Book Review: The Meat Paradox by Rob Percival

There’s no shortage of books talking about why we “need to swap the sausage sarnies for tofu tempura,” said Christina Patterson The Sunday Times. What this one does is “much more interesting”. Rob Percival, head of nutritional policy at the Soil Association, sets out to explore our “psychological relationship with meat.”

In his opinion, eating meat is a “paradox”, said Julian Baggini in The guard. Most people feel sorry for animals – and yet are willing to tolerate their mass slaughter by eating meat. He sets out to understand what makes these contradictory viewpoints possible.

Percival does a “strong job” detailing the damage caused by “modern meat eating,” Bee Wilson said in the financial times. And yet his book is impressively nuanced: It also debunks the “vexation” of some vegan arguments – such as the idea that a meat-based diet can never be as healthy as a meatless one.

What the book lacks are “practical solutions”. Percival believes meat production urgently needs to change – and yet there is no clear proposal here to “reform a global meat industry that is causing so much ethical and environmental harm”.

Little Brown 384 pages £18.99; The Bookstore of the Week £14.99

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