David Levy – Where We Need to Go – Mar 21

The 1950’s, when I was born, were still considered post World War II with colour still fairly muted and a certain drabness everywhere in a country trying to get to grips with the bankruptcy that we faced as we trying to rebuild a better world.

What was revealed post-war was the depths that humanity had sunk to, and even our friends were locked in a Cold War where daily the threat of nuclear obliteration played on the minds of us all.

Regular Sunday television had philosophers like Bertrand Russell who regaled us with what appeared to be doom and gloom.   Out of this came the Sunday Radio Shows making stars of the Goons, Round the Horne and the Glums.   Also with it came steady prosperity and once a week a meat joint on the table, supplementing Spam and main course meals of baked potatoes and beans.

I clearly remember when we had our first ever chicken and roast beef.   The taste was wonderful and food then was an event.

Today the mass production of food is done in factory-like conditions, and I have to say this food has to be accompanied with sauces in order to approach edibility.

I wonder, with good reason I believe, whether the conditions in which animals are being housed today affects their internal well-being and flavour?   I am not an expert, nor am I a vegan who also points their ‘beware finger’ at factory farming.

Yet conditions in these farms evoke similar feelings of human disgust that we had when concentration camps were revealed to the British Isles by the late Richard Dimbleby when he went in to Bergen Belsen in 1945.

Food doesn’t have to be reared in this way and, if that means for my family returning to a once a week experience of meat, I would vote with my money for this.

If Globalisation means our country’s Balance of Payments are reliant on us shipping our crap to the USA only to be the recipient of their crap (chlorinated chicken), then down with Globalisation is my mantra.

I suspect that for the tide to be turned our self-centredness needs a sharp jab of reality and constant exposure to the conditions about how and where we get our food from, and for children to shame their parents into a new world of public requirements.

There is a third way.   That is for the factory farms to clean up their own act.

They need to provide safe pathways for effluent treatment, to allow public scrutiny of animal conditions, and all farms must be required to gain a public grading and certification before they can sell to the public.

Something has to change now.   We need greater, more scrupulous assessment of their practices in order to guide our ongoing eating habits.   Cheaply produced foods means corners are being cut, both in health and in hygiene matters — and that way leads to new and nasty viruses.

David Levy