Get thee behind me, hipster

Millennials come in for a lot of flak, what with being incoherently blamed for misfortunes imposed by take-the-money-and-run capitalist boomers etc, but if you ask me our one unforgivable fault is a tendency to get cute. Thus we cutely spend our time debating whether Emma Watson should appear on our ten pound notes alongside the motto illegitimi non carborundum, then in May when the Tories get in we’re all like :’(

One of the many minute things to grind my minute gears in recent weeks has been this bit of aw-shucksery from the Guardian:

The centrepiece of a roast is usually a giant hunk of meat dripping in its own juices. A monstrous piece of animal that you now have full dominion over. You’re setting an example for the rest of the world. You are all-powerful now, and all the creatures of the Earth must tremble before you, lest you cook them as well.

I know, it’s meant to be tongue in cheek. But it’s not really ironic, because it does really suggest that eating meat makes you feel powerful, and, recognising the idiocy of that, doesn’t question it, but treats this grotesque thought process as an adorkable part of a gratifying culinary experience.

Courtesy of the Observer

The violence of this attitude might ring a bell with readers of Carol J Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, along with a sicklier grace note. Meat is objectification: something that’s been dominated and extracted from consciousness or agency, the object having more value because it once had consciousness and agency which was taken from it. In a nutshell (which is how a hipster would probably serve it), meat represents much of what is despicable and odious in masculinism, but also, because it’s food, has a feminised and domestic facet that can appeal to ‘new men’, who tie their big beards behind their pinnies and experiment with ways of making their base sense of entitlement look most palatable. Not that women don’t do this: I think that for women too interactions with meat can combine masculine and feminine, and sexual, motifs in a particularly self-indulgent way. Possibly the most hateful example of this is Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession by Julie Powell, a journey of unnecessary self-discovery via the mutilation of corpses.

3 victors in a 'trying to look like a burger' competition

Artisanal butchery is not down to earth, it’s a retrograde affectation. Think of the lumbersexual, of the Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall on his photogenic smallholding, of TV chefs proving their authenticity by executing lambs live on camera. “It’s the natural order, people have always eaten meat,” says the straw man. This aspect of the meat conversation is bullshit: people have always been murderers, rapists and genocidal despoilers, but that doesn’t make it ok. And since it’s increasingly obvious not just that we don’t need to but that we mustn’t indulge in this killing, the last thing we should be doing is fetishizing it, allowing it to seem naughty but nice, or even (gawd help us) sexy.

As a final mention, just because I think it’s worth saying, animal issues are not isolated from other liberationist movements. As Adams points out, violence inflicted on animals is violence that will, in some form, be visited on oppressed humans; it belongs to the same paradigm of objectification and entitlement. First they came for the pigs, but I was not a pig so I said nothing. Then they came for me ...

Holla atcho Proles

Look at Jonathan Meades. He is the coolest person in the world. Why doesn't everybody dress like that?

In a rare moment not spent reading the Mail Online or re-watching my favourite film, Blades of Glory, I i-playered his latest documentary, The Joy of Essex. It ended with a brilliant if slightly jingoistic tribute to 'The People's Essex', which he presented as a sort of surreal architectural lost-property bin that shits all over stylistic uniformity and where 'DIY resourcefulness and bricolage were employed in the service of a better life'. He also expressed plenty of scorn for the people who don't like it, including 'bien-pensant environmentalists of all shades'. It made me think of a fallacy that I quite often encounter in people who care about other people, one which puts the claims of social equality and those of the environment ('Nature, whatever that is,' as Meades says) and animals in competition with each other. There's an idea that animal rights or the preservation of rural areas are a distraction from more pressing concerns.

There's something in this - environmentalism, vegetarianism, organic food-fancying etc, are the sorts of issues that the bleeding-heart bourgeois have the luxury to get puffed up about, like Zac Goldsmith, or celebrity tub-of-guts Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The stable feature of the neo-conservative green movement is its blatant hypocrisy: remember the economic fat-times, and the whole vote-blue-to-go-green thing? David Cameron on a bicycle with his shoes being driven behind him? That didn't last long. Even the ones who believe their own beliefs don't even remotely practise what they preach - I refer you to Prince Charles, who I will not even bother to insult here.

These clowns use the green thing to sell us stuff, or reinforce their feudal sense of privilege, or distract from the cartoonish evil of their governments, but we shouldn't let their corruption taint the  causes that they use to conceal it. Of course it is no good sentimentalising nature, but even the most realistic among us shouldn't be ashamed to admit things that are not man-ufactured (oh snap, what a pun!), things like trees and animals, are not only pretty good mechanisms for running a planet, but are also worth protection and love and respect. If it matters that people are comfortable and are spared suffering, with or without the balm of some imposed teleology - Marxist, religious, whatever - then surely it follows that other life forms matter too?

By all means be hard-nosed, pragmatic and anti-nostalgic when thinking about Mother Nature - she doesn't love you, she doesn't stand for comfort and all she ever intended for any of us is an un-palliated death. But any politics that places an intrinsic value on human happiness ought to question the grounds on which it separates this Good from the wellbeing of other animals, and the places where they live.

A New Hugh

I don't know whether to feel annoyed or vindicated. Presumably prompted entirely by my cartoon of him looking like a pig when eating pigs, then looking like a fish when eating fish, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall appeared in  yesterday's Guardian dressed as a cabbage, to announce that these days he is almost completely vegetarian.

Since you are obviously reading this, Hugh, congratulations. Your article finally acknowledges that  "we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm." He (I think I can drop the vocative now) still believes in "being a selective omnivore", which seems to me pointless dallying when he's already admitted that meat eating is cruel  and environmentally damaging, but I'm ready to call a truce. I'm just glad that I didn't completely miss the opportunity to roundly insult him before he went public with his "small revolution."

It looks like my years of passionately loathing this particular man are over, but nevertheless I am pretty glad. His unexpected conversion from the church of bacon is a single step in a slow but inexorable movement away from meat. It may be that his aubergine and green bean curry looks like dog-sick with grass in it, but I am the last person to discourage anyone from eating it.

Fish Fight: a bit of a cop-out.

Hugh's Fish Fight: The Battle Continues surprised me with Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's transformation from foodie Etonian pig-in-a-wig to smiley-but-slightly-drawn campaigner for marine conservation.

In a nutshell, Hugh is succesfully drumming up interest in reforming the EU's Common Fisheries Policy. As it stands, the CFP's quota-based system of controlling how many and what kind of fish a fisher can legally bring in to land results in a lot of fish, dead or half-dead, being chucked back into the sea after having been caught. A hideous waste of life, or, as Hugh puts it, of 'lovely edible fish.'

My impression throughout the programme was that Mr F-W is less concerned by the serious ecological consequences of over-fishing (which is destroying habitats, destabilizing and contaminating eco-systems and endangering species) than by the idea that some of the plundered sea-creatures will fail to end up on his plate. Hugh's attitude to most living creatures is a meal-minded form of compassion which is alright in its way, but falls short of a real respect for life (eating a pig is not respecting it, Hugh) and of realistic sustainability: you cannot feed the world from a high-minded smallholding, nor does Fish Fight strike at the heart of the overfishing problem.

Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki has expressed support for Hugh's anti-wasting campaign; she has also said, 'We are not going to fish less because of this ban on discarding.' That is good news for fishermen but does not acknowledge the fact that we're going to have to fish less - a lot less - given that the world is predicted to run out of wild-caught seafood by 2048.

Fish Fight highlights an important issue and has achieved some good things: it was a driving force behind the reformation of the CFP, the new version of which should be put into action from 2013. Nevertheless, it never properly acknowledged the importance of not eating fish, and it has been shown that while it has boosted the sales of 'unpopular' fish it has not dented the overconsumption of endangered ones.

Besides, anything touched by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is bound to carry the taint of food-snobbery: that smug whinging over having to be seen holding a Tesco bag; that cringing conversation with fellow organic-fetishist Prince Charles where Charles was appalled to learn that cod is still the public's favourite fish: "They can't get off it!" Shame on you, you nation of plebby cod-heads! Haven't you heard of Hugh's Mackerel Mission?

The fact is that producing meat  and fish ethically, sustainably, cheaply and plentifully isn't an option. Not until they start selling stem-cell meat, that is. But I can guarantee that the organic brigade will be out waving their pitchforks at the first mention of that.