BOOKS & ARTS
Meaty matters
A.A. Gill
The Ethical Carnivore:
My Year Killing to Eat
by Louise Gray
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320
I’m writing this in the Highlands. Through
the window I can see Loch Maree, being ruf-
fled into white-tipped skirls by the westerly
wind and a squall of cloud that’s shrouding
Slioch, the Place of the Spears. The Munroes
are steeples at the end of the water, a bastion
reminder of Scotland’s eternal war between
the fastness and the wetness.
I’m up here for the stalking. I come
every year. I haven’t taken a shot for some
time. I love the stalk: stalking is to walk-
ing what opera is to whistling. And I also
love going out with people who have never
done it before, or for whom pulling the trig-
ger is still the pinch-point of life, death and
everything. Watching a stag through a
sight, an animal bigger and heavier than
you are, that embodies so much yearning
and lust, roars so fundamentally about our
temporal mythologised lives, is always a
big thing, a big ask.
I’ve taken the day off in the lodge, with
a fire and an Arbroath Smokie tart, a cold
grouse and a square of tablet, to pick some
rowans and sharp apples for jelly and to
write this. I am more sympathetic to Louise
Gray’s book in the north than I would be in
Chelsea.
The best chapter is about stalking with
her father, and is less to do with killing
than with the warm, vegetative relation-
ship that daughters have with their dads. It
has a different tone and digs deeper than
the rest — but this is not a good book.
It is a well-meaning one, and it is writ-
ten by an evidently decent and empatheticwoman; but niceness and goodwill don’t, by
simply wishing it, conjure up interest or a
compelling argument. Altogether, it sounds
like Prince Charles screaming Bridget Jones.
Let’s start with a nit-pick. The title: The
Ethical Carnivore. Does she really mean
ethical — or is it moral? I understand that
untangling the specific definition is a ped-
ant’s errand, but ethics are generally theapplication of morality. Ethics are what
lawyers, bankers and plastic surgeons have.
Whether or not to eat an ingredient that
has died for your dinner is surely moral.
Buddhists, Jains and Hindus are directed
by morality, not ethics. Ethics you learn;
morality you believe.
The distinction is not inconsequential.
Louise Gray wants to make up an empiri-
cal argument against eating meat. She’s
not a missionary, she’s an advocate and
that’s the first of the book’s numerous
shortcomings. The argument against eating
meat rests on it being cruel and environ-
mentally unsound; but also on the claim that
it is unkind and wrong and fundamentally
inhuman. So the discussion about relieving
pain, misdirecting the attention and calm-
ing the fears of animals that are about to be
killed and the husbandry practices that do
the least environmental damage are beside
the point — as are the discussions about
whether or not fish feel pain. She cites a
study that got bees to sting trout mouths
to see if they reacted to pain, and appar-
ently they rubbed their faces in the sand.
As a piece of scientific inquiry, that must
be one of the most weirdly bizarre and
pointless. There is a paragraph explaining
that it is OK to eat bivalves because they
don’t have a central nervous system, as
if an ability to feel pain is the threshold for
membership to the right-to-life club.
There are also long, hand-wringing
discussions on how much pain a pig feels
and for how long, and then there is the
patronising, head-patting respect for old-
fashioned farmers, peasants, natives and
time-honoured rituals, as opposed to the
obvious hellishness of supermarkets, fac-
tory farms and fast food.
Gray suffers from a constant squeamish-
ness about offal, blood and messy bits, and an
equally sentimental gooiness for the beauty
of fur, feathers and ickle baby animals. She
seems to condone eating roadkill because,
well, it’s dead anyway, and insects because,
well, they’re creepy-crawlies. There is no
attempt to explain the obvious dichotomy:
that if killing things is wrong then whether
you do it with a captive bolt or a bus makes
no difference. If all life is intrinsically equal-
ly valuable, then there is fundamentally no
difference between eating a run-over pheas-
ant or a hit-and-run cyclist. If you are simply
worried by the type of suffering, then it is not
a profound question of ethics or morality: it’s
about quality control.
And I kept wondering who this book
was aimed at. Who does she think is going
to be moved by it? Is it just a mutual con-
firmation for vegetarians, or are carnivores
supposed to slap their heads and say, I never
knew that’s where my chops came from? For
all its hand-wringing and breathless sadness
at the extermination of natural wonder, this
lifeless little book suffers from the endem-
ic plague of new age fundamental food fad-Bushel
Whoever invented the chair, God bless him.
And the floor, what would we do without the floor?
And the man who invented the door, I salute you.
I guess it was a man, so busy and bearded
and his saying to no one in particular, Hinge!
And the wife saying, What on earth is that?
It’s a door, I have invented one. Now what?
You may slam it if you like. The man goes through
the door and walks into a wood. Well done
that inventor of woods! It was Dante I think,
what a breakthrough that was.
And the corridor. Too little has been said
about the inventor of corridors. Stop hiding
your light under a bushel. A bushel?
I know who invented the bushel, hah!
And the handkerchief! Imagine a life without
handkerchiefs! And windows are cool,
all those people, moving around. Madame Omelette,
wherever you are, you should pat yourself
on t he back too. We sta nd in awe, come now,
a game of Six-Egg Snooker then at last
the weight taken off those feet. You may sit down.
In fact, we can all sit down. It’s wonderful!— Julian Stannard
It’s OK to eat roadkill because, well,
it’s dead anyway; and insects because,
well, they’re creepy-crawlies