You Can’t Eat Grass – Review
You Can’t Eat Grass: Livestock, Veganism and Human Nature in a Landscape, by Greg Forster, 2023. Grove Books, ISBN: 978-1788273077. RRP: £4.95
The opening words of this book’s introduction set the scene: “I do not want to dissuade anyone from a vegan lifestyle…what I say is no argument against it”.It does, however, read like a defence of meat and dairy consumption, referring to the way things have been done for many years, and how our very landscape has been shaped by animal agriculture. But our landscape has been altered within my lifetime by many other things, including motorways, pylons, wind turbines, solar panels and housing, so one would assume that a change in how we farm would also alter the landscape. I know people like things “as they were” but is that a reason for not changing?
Animals certainly add to soil fertility, when they are allowed to spend time outside in a field. However, Iain Tolhurst, on his own farm, maintains or improves soil fertility by a “veganic” faming system which chooses to reject all animal based inputs, so it can be done. Greg Forster writes a lot about animal methane and carbon sinks, with biodigestion as a way of dealing with animal waste, but he points out that this comes at a cost. Certainly animal waste is a real problem. He quotes John Lynch from Oxford University who has stated that he cannot offer an explanation of current methane levels, as the rise “is more rapid than ruminant populations”; clearly it’s a complicated subject.
Writing about our evolutionary development, Forster draws attention to scientists who claim that we grew bigger brains because we ate larger amounts of protein in meat. However, Dr Milton Mills has pointed out that the brain burns mainly glucose from carbohydrates, and that protein is easily available from plants. After all, most of the large mammals on the planet, including the cows that we eat, are herbivores and they do pretty well. Dr Mills has also discussed the fact that many African American people find that milk causes them digestive problems, yet their government food guidelines recommend its consumption; he calls this racism.
Similarly, Forster writes about the importance of vitamin B12, which is obtained from animal-derived foods or supplements. But, as Dr Mills points out, animals do not produce B12 themselves. Rather, it comes from bacteria, which in the past we got from our less than sanitised environment.
I found the arguments in the book interesting, and welcome the fact that people of faith are being encouraged to consider what we eat and its effect on God’s world. But the impact of our food choices is even wider than those mentioned in this book; the issue of water usage, for example, comes to mind as a significant ethical factor.
Tony Roper
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