Get to work! New non-fiction books: Meat – praised in the past, banned from sale in the future?

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A chicken flying over a landscape with a fork and a knife in its back, a pig with cutlery strolling past a tree with ham and sausages: these drawings from Globe in the Land of Cockaigns fascinated me immensely as a child. Later I saw a motif in color in the museum: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s (1525–1569) painting “The Land of Cocktails” – again a running pig, this time a piece cut from the back, but not a drop of blood. And there is neither an apple nor a potato anywhere.

“Meat and potatoes were at opposite ends of the health spectrum,” writes German cultural scientist Laura-Elena Keck (37) in her recently published dissertation on meat consumption in Germany at the end of the 19th century. With the advent of industrial slaughterhouses, consumption has increased dramatically and animal products have become considered a “superfood” and source of protein. Keck: “Around 1900, the potato was a symbol of a poverty-related and physiologically unsustainable diet.”

While Keck conducts a thorough scientific analysis of the past, Joël Luc Cachelin (41) embarks on a playful, equally scientific journey into a future where industrial meat consumption is coming to an end. “Veganomics” is the title of a recently published book by a Bernese business economist. The self-proclaimed futurist is interested in change and repeatedly travels through time on the website Wissensfabrik.ch, about which he then publishes books such as Culture 2040.

Now we go to 2045 for a convention in Carnivoria, the island of meat eaters. This is what is left of Europe after the “perfect storm” – next to the Vegania archipelago, where the vegan revolution has prevailed in four variants: on Chlorella, people are completely dedicated to plants; High-tech islands rely on new technologies; Tenebrio replaces raw materials from cows and chickens with insects, mussels and jellyfish; and people rely on the circular economy – nothing is burned.

“My name is Joël and I will be your traveling companion during the conference,” writes Cachelin. Despite the artistic approach, the book is extremely rich in facts – the economist, who has a doctorate, repeatedly supports his theses with stark figures. But unlike specialist books on this topic, “moralizing in tone (…), objective, strict and gloomy,” Cachelin does not want to scare people away, but rather to stimulate thought.

Source: Blick