A cat sniffing a pile of snacks on a cake stand. Photo: By Anastasiia Rozumna on Unsplash.
Food for thought? Ruth Jones wants us to consider how we feed our pets – and ourselves
‘If we were presented with an alternative, we would welcome it with open arms, surely?’
Animals play important roles in our lives, from working- and assistance-dogs to therapy horses – not forgetting, of course, our unconditionally-loved and loving companion pets. Indeed, we can sometimes feel more sentimentally generous towards the dog than to its homeless owner sitting on the pavement. Quarantine means our pets can freely travel the globe, while refugees cannot.
Back in the 1700s, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Stubbs depicted the particularly-British love of animals. This love has ballooned so that in 2024 there were 10.6 million dogs, 10.8 million cats, and 800,000 pet rabbits in the UK, with fifty-one per cent of adults owning at least one pet. Consequently, the pet food market was worth £4.1 billion in 2024.
There is, however, a gaping cognitive dissonance between our beloved animals and the unseen battery hens and cattle herds sacrificed to produce their canned foods and kibble. Beef production requires soya feed or grazing, both of which lead to land clearances and devastating losses of biodiversity and rainforest. The calorific value of the meat produced is many times less than that of the original soya bean feed. And the effluent from farms and intensive poultry units is devastating rivers and their wildlife.
While we love our pets, we have been abusing other categories of animals, making them vulnerable to disease, putting them in unhygienic conditions. These animals have become sentient food factories, pumped with growth hormones and antibiotics. We restrict their movement, and condemn them to unnatural lives and traumatic deaths. We turn a blind eye to battery calves birthed by c-section, sows imprisoned in metal clamps, and male chicks ground up – alive – for chicken feed. And we are quick to forget outbreaks of avian flu and foot and mouth once they subside.
If we were presented with an alternative – clean, pesticide and hormone free, tasty proteins produced without cruelty or effluent or airmiles – we would welcome it with open arms, surely? Apparently not. Instead, journalists ghoulishly refer to ‘Lab Grown’ meat and nickname it ‘Frankenstein’, and we unthinkingly associate cultivated proteins with notoriously unhealthy, ‘ultra-processed’ or GM food, and recoil. Is it because we polarise nature as good, and science as bad? Or because we don’t credit single cells with being sentient or having ‘that of God’ in them, and therefore not making Godly eating? Or because we do, and fear that swallowing them is somehow more dystopian than digesting pieces of recognisable animals? Is it because we fear ‘cloning’ and forget how many lichens, fungi and micro-organisms replicate by splitting or shedding cells, or how we happily take cuttings from our favourite plants? The Quorn products in supermarket freezers up and down the land all derive from a single source sample of mycelium found in someone’s household compost heap in Marlow in the 1970s!
This week, a precision fermentation grower called Meatly tip-toed onto the market in partnership with vegan pet food supplier The Pack. They launched their first animal-free meat products: a range of pet treats made with pure chicken, cultured without cruelty from source cells from a single egg, and cultivated without hormones and antibiotics in a disease-free environment, without producing slurry. After years of multi-disciplinary, detailed research, the resulting protein is cleaner and more predictable than animal flesh. Would you buy them for your pet, if you are one of the fifty-one per cent, or could you imagine doing so if you are not? Would it be a way of reducing your carbon footprint? Of giving your pet healthier nutrition? Or satisfying your curiosity?
‘Remarkable work is being done to establish sustainable food systems on every continent.’
I anticipate those of you who now want to say, ‘Why bother with any of this at all, why doesn’t everyone just go vegan?’. Even if everyone and their pets could be persuaded to give up eating all animal products, by advertising, social media manipulation or restriction, there still remains the caution that ‘if you are going to be vegan, be careful whose lentils you are eating’. The world’s food baskets are being challenged by flood, drought and rampant biohazards like Fall Army Worms, locusts and Panama disease. The six inches of soil which produce all our food are being degraded at shocking rates, and we are already eating into the remaining harvests that our land can sustain.
Remarkable work is being done to reverse these trends and establish sustainable food systems on every continent. Black Mountains College in Talgarth is pioneering land-based educational programmes for sustainable systems change, and the visionary Our Food 1200 is enabling smallholders to live on the land again and sustain family-sized micro-businesses with reliable market access. Nonetheless, George Monbiot (in his book Regenesis) spells out why any combination of organic, regenerative and permaculture agriculture cannot even provide the number of calories required to feed the UK population, let alone supply the variety, novelty and year-round produce we have come to expect in the global north.
Globally, increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are disrupting the usual harvests, leading to exponential price hikes of the most basic staple foodstuffs on rural markets, and driving subsistence farmers into starvation or migration. And falling rain now contains contaminants including microplastic particles.
British farms have traditionally been inherited by first-born sons, while the other children had to join urban populations that cannot so readily feed themselves. In subsistence economies, land can only be subdivided through a few generations before becoming too small to sustain family life. We can convert our lawns and roadside verges into productive kitchen gardens, which helps to retrieve a sense of our connection and dependence on the living world both above and below ground. But is it enough, and can we act quickly enough to offset the impacts of a disrupted climate on our food chain, let alone remediate the damage our current food supply has been wreaking worldwide? How can we support subsistence communities to avoid becoming climate refugees and continue to live in their home communities and cultures, taking care of their piece of the planet?
It was with this concern that an informal ‘Future Food’ group formed at Ditching & Haywards Heath Meeting, to open up these questions and learn more about the burgeoning technologies for producing alternative forms of protein. We have seen that, by using a range of core substrates including fungi, algae and food industry and agricultural organic residues, many different kinds of protein-rich produce can be produced. These combine traditional fermented food recipes with sophisticated food science, along with cutting edge microbiology, culinary arts, and other innovations, to produce tasty, healthy and affordable, nutritious, protein-rich foods, while freeing up water and land for nature restoration, biodiversity recovery and regenerative agricultures.
In part we are considering our friends and colleagues in rural East Africa and the Sahel, whose traditional ways of life are being increasingly impacted by weather and temperature changes. We are also holding in mind the importance of local community food resilience in the UK, where the majority of our nutrition is now imported. Bringing Quaker testimonies to bear, we are asking how this technology can benefit the poorest families and help mitigate against malnutrition.
While the corporate behemoths are investing heavily in this technology, can we Quakers bring our values to bear on the evolution of the field? By representing simplicity, integrity, equality, community, stewardship and peace, and speaking boldly about reparations, can Quaker ‘nudges’ contribute towards the development of local- and cooperative-scale applications that nurture climate resilience, rather than stock market profit? We can only hope to do so by ‘being in the room’ and taking part in the discussions around this emergent technology.
