Suzanne Harrington: 'You are what you eat' has a global meaning now

The way we treat other species is something none of us wish to talk about, or even think about.

Pigs gather around a feeder in an indoor pigsty. Picture: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg

IN the supermarket queue, which now counts as socialising, the chatty checkout man tells me how he gave 'Veganuary' a go and found it easy, so extended it to February: He couldn’t think of a good reason to not. We rhapsodised briefly about vegan Magnums, before I  went home to write about the pandemic: Unless you're a fantasy novelist, that's all anyone writes about these days.

To that end, I speak with University College Dublin sociologist Kathleen Lynch. She talks about the basis of Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film, Contagion; which, until last year, would have been sci-fi; post-Covid-19, it's almost a documentary. That basis of which she spoke is the relationship between viruses and the way we treat other species.

This topic, says Professor Lynch, is something none of us wish to talk about, or even think about. And yet, here we are. 

After a few false alarms  — bird flu, swine flu — a virus directly linked to how we treat animals has come back to bite us all, big time: How we rear sentient beings (like pigs and cows and chickens), how we enclose them in unnatural conditions, deprive them of their ways of being, and then factory kill them. We don’t like to talk about any of that. 

We pretend it doesn't happen, or that it only happens in China. But it happens across the world.

We create hugely cramped environments, without having much of a clue what these environments are, in turn, capable of creating. Turns out they are capable of creating viruses.

 Remember the end of Contagion, when the story rewinds back to a factory-farmed piggie and a stray bat? Guess what? It came true. The details may be slightly different, but the ending is the same: A deadly virus brought on by the catastrophic mismanagement of our fellow species.

We kill 77bn animals a year globally, mostly so we can eat them. The maths are straightforward: 10 animals for every human. Except not every human eats 10 animals a year — the meaty concentration is, like everything else, in wealthier regions: China, North America, Europe, Australia, Argentina. Concentrated animal eating means concentrated animal rearing. It means profit before welfare. It means creating environments where viruses can evolve, mutate, spread, kill, shut us down.

Instead of looking at this, and changing it, the dissenting voices are shut down: 'Animal rights loonies'; 'po-faced snowflakes'; 'bloody vegans', as it were. 'Virtue signalling killjoys' trying to destroy the global meat and dairy industries by having the temerity to avoid mega-scale factory-farmed food like it's 'the plague'.

It's easy to blame other countries for their poor animal-welfare standards, but if this current pandemic isn't a great, big, clanging clarion call to the world to re-evaluate what it deems food, then I don't know what is.