The Meat Paradox: Ethics, morality and shamanic spirituality: exploring the politics of protein with Rob Percival

We are human because for most of our evolutionary history, we have eaten meat whilst treating animals as relations and giving thanks to them. We held these the two sides of this paradox in tension. But in the past decades, we have created hells on earth in our industrialised farming and abattoirs so that eating from them is no longer remotely ethical.  How do we resolve the paradox? Is global veganism the answer or are there other ways to create a generative relationship with our humanity and the food we eat? With Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as forager-hunters, our lives intimately entwined with the lives - and then deaths - of the animals that we ate.  And then we cut that link and now we eat meat in plastic packages with cute pictures on the front to remove our awareness of the death that has arisen. And yet at our deepest levels, we know that meat is murder.  How do we resolve this paradox?

Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association.

The Meat Paradox is his first book and it's one of the best, deepest, and most genuinely engaging that I've read of the many that seek to address the huge cultural divide that surrounds our consumption of meat.   This is a book that delves into neuroscience (denial, cognitive dissonance and the lies we tell ourselves), indigenous spiritual/shamanic practice, ancient ancestral practice as depicted in cave paintings that were created over a span of 30,000 years (that's a long time for an art form) and the actual experience of what it is to stand in an abbatoir and make eye contact with a cow as she walks into the stun cage.

Reading this book will change your life.  Talking to Rob on the podcast was a joy and an inspiration and we ranged across all of these subjects and more.  We didn't get to the last-line dedication to Odin, which I had thought would be the core of the podcast, but then I discovered in the pre-recording conversations that Odin is a rescue dog (which is wonderful, but not quite the backbone of a shamanic/spiritual podcast that I'd imagined).

Nonetheless, this is a deeply felt, deeply touching podcast that delves deep into the very meat of our identities in the modern world.

The Meat Paradox: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9781408713815

Web: rob-percival.com https://rob-percival.com/

Twitter: @rob_percival_ https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_
IPES report: The Politics of Protein: http://ipes-food.org/pages/politicsofprotein
Sustainable Food Trust Report: 'Feeding Britain': https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/our-work/feeding-britain/
LRB: A Million Shades of Red by Adam Mars-Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/adam-mars-jones/a-million-shades-of-red