Meat

I must confess I'm struggling with this, and the main thing stopping me from giving up is the fact that I paid £15 for it. There's no attempt at narrative to carry what is essentially a string of back-of-the-envelope calculations interspersed with short polemics, and given that the author misunderstands certain key concepts (embodied water for example) I don't even trust the calculations. There are a few interesting snippets that I would have liked to see discussed in more detail, for example the fact that much of the UK's food waste problem was caused by the fact that following the BSE crisis it was made illegal to feed food waste to pigs, but rather than essentially dismissing this as "health and safety gone mad" I'd have liked to see some discussion of how it might be possible to recycle food waste without propagating pathogens through the system. Maybe it will get there later in the book but thus far I've seen nothing that contradicts my basic belief that while it may be theoretically possible to design an agricultural system featuring animals that minimises environmental impacts without compromising welfare, we're a very long way off having that at the moment so in the meantime it's probably a good idea to eat as little animal produce as possible.

Update: I gave up. Life's too short.