More slippery slope - Tim Lang and the denormalisation of meat

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I think we've been here before. Professor Lang has been peddling his eco-waffle for some while, wrapping it in ethics, lies about animal welfare and misdirection on food safety. But these days, of course, it's 'climate change' that's the daddy in the Prof's campaign against an efficient, effective international food system that might actually feed the starving and ensure they get fed up to the likely peak population somewhere between 2030 and 2050.

Here's Prof Lang (via an excellent critique in Samizdata):

Without a shadow of a doubt, the ubiquity and cheapness of meat and meat products, as a goal for progress for Western agriculture, let alone developing world agriculture, is one we have to seriously question now for reasons of climate change, emissions, ecosystems and local reasons.

See what he's saying here? Yet again we get the "cheap food is bad" line from the food fascists. And not for the first time.

Is the priority to keep food cheap or to lower its carbon footprint and the cost of diet-related health care? Are consumers modern gods, or should they have their choices restricted before they even see the food on shelves? 

Prof Lang, of course, answers his questions in the affirmative - the idea of free trade in food sticks in the craw of his localist, eco-farming and sad obsession with claiming that the western diet is the cause of starvation elsewhere (it isn't). More to the point there's that "diet-related health care" - caused by the food industry rather than by people grazing on stupid quantities of processed carbohydrates (certainly not meat, it's not the burger but the bun that's the problem). No evidence to support Prof Lang's contention yet he makes it time and time again.

And - agreeing with Tim is one Camilla Toulmin who looks at meat production and concludes:

In 20 years’ time we will look back at it in the same way as we now look back at smoking as it was 20 years ago.

Yes folks - the denormalisation of meat begins!

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