• Question: Do you think that Battery farming is the only way forward???

    Asked by monkey24 to laurenceharwood, Jack, Akram on 19 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Jack Snape

      Jack Snape answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      That’s a really interesting question! 🙂 The world’s population is growing and we are running out of big spaces for farming. At the moment people in poorer counties like China don’t eat much meat. But they are get richer so they’re starting to eat more and more meat. I think we have 3 choices:

      1. We eat less meat. At the moment, we eat a lot more meat than our grandparents used to eat because it used to be a lot more expensive. If we all ate less meat, we wouldn’t need to save as much space so we wouldn’t have to use battery farms.

      2. We use battery farms… They’re not nice but they provide cheap meat.

      3. We try to ‘grow’ fake meat using stem cells or some other technology. This is a bit weird but it avoids cruelty to animals and still saves lots of space. Scientists are nearly at a stage where they can do this.

      None of the choices are great but we have to pick one of them because we’re filling up our planet with hungry people. Hope this answers your question 🙂

    • Photo: Laurence Harwood

      Laurence Harwood answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Certainly not. It is inhumane and produces poor quality meat. The answer is that we have to adapt our lifestyles to eat less meat – and fish too as we are rapidly overfishing the oceans. We talk about the food chain lants are eaten by small animals, small animals are eaten by larger animals and so on. Each step up the food chain causes a drop in mass to about one tenth. So to produce 1 kilo of chicken or pig or cow requires 10 kilos of vegetation. Alternatively, the vegation can be grown for human consumption instead of for feeding to farm animals.

    • Photo: Akram Alomainy

      Akram Alomainy answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Not for me since they are not kind to the environment in anyway and also they produce horrible tasting meat and I love my meat 😉

      But I guess this question makes us think carefully about our habits and how we need to adapt to changes in the world and also the equation of demand and needs!! I guess carefully considering our diet choices will need to be a must specially for nations were resources are becoming scarce.

      I think it is a great question 🙂

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