UK Article: How The Victorians Started Our Global Obsession With Meat

[Andy_T]

How the Victorians started our global obsession with meat

Increasing consumption of meat rich diets throughout the world in the 21st century raises pressing concerns about human health, animal welfare and environmental sustainability. Too much mass-produced meat is bad for us, bad for the livestock we eat, and bad for the planet on which we live.

If we want to understand how the world arrived at this point, as well as how we might change it for the better, we should look back to the Victorian period, which laid the foundations for modern globalised meat production and consumption.

 

[Val]

I saw a fragment of a decent plot (a tv show) in the morning. It's a pseudo documentary show "Yeda zhivaya ee mjortvaya" ("The food - alive and dead"). It's being shown on the one of main national tv channels (NTV), and millions of people watch it before work, or after work, when it's repeated. So, this is important what they say about food and health from the tv screen. The host is a pretty man, Sergey Malozjomov, a very clever journalist. He speaks English well and travels around the world in order to find out the food habits of different peoples and how they affect the health of the whole nations. Finally, in this plot, they started talking seriously about debunking of Dukan diet and Atkins diet (it's hard to believe it, but a lot of Russians still believe that such executions are good for them). There were personal stories of people who had suffered of those kind of "diets". I wish our lyceum's concierge-woman could watch it (she had nearly died because she followed Dukan diet!!!). The bad part of it is that the producers involved that wh*re-"doctor", who is running from documentary to documentary and telling people about how animal protein and aminoacids are essential for maintaining life. She would say anything to get paid well. ...But still, Russians need to know, that e.g. so-called "Kremlin diet" (a version of Atkins diet) is a myth: soviet leaders never followed anything like that. The meat cult appeared when the chain of meat factories, owned by the armenian businessman Mikoyan, spreaded over SU after WWII: the goal was to feed the larger amounts of workers, and make the process as effective and cheap as possible, so that soviet people could be building socialism and not complaining about anything.