Leopold Bloom may have eaten with relish the “inner organs of beasts and fowl” but I fear my own meat eating days could be swiftly drawing to an end. The decision to quit meat has been in the pipeline for several years. Whilst grudgingly employed as a chef, I maintained that the moment I was able to vacate that unfitting occupation, I would also finalize my run on the carnivore circuit. Every time I trimmed the fat from a beef sirloin, scraped clean the vertebra of a column of pork or gutted a wild salmon, I was never able to overcome the feeling that the routine handling of so much death was not a right thing. Despite the move towards more humane and sanitary procedures in the modern meat industry (Long gone are the days of rat infested warehouse described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle), I find myself unable to accept any of the ethical arguments defending meat consumption in the developed world. At its very core, it is an industry founded on the slaughter of sentient creatures and is no more civilized than whale hunting, seal clubbing or dolphin drive hunting.

A familiar – and possibly more revealing than was intended – portrayal of the meat industry broadcast to my generation can be found in an episode of The Simpsons. In the episode Lisa the Vegetarian , students at Springfield Elementary are shown the Troy Mclure (who you may remember from other such educational films as “Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun” and “Firecrackers: The Silent Killer”) fronted student education film Meat and You. Following a tour of a meat processing plant, the film’s protagonist, Jimmy, asks “Mr McClure? I have a crazy friend who says its wrong to eat meat. Is he crazy?” to which McClure responds “Nooo, just ignorant. You see, your crazy friend never heard of the food chain”. The image then presented to the viewer is a telling and fantastically satirical representation of mankind’s seeming relationship with the animal kingdom:

Vegetarianism is often criticized as being the pursuit of a pontificating and privileged western minority. To Orwell they were of ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. The group espousing this belief tend to focus largely on the arguement that we are evolutionarily developed to eat meat. However, our ancestors needing to eat meat for survival is in no way correlated to the arguemment as whether or not we should eat meat now. In the developed world, the existence of mankind no longer depends on the consumption of meat. Offering a preference utilitarian (though he prefers the term “personism”) and compelling opinion on the matter, the moral philosopher Peter Singer, explains that:

Once we accept the, sort of, Darwinian picture that we are not a specially created species that’s got a God given right to rule over the other animals we really have to move towards not buying all those products that come from animals and really embody the suffering of those animals experience.

Commenting on 24th century human dietary practice in the frequently prophetic series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Officer William Riker informs a visiting alien dignitary that “we no longer enslave animals for food purposes”. While such remarks could previously have been disregarded as the wishful thinking of 20th century sci-fi television writers, in 2010, Bill Gates discussed the very likely future in which science will facilitate the production of vegetarian “meat”. Gates believes that such a product could possibly be more efficiently as well as cost effectively produced not to mention better for the planet. The increasing likelihood that humanity is heading towards a meat free future certainly makes the transition to vegetarianism seem considerably less daunting and more like a natural progression in human thought. Veganism, however, may be a little more difficult to get people on board.