Meat

Afterword

For the record, I’m not a vegetarian.

Yet.

Nor am I on some kind of animal welfare crusade. I’m just one of those people who can’t help thinking about things.

Because I do all the shopping and cooking, I see to it that most of our meals don’t include meat. When they do, the meat is expensive; in other words it’s organic and from animals raised and slaughtered respectfully and humanely.

If you don’t have the stomach to kill, gut, skin and dress an animal, you ought not have the stomach to eat it either. Much of the impetus for this book arose from that double standard. Consumers are very happy to pick and choose their cuts of meat after they’ve reached the butcher shop or supermarket. If they ever think about the process that got the meat there, they must put the truth out of their heads in order to enjoy their rib-eye, neck fillet, belly or breast.

Having researched the subject and watched hours of gut-churning footage, my conclusion is simple. All over the world, animals are farmed and brutalised for slaughter in the most appalling conditions and in numbers no-one wants to consider. I won’t go into it here. There are plenty of websites where you can find out for yourself. You might try typing ‘slaughter footage’ into a search engine and see where it takes you.

Or you might decide not to. I could understand why.

In ‘Meat’, I put humans through abattoirs for the freak-factor, for the sheer horror of it. But all the time it was the animals I saw in my mind’s eye, animals waiting in lines in narrow steel corridors, waiting for death at the hands of men with targets to meet.

Believe me, they don’t go quietly or willingly.

Who would?