Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie is an excellent book that I recommend to anyone who cares about the environmental impact of your food, whether you're a vegan, a fan of pastured meat, or are somewhere in between.  While the book doesn't touch on health issues or whether the actual act of slaughtering animals is ethical, the author does an admirable job of poring over the literature, crunching the numbers, and figuring out whether we're kidding ourselves when we think we can raise meat in a way that heals the earth. 

My favorite part of Meat is that Fairlie gives both sides of the aisle fair consideration.  He admits up front that he's not a fan of CAFOs from an ethical perspective, and that he spent several years as a vegetarian before beginning to raise his own dairy goats and to eat the male kids.  But he sets his own biases aside and bashes all of the infomercials in which authors twist the numbers to suit their ideology, whether the texts are written by vegans or by industrial agribusinesses.

I put off reading Meat for several months because the inside doesn't look inviting.  There are a lot of footnotes, no pictures, the text is a bit small, and it just looks like a tough, academic read.  Luckily, the author is engaging, and if you ignore the footnotes, the text isn't nearly as dense as it first appears.  Instead, you'll likely have the most trouble translating from British English to American English, and even that's not so hard.  (Just remember that soya is soybeans, ground nuts are peanuts, and lucerne is alfalfa.)

This week's lunchtime series will sum up the highlights of Simon Fairlie's book, but this is one that I highly recommend you hunt down and read for yourself.  As usual, I'm looking at the author's information with an eye toward tweaking our own permaculture setup, not to changing society, so I've left out huge portions of Fairlie's argument that will be relevant to those of you who depend more on the grocery store.  If you're interested in the bigger picture, it's worth putting in the time to read Meat yourself.