Carnivory of modern Western societies is constantly on display. Supermarkets have meat counters that are sometimes tens of meters long, full of scores of different cuts (or entire eviscerated carcasses) of at least half a dozen mammalian and avian species (cattle, pig, sheep, chicken, turkey, duck). Some of them, and many specialty shops, also carry bison, goat and ostrich meat, as well as pheasants, rabbit and venison. Then there are extensive delicatessen sections with an enormous variety of processed meat products. Fast-food outlets – dominated by ubiquitous burger chains – were built on meat, and despite their recent diversification into seafood and vegetarian offerings, they remain based on beef and chicken. Consumption statistics confirm this all too obvious extent of carnivory, with annual per capita supply of meat at retail level (including bones and trimmable fat) surpassing typical adult body weights (65–80 kg) not only in the US and Canada and in the richer northern EU nations but now also in Spain. In fact, Spanish per capita meat supply has been recently the Europe’s highest.

What all but a few typical (i.e., urban) carnivores do not realize is the extent to which the modern Western agriculture turns around (a better way to express this would be to say: is subservient to) animals: both in terms of the total cultivated area and overall crop output, it produces mostly animal feed (dominated by corn and soybeans) rather than food for direct human consumption (staple grains dominated by wheat, tubers, ­oilseeds, vegetables). But, if they are so inclined, modern Western urbanites can find plenty of information about the obverse of their carnivory, about poor treatment of animals, about environmental degradation and pollution attributable to meat production, and about possible health impacts. Vegetarianism has been an increasingly common (but in absolute terms it is still very restricted) choice among the Western populations, and vegetarian publications and websites have been a leading source of ­information on the negatives of carnivory. Vegans in particular enumerate the assorted sins of meat eating in an often strident manner on many Internet sites. These contrasting attitudes have been reflected in the ­published record.

On one hand, there are hundreds of meat cookbooks – unabashed and colorfully illustrated celebrations of meat eating ranging from several “bibles” that are devoted to meat in general (Lobel et al. 2009; Clark and Spaull 2010) and to meatballs and ribs in particular (Brown 2009; Raichlen 2012) or to Grilling Gone Wild (Couch 2012) – all promising the best-ever, classic, succulent, complete meat repasts. The middle ground of meaty examinations is occupied by what I would call mission books of many gradations, the mildest ones imploring their readers to eat less meat (Boyle 2012) or arguing the benefits of becoming a flexitarian, that is, only an occasional meat eater (Berley and Singer 2007). The more ambitious ones are trying to convert meat eaters into vegetarians, even vegans, in ways ranging from straightforward (de Rossi et al. 2012) to enticing (O’Donnel 2010). And the same contrasts and arguments have been replayed in yet another genre of books that examine meat’s roles in national and global history (Rimas and Fraser 2008; Ogle 2011).

Finally, there is a venerable tradition of books as instruments of indictment. This genre began in 1906 with Upton Sinclair’s novel uncovering the grim realities of Chicago’s stockyards and meatpacking (Sinclair 1906). A reader entirely unfamiliar with the revolting nature of Sinclair’s descriptions will find an extended quote in a section about meat processing. More than a century later, critics of anything associated with meat include such disparate groups as activists agitating for animal rights, environmental ­scientists worried about cattle taking over the planet and nutritionists ­convinced (not quite in accord with the complete evidence) that eating meat undermines health and hastens the arrival of death.

Some of these writings portray modern meat industry in truly gruesome terms, and many have unsubtle titles or subtitles that make it clear that meat production and animal slaughtering are components of a despicable, if not outright criminal, enterprise and that meat eating is a reprehensible habit, a deplorable ride that must end: meat is madness (Britton 1999); meat animals are devouring a hungry planet (Tansey and D’Silva 1999); meat production is a matter of crimes unseen (Jones 2004); and eating meat is our society’s greatest addiction (Ford 2012). Others, including books by Schlosser (2001) and Pollan (2006), are more measured in their condemnation. But in terms of extreme positions and incendiary language, few texts can beat The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams first published in 1990: the book’s subtitle claims to offer a feminist-vegetarian critical theory; it abounds in such deliberately provocative phrases as “the rape of animals” and “the butchering of women.”

And this is how it ends: “Eat Rice Have Faith in Women. Our dietary choices reflect and reinforce our cosmology, our politics. It is as though we could say, ‘Eating rice is faith in women.’ On this grace may we all feed” (Adams 2010, 202). Of course, the nation where rice had a more prominent place in social identity, self-perception and culture than anywhere else – and where the plant has been a cherished symbol of wealth, power and beauty (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993) – would be left entirely unmoved by that argument: average per capita consumption of rice in Japan is now, in mass terms, lower than the intake of dairy products (less than 65 vs. more than 80 kg/year), and the country’s accurate food balance sheets show the per capita supply of meat and seafood at nearly 100 kg/year, or 50% higher than rice (Smil and Kobayashi 2012). And Japan has been a model followed by other traditionally rice-eating Asian nations whose rice consumption appears to fall by about a third with every doubling of income (Smil 2005a).

What are we to make of these contending and contradictory conclusions? Should we eat meat – or should we try to minimize its consumption and aim at its eventual eliminations from human diets? My answers will be based on long-term perspectives and on complex and multidisciplinary considerations: my appraisals of the evolution of meat eating, historical changes and modern modalities of this practice and its benefits as well as its undesirable consequences are based on findings from disciplines ranging from archaeology to animal science and from evolutionary biology to environmental and economic studies. This is a book rooted in facts and realities, not in predetermined posturing and sermonizing, a book that looks at benefits of meat eating as well as at the failures and drawbacks, and that does not aspire to fit into any pre-cast categories, pro or contra, positively programmatic or aggressively negative. I do not approach the reality of modern large-scale carnivory with any pre-conceived notions, and I did not write this book in order to advocate any particular practice or point of view but merely in order to follow the best evidence to its logical conclusions. At its end, a reader will know quite clearly where I stand – but I thought that at its beginning it might be interesting to explain where I come from, that is, to make my full meat-eating disclosure.

As a child, adolescent and a young man I ate a wide variety of meat, but never in large individual portions or in large cumulative quantities: realities of post-WW II Europe (in some countries food rationing was in place until 1954), my mother’s cooking and my food preferences (I have always disliked large and thick pieces of meat and all fatty cuts) explain that. But this moderation went along with a great variety, and before I left Europe for North America at the age of 25, I had eaten pork, beef, veal, mutton, lamb, goat, horse, rabbit, chicken, duck, pigeon, goose, turkey and pearl hen, and as a boy the meat I loved best came from the animals my father shot during the hunting season, pheasants, wild hares and, above all, deer.

Also as a child I attended with my parents a number of village winter pig killings at the houses of my father’s acquaintances. In many traditional European societies, these used to be (and in some places still remain) ­festive social and culinary events: Schlachtfest in Germany, maialata in Italy, matanza in Spain and zabíjačka in Bohemia. They are crowned by eating a remarkable variety of foodstuffs prepared expertly from the killed animal – including blood soup, blood sausages, white sausages and headcheese – and the attendants then take home assorted lean and fat cuts to be roasted or boiled or processed into lard. Other meat-related memories of my ­childhood include: my grandmother force-feeding geese (a practice I ­disliked); my father placing fragrant evergreen boughs into the cavity of deer carcass before hanging it to age in cold air (so learning as a child that fresh meat is not really fresh); my mother cooking beef rouladen stuffed with carrots, onions, boiled eggs and gherkins (yielding a colorful ­combination of fillings that is beautifully revealed on cooked cross-cut).

And as in any traditional society, when I was a child we also ate organ meats, albeit much less frequently than pork or chicken. Except for tripe (a preference I share with all those who like trippa alla romana) they were never my favorites, but I had eaten brains, lungs, heart, kidneys, cow’s udder and calf, pig and poultry livers, the latter both cooked and prepared as pâtés. Quantifying those childhood and adolescent meat intakes is impossible with accuracy, but my best estimate is that as a teenager my annual meat consumption was on the order of 15 kg, with a few more kilograms of processed meats (mainly ham and sausages). Liver was the only organ meat whose eating had temporarily survived our move across the Atlantic: for a time during the 1970s, I used to make fairly regularly a chicken liver pâté with cognac.

But our trans-Atlantic move and the access to much cheaper meat in general, and to inexpensive beef in particular, did not change my dislike of large or fatty pieces of meat: as a result, in more than four decades of living (and almost daily cooking) in North America, I have never eaten, bought or cooked a steak – and, a fact many readers might find even harder to believe, I have never eaten a hamburger in McDonald’s or in any of America’s other burger chains. Virtually all cooking with meat I did during the years when our son was growing up was Chinese and Indian food, with small pieces of meat in sauces and with vegetables served with rice; the only exceptions were some holiday roasts and an occasional Wiener Schnitzel. During that period (in order to understand better the difficulties involved in performing representative food intake surveys), I had repeatedly monitored our actual food intakes for a few days at a time, and so I can state with certainty that our average annual per capita meat consumption had never surpassed 25 kg.

When our son left for graduate school in 1996, we continued to eat all animal foods (especially fish, cheeses and yogurt) but cooked red meat and poultry only a few times a year for traditional holiday dinners. According to an inaccurate, cumbersome but often used current dietary parlance, we became the longest-definition vegetarians (lacto-ovo-pisci-vegetarians). There were no sudden specific reasons behind this shift, just a naturally evolving preference. During that time, our per capita meat intake was well below 5 kg/year, but after a dozen years of these virtually meatless diets I began cooking again occasional meat dishes, including my favorite Indian curries and Schnitzel, and occasionally buying some good-quality prosciutto or jamón Serrano – and a few days before these introductory lines were written, I ate in Firenze a small dish of trippa alla fiorentina, a cook’s natural curiosity to try once again an ancient local favorite.

During the most recent years, our total per capita meat consumption (actually consumed servings, not retail weight, although with the lean meat and boneless cuts I buy these two categories are pretty close) has been thus less than 5 kg/year. As with most people in the West, I should thus be classified as a life-long omnivore – but one with an increasing tendency toward very low meat consumption. After finishing this book, some readers may find that my dietary preferences had some effects on its tenor and on its conclusions; as a scientist, I would like to think that has not been the case, but others may conclude differently.

With this confession out of the way, I am ready to plunge into the realities, complexities and consequences of modern meat production and consumption. In Chapter 1, I must lay out first assorted meat basics, many essential facts and observations about meat in nutrition and health: about its properties, composition, quality and variety; about its role in human diets, above all as a source of high-quality protein and some key micronutrients, and its association with fat; and about its demonstrated and suspected roles in the genesis of major civilizational diseases and in human longevity. Some of these fascinating, but often inconclusive, links between meat and health and longevity have received a great deal of research attention, but they are also subject to an even greater amount of false beliefs and misinformation, and I will try to sort out this complex relationship by referring to the best available evidence. A separate section will be devoted to diseased meat and impacts and risks of meat-borne pathogens.

In Chapter 2, I will explain the evolutionary basis of human diets and their historical development extending from domestication of animals to typical meat intakes in traditional societies and including dietary taboos and proscriptions as well as meat’s common position as a prestige food. Chapter 3 opens with a brief review of modern dietary transition, a process that has transformed traditional diets and whose two main components have been reduced consumption of carbohydrate staples and higher intakes of animal foodstuffs in general and meat in particular. This will be followed by an introduction to modern meat production and consumption that will trace the meat chain from the reproduction and growth imperatives through slaughtering of animals and processing of meat to meat consumption and waste, and that will systematically sort out the statistical categories used to quantify and compare these processes in historical and international terms.

Chapter 4 will explain what it takes to produce meat: it will first survey the modalities of modern animal husbandry (grazing, mixed farming and centralized “landless” industrial systems) before turning to long-term changes and current best practices of efficient meat production using ­balanced feed rations and to (humane as well as abusive) treatment of meat animals. The chapter’s second part will focus on the environmental consequences of modern mass-scale carnivory. This is not a new concern but one that has gained a much higher prominence as the attention to environmental degradation and pollution and the concerns about the state of the biosphere and the sustainability of modern civilization have become increasingly common subjects of scientific inquiry, public discourse and governmental policy.

Animal Agriculture and Global Food Supply, a comprehensive report prepared by the US Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, was the first notable contribution to these new, environmentally centered, ­perspectives on livestock and meat production (Bradford et al. 1999). While it detailed many concerns, it concluded that livestock have both positive and negative environmental effects. Seven years later, an even more substantial interdisciplinary report prepared by the FAO had a ­different message, giving away its concerns by its very title: Livestock’s Long Shadow (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

Its basic conclusion made many headlines:

The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity.

The report’s most often cited findings were that 26% of the Earth’s surface is devoted to grazing land, 33% of all arable land is used to grow feed for animals, 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to livestock as is 8% of the total use of freshwater.

Two years after FAO’s report came a study that had a narrower focus but whose conclusions were even more worrisome: the goal of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (IFAP) was “to sound the alarms” as it determined that “the negative effects of the IFAP system are too great and the scientific evidence is too strong to ignore. Significant changes must be implemented and must start now. And while some areas of animal agriculture have recognized these threats and have taken action, it is clear that the industry has a long way to go” (PCIFAP 2008). All of these three reports are readily available on the Web, and I will refer to them only when I will need to make, or stress, some specific points that are well developed in these studies. Rather than repeating much they have to offer, I will question some of their approaches and conclusions in an effort to demonstrate many uncertainties that make some of the published conclusions much less definitive than they may appear when they are cited as absolute findings.

I will do this by surveying five major categories of impact. The first one is the 20th century’s rapid rise of domesticated zoomass and its densities, a topic that has not been addressed by the three reports. The second concerns changing animal landscapes, with the effects on land cover and land use dominated by deforestation, deliberately set fires, grazing and overgrazing. Intensive production of feedstuffs is the main reason why meat is an expensive food in virtual energy terms, with indirect energy costs due to intensive cultivation of feedstuffs being far more important than direct energy costs of feeding, housing and killing animals and processing, distributing and cooking meat.

And the last two categories of environmental concern will deal with the aquatic and atmospheric impacts of meat production. Large volumes of virtual water are needed to grow animal feeds, and the nutrients lost during that process as well as copious metabolic by-products of meat production are major water pollutants that contribute to undesirably high nutrient loadings and eutrophication of both fresh and coastal ocean waters, while gases released during the cultivation of feed crops and by metabolizing animals are significant factors in local, regional and global atmospheric changes (the last instance being due to emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, two major greenhouse gases). Some of the published claims appear less dire when seen in a proper context, but there is no doubt that when compared with burdens imposed by other foodstuffs, meat has a high environmental cost.

I will conclude the book with an appeal for what I call rational meat eating. I will first assess the extent to which non-meat options – ­vegetarianism or diets enriched with other animal foodstuffs (including the ­promise of in vitro meat) – can displace current meat eating, and then I will outline a path of desirable meat production. Advocacy of such a path will anger vegans and it will disappoint vegetarians – while its insistence on moderation will not satisfy the proponents of unrestrained, vigorous carnivory. But I believe that such a choice offers the best way to preserve social, economic and nutritional benefits of meat eating while minimizing many unavoidable and undesirable environmental impacts of mass-scale meat production.