From a bacon sandwich to a roast dinner, a lamb curry to a pepperoni pizza, our diet in the UK is loaded with meat. Across the world, ninety per cent of people are meat-eaters – and global consumption is rising. But research at the University of Oxford has rung up the environmental cost of keeping so much meat on the menu. Meat production is a significant contributor to climate change, and future demand will require impossible amounts of land and water.
I eat meat, and I was intrigued to join the team as text-writer for Meat The Future, a contemporary science exhibition created by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and their colleagues in the university’s LEAP research team.
The aim was to explore questions such as:
- is our appetite for meat just normal, natural and nice?
- what’s the evidence that meat production is a big factor in the environmental crisis?
- how does our consumption of meat in the UK compare with the US – or, say, India or China? And is it fair to expect other nations to reduce their meat-eating?
- would it help if food had environmental labelling?
- how does meat farming cause other species to go extinct?
- if we eat less meat, what could we fill our plates with instead?
It was wonderful, months later, when the exhibition project won Partnership of the Year at The Museums + Heritage Awards 2022. The judges said the exhibition was: ‘A brilliant example of a completely mutual and cross-dependent partnership. Meat the Future successfully combined research, engagement and commerce in an immersive and involving experience.’
When I have worked with the Museum before, I have written text for shows looking at Earth’s First Animals, the colossal role played by tiny organisms in our Bacterial World, latest neuroscience research in Brain Diaries, and the story of William Smith and the dazzling first geological map of England and Wales. Each one in the series makes use of the Museum’s extensive natural history collections, plus cutting-edge research from the university and beyond, to create an exhibition with impact.
But food is a really personal subject. As we stirred the pot of potential issues to cover in this exhibition, everyone on the project team found their assumptions challenged. I was pretty sure that eating high-welfare meat would be OK, but I was wrong. In the UK we eat over double the global average of meat products – more than our fair share, and much more than the 15 g per day per person that is actually sustainable.
The exhibition presented proposed environmental labelling, which tries to capture a snapshot of the overall production cost of a food in terms of its impact on water and air pollution, climate warming and biodiversity loss. Surprises here included the fact that it’s better to transport a tomato grown in a sunnier climate to Britain, than to grow it here under artificial heat and light. What was really clear was that any form of meat has an environmental impact dozens of times higher than an equivalent plant-based product.
Some of this felt as if it would be hard for visitors to swallow. Food, however, is a gift of a subject to a text-writer. English is ripe with delicious foodie phrases and meat-related metaphors. Crunchy, tasty text is more palatable to read, and adds spice to the most complex mix of scientific ingredients.
The trick I felt we had to pull was to preserve the witty and punchy, and bin the weak puns. For example: a panel about the environmental cost of meat production would be fine with a title of High Stakes. It has a flavour of something foody, but isn’t trying to be funny. However, change it to High Steaks and you have gone with a pun – something to treat with great caution for fear of crossing the cringe-barrier.
So I thought the text above worked well, introducing a case of species from the Museum’s collection that are threatened with extinction as agriculture relentlessly expands. We are literally causing death by eating so many cuts of meat – and indeed by cutting down the forest to farm cows and grow their feed. I also had something in one draft about the species being ‘on a knife edge’ but maybe that was a phrase too far. The subject experts rightly have a final say.
Fields of Gold was a good title for a panel looking at the rise of food as a commodity and a multi-trillion-pound global business. Among exhibits in this section were toy farm animals, and original 1950s cow-farming board games involving artificial insemination. The idea that cows are a natural part of our rural landscape had started to seem like a fiction. And while animal welfare was not a primary focus of the exhibition, the display of Cain and Abel by Damien Hirst alongside the Museum’s mammal skeletons hinted at the question of the dispensable, disposable way we treat some species.
If we are going to eat less meat, what’s for dinner, then? The fact is that a quarter of all Britain’s evening meals are already vegan or vegetarian, so we have a proven appetite for a less meat-heavy diet. The exhibition offered some future scenarios for eating insects, lab-grown meat or opting for more plant-based meals featuring other kinds of protein. For change to come about, and industries to adapt successfully, will take government action as well as individual pressure. But every non-meat meal really does stack up towards a better world.
You can see the exhibition in person at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History until June 2022, or online here.
