A look at conscientious eating

I don’t eat out much these days.

Once upon a time I lived in the city and led the ‘corporate’ lifestyle. So whilst it has been a while, I wouldn’t consider myself a stranger to restaurants and cafés. Yet things have changed.

A subtle V now appears alongside every second option on the restaurant menu indicating suitability for vegans.

Pop in to a café for tea or coffee and no longer will you be faced with the option of semi-skimmed or full fat milk. You now have a myriad of additional options including soya and almond milk.

The above is apparently indicative of changing dietary demographics within the UK which are accompanying the rise of the ‘millennial’.

This is a generation which wants to be seen to be eating conscientiously. For a few this means steering away from animal-based food products altogether, for others, it’s the less extreme ambition of ensuring that as much of their food as possible is healthier and more ethically sourced.

Just what healthier or more ethically-sourced means seems very much down to interpretation. That said, no farmer should ever criticise another person’s dietary choice (assuming they are made with full knowledge of facts) given that almost all commercially sourced food originates from some form of agriculture. But what we can do is extoll the virtues of our own home-grown products, such as lamb.

Anyone who suggests that lamb is not a sustainable and ethical protein source has clearly drunk far too much soya milk!

My local butcher sells lamb raised on farms literally only a few miles away. Beat that for food miles!

What’s more, in its simplest form, lamb has been born on a hill, reared only on its mother’s milk and grass. All this with little intervention from mankind. This is about as natural and basic a product as you could get without actually going out, shooting and butchering a wild animal.

Of course there will always be environmentalists and rewilders who will tell you that sheep production is ruining the uplands and that the carbon footprint of sheep is significant. But they are wrong.

Much of the biodiversity that we know and love in this country is the result of pastoral agriculture.

Remove livestock from our upland agricultural areas and you will rapidly see a loss of the existing habitat mosaics supporting this biodiversity. Very soon the hills will transform into mass monocultures of rank heather, bracken or rushes. This will lead to a catastrophic loss of species in our uplands. There will not be vegetative succession leading to Edenesque landscapes as dreamed of by some prominent environmental campaigners – at least not for a few thousand years.

It is true that sheep are very ‘burpy’ animals and they therefore do produce significant carbon emissions, but if you take into consideration the relatively insignificant amount of additional inputs that an upland sheep receives in respect of mechanisation, fertilisers etc in comparison to other protein sources, these emissions can be somewhat offset.

Take into further account carbon sequestration by the aforementioned habitat mosaics of our uplands and we should be selling carbon credits!

So there you are, if you ever happen to be discussing food ethics with a millennial, point them towards their local butcher and tell them that eating lamb might help save the world. Whilst you are at it, tell them it’s tastier than tofu too.

Niall Blair farms 400 ewes and 40 sucker cows on a 600-acre tenanted hill farm in Glen Isla in partnership with his wife Katy.

Pictures: Kim Cessford. Niall Blair, who farms at Loanhead, Kilry, says farmers should extoll the virtues of home-grown produce.