a conscientious omnivore, is to avoid meat altogether in these situations – to go meat-free and therefore bad meat-free. He relayed his friends’ struggle with this situation which mirror my own. It’s now harder to be a conscientious omnivore in a restaurant than it is to be a vegetarian. So is it a labelling problem? Is it a government problem? Is it a personal problem? Either way, Jonathan’s tour of America and now the UK, with his book backs up his notion that talking about the problem makes it real, and makes us confront the industry we are buying into, in its billions, every single day.
Finally, just today I found a great blog on the Guardian by Jenna Woginrich, who went back to eating meat from the ‘apathy’ of being a vegetarianism. “Your fork is your ballot, and when you vote to eat a steak or leg of lamb purchased from a small farmer you are showing the industrial system you are actively opting out.” I hope soon to call myself an entirely conscientious omnivore – without hurting anyone’s feelings in the process.
