The Myth of the Global Cow

Posted by Martin Cohen

Data crunchers have started to attack farms on the basis of statistical creations such as ‘The Global Cow’. Of course, there’s no such thing. The sublimation of differences in concepts like the average cow, leaves cows and sheep who are helpfully and quietly grazing grass suddenly accused of inefficiently expropriating vast tranches of valuable land, while farmers keeping animals fed soya in sheds can be reinvented and presented as efficient and ‘climate friendly’. And yet summarised and simplified messages creatively abstracted from the data itself construct a global picture, skewed by preconceived ideas, and designed to influence policy decisions.

    • The idea of ‘the Earth's average temperature’ is also an exercise in mental gymnastics - which parts of the oceans are included - or of the atmosphere? Does it make sense to have hypothetical data points in uninhabited regions? Even NASA and the Met Office cannot agree. 

   • Food policy in particular always seem to consist of sharp, Manichean (good versus evil), divisions even as most things are nuanced and a matter of detail - and degree. Missing from both types of thinking is any acknowledgement that the experts behind the expert consensus are also political and ideological subjects, and the vast majority of respected science (or any research) is produced from a mainstream and shaped by the policy objectives of funders.   

But let’s just take up that idea of a ‘global cow’. Even small farms can be completely different in terms of differing habitats and differing good or really bad practices in one place. Last year I had a series of email exchanges with a Welsh couple in the Brecon Beacons (on the England/ Wales border) about their efforts to graze farm animals ‘sustainably’. The two explained how they have mountain grazing rights on the Brecon beacons and have cattle grazing an ancient hill fort, to preserve the archaeology from the incursion of scrub and to enhance the diversity of the grassland untouched by a plough for millennia, if at all. All their fields are natural pasture kept in a grazing rotation. One of the fields is an iron age enclosure and has never been ploughed in modern times! Yet now the call everywhere is to shun animal farming and rely solely on crops. 

The couple keep grassfed (Dexter breed, as in  the picture above) cattle and sheep and rare-breed pigs, all raised outdoors and supplemented  by a range of non-soya concentrates, and farm amazingly sustainably. They firmly believe that the sheer complexity of their farm demonstrates that the global environmentalist models about ‘Norm’ cannot possibly map onto reality anywhere on the planet. 

Instead, their farm is a case study in how the new ‘plant-based food’ movement risks upturning delicate relationships between humans and nature but also a more anthropological study in how apparently deeply-entrenched attitudes towards long-established activities and traditions can be rapidly changed by elite groups using sophisticated control of public information.

BOOK REVIEWS: Back to the Future with the Food Gathering Diet

Posted by Martin Cohen*

BOOK REVIEW
Back to the Future with the Food Gatherers Diet

How we imagine hunting and gathering - in this case, on the South Texas Plains

Food Sanity: How to Eat in a World of Fads and Fiction
By David Friedman (Turner 2018).

Psst! Maybe someone should have told David Friedman, well-known media personality as well as the author of this new look at food issues – there are hardly any vegans. So if you pitch a book on 'how to eat' to that crowd, you take the risk of ending up preaching to a much reduced congregation. Add to which the serious vegans in town won't like some of what Friedman has to say, because vegans don’t eat eggs and certainly don’t eat fish. All of which only goes to show, that food is a pretty controversial and divisive issue these days, and if you want to be honest, as Friedman evidently does, you're going to have to risk trampling on the dearly held, indeed dearly munched, beliefs of lots of people.

But I hope Food Sanity does find that wider readership, because I’ve read a lot of books and articles recently about food and this one really does clear out a lot of the deadwood and present some pretty mind-boggling facts (and figures) to ‘put the record straight’, as Jack Canfield (of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame) puts it, by way of an endorsement of the book.

Take one opening salvo, that as I say, will surely lose Friedman lots of readers in one fell swoop: the Paleo or ‘Caveman’ Diet. This is probably the most popular diet going and that’s likely because it fits so excellently people’s dearly held prejudices. Plus, it allows them to eat lots of beef-burgers and chips, while cutting out things like muesli which only hippies eat anyway. But oh no, Friedman has done his research and found out that Stone Age folk didn’t really eat lots of red meat washed down with a beaker of blood, as we like to imagine. Instead, using both archaeological and anthropological research as a guide, he says that the earliest human tribes spent most of their time eating fruits and seeds, which they gathered, and probably only really sharpened the spears (or so, at least, I imagine) for internecine human disputes.

Friedman finishes his deconstruction of Paleo by consideration of human biology too: notably the fact that we just aren’t built to catch our fellow animals. We lack the right claws, teeth and general physique too. He points out, a thing curiously overlooked, that Stone Age people would have been rather short and squat - not the fine figures wielding clubs that we imagine. He retells Jared Diamond’s tale of a hunting trip by one of today’s last remaining ‘stone age’ tribes, in New Guinea. At the end of the hunt, the tribe had caught only some baby birds, frogs and mushrooms.

This is all fascinating to me, but compelling too are Friedman’s physiological observations, most particularly on the acidity of the human stomach. The gastric fluids of carnivores are very acidic (pH 1), which is essential if they are to break down the proteins and to kill bacteria. Our stomachs, however, are much less acidic (pH 5), and simply can’t tolerate much uncooked meat. And if, yes, Stone Age man might have done a bit of cooking, it would probably have been rather rudimentary with parts of the meat not really cooked.

Actually, by the time I had finished reading all of the reasons that ‘humans can't eat meat’, I was left puzzled by Friedman’s conclusion which was that a significant proportion of the prehistoric human diet (nonetheless) seems to have been meat. Less surprising was Friedman’s hearty endorsement of eggs, which surely everyone has heard by now are really not dangerous, and don’t cause heart attacks after all, and fish, which he carefully defends form claims that they are today dangerously contaminated with things like mercury.

However dairy gets the thumbs down, with a disdain that I personally felt was unjustified. Dairy, after all, is much more than drinks of cow’s milk - it is goat and sheep milk, cheese and cream too -  and an inseparable part of many dishes. We are advised here instead to swap to things like ‘almond milk’, and ‘hemp milk’ but I know these substitutes very well, and, well, they ain’t one. At least Friedman doesn’t try to suggest we switch to soya milk because, as he rightly observes, that is a food disaster just in itself

There is, to be honest, a bit too much bad news in this book - so much so that I started to skip some  sections, which fortunately the book’s modular structure permits. On the other hand, Friedman makes an effort to leaven the mix by including some good news and positive suggestions, including a two page table of the healthiest foods on earth. What are they? They're all fruits and veggies - the things that Plato and Pythagoras were praising and recommending nearly three thousand years ago. It seems that it’s time, if not indeed long overdue, to go back to following their advice.

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*Martin Cohen is the author of a forthcoming book on food issues too called I Think Therefore I Eat, which is also published by Turner, and due out in November 2018

Doublethink 17 - Line World

 

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