Budget Buster: Good riddance to meat; bring on the vegetarian revolution

David White stuff.co.nz

Meat, an obsession for New Zealanders, who eat three times the international average.

OPINION: Knock me down with a feather! New Zealand – home of the steak and cheese pie, where red-blooded blokes observe the Saturday barbie and Sunday roast with religious zeal – is going veggo.

Stuff's Meat Under Heat investigation revealed we're eating an average of 15kg less meat than we did in 2010, and the number of budding vegetarians is up 27 per cent in just five years.

While farmers are right to be worried, this is astonishingly good news for the rest of us.

The health benefits of going vegetarian are a bit of a red herring. Eating too much red meat or processed meat is almost certainly a bad idea. But beyond that, nothing magical happens when you stop eating meat. An omnivore with a well-thought-out diet will be way healthier than a lazy vegetarian who subsists on bread and chippies.

We're on firmer ground with the environmental argument. If you care about personally reducing carbon emissions, the only behaviours that matter a damn are ditching your car, flying less, and switching to a plant-based diet. All those hipster cloth bags and fancy eco-bulbs might as well be a rounding error.

A move away from meat into a world of vegetables could save you as much as $1000 a year.

You could always pay money to offset the carbon footprint caused by meat eating, but it's a bit trickier to offset pain and suffering.

Would you torture an animal, purely for your own pleasure? Hopefully not, unless you're a sociopath. But if you eat, say, bacon, that's exactly what's happening. A sow is an intelligent, conscious being, capable of suffering and joy, kept in a tiny, filthy crate in which it can't even turn around, and used as a breeding machine for its entire miserable life. Something to ponder next time someone tells you how much they love animals or shares another save-the-whales video while munching on a hamburger.

We can be proud that New Zealand was the first country in the world to legally recognise the sentience of animals, back in 2015.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, scientists have never found a 'soul', or any other bright line that separates us from other animals. What they have found is a broad spectrum of consciousness, and all the accompanying emotions. Non-human animals experience love, and fear, and grief, and pleasure, just like us. Some species are self-aware, and even plan ahead for the future.

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The only unique trait we humans possess is the intelligence to mull all this over, and rise above the law of the jungle. Yes, lions eat antelopes. Thankfully, we don't derive our morals from the animal kingdom, because infanticide, rape, murder, and genocide are also perfectly "natural" behaviours.

Here's a fun game to play at home. We all have ancestors who committed atrocities – slavery, cannibalism, ritual sacrifice – which seemed perfectly fine by the standards of their time. So, which of our currently accepted norms will be viewed as unspeakably barbaric in the future? Imagine appearing before a tribunal of your great, great grandchildren, and having to explain why you supported the torment of 50 billion sentient beings. "Well… everyone else was doing it!"

Perhaps you're not convinced. It took me 25 years to finally bite the bullet, and I still have moments of weakness (the smell of KFC is my kryptonite).

When reason and compassion fail, good old-fashioned self-interest often wins the day. No-one can dispute the fact that meat is bloody expensive. By contrast, vegetarian staples like beans, rice, lentils, legumes, and the dreaded tinned tomatoes are ridiculously cheap. When I ran the numbers, switching to a plant-based diet saved about $1000 a year.

No sacrifice is required. With a well-stocked spice rack and a decent recipe book, it turns out that vegetarian food can actually be finger-licking good, too. At the risk of turning the incoming torrent of hate mail into a tsunami, maybe – just maybe – it's even better than KFC.

Kiwis' consumption of lamb and mutton has dropped a significant amount since 2006.

Got a burning money question? Email Budget Buster at richard.meadows@thedeepdish.org, or hit him up on Facebook. You can also find links to previous Budget Busters here.

- Sunday Star Times

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