This text is taken from the Courrier de la Planète of 1er November 2022. To subscribe, click here.
It is now common knowledge that factory farming has disastrous consequences for the environment and animal welfare. Dominic Lamontagne and Jean-François Dubé agree on this and both propose important changes in the way we produce food. But their agreement stops not far from this observation. It leaves room for a fertile debate which materializes in the book goat and cabbagepublished Tuesday by Écosociété editions, on the occasion of World Veganism Day.
Dominic Lamontagne, field mouse, author of the books The impossible farm and The artisan farmer, pleads for a peasant agriculture made up of small diversified farms using the most “natural” techniques possible and feeding humans who are nearby. He is convinced that his chickens, goats and pigs live a good life and that they do not suffer when he slaughters them quickly on pasture.
For Jean-François Dubé, city rat, vegan activist who has done a master’s degree on the links between the ideas of the animalist and environmentalist movements, this practice is horrifying. “If I take good care of my dog, that’s not a good enough argument to slit his throat and eat him, when I can go get myself some tofu and continue to take good care of it,” he illustrates. he.
Farm animals are endowed with sentience, that is, they are conscious and have the capacity to suffer. It would therefore be immoral, from Mr. Dubé’s point of view, to take their lives for “our simple gustatory pleasure”, whereas it is possible, in our current Western society, to avoid consuming them while maintaining a healthy. The vegan philosophy also rejects the exploitation of animals for their milk or their eggs, since they are prey to various practices deemed harmful to them. It is for these reasons that the antispeciesist movement does not spare, in its denunciation campaigns, local farmers like Mr. Lamontagne.
At the invitation of the farmer, exasperated by this vegan sling, the activist accepted that they exchange their arguments in writing, which gives a total of 22 passionate and provocative letters. Which of these two models would be the most enticing for the environment, health and ethics?
Goat milk vs oat milk
It is risky to summarize 275 pages, but let’s try to give you an overview all the same. Mr. Lamontagne believes that the planet will crash into a wall if humans continue to eat industrially. He pleads for a massive reconnection of citizens to the land. He has therefore chosen the path of food self-sufficiency by implementing agricultural methods that he considers to be the most responsible and the most sustainable for the ecosystems.
“I realize that most of the vegetable protein that you have at the grocery store, I can’t do that. Enriched oat juice, to me, is science fiction,” reports the farmer.
Mr. Lamontagne deplores the fact that plant proteins come largely from monocultures, such as soy. He also judges that a purely vegan local agriculture, using no animal input, whether for example as fertilizer or as a labor force, has never existed in the long term in human history.
For his part, Mr. Dubé recognizes that vegan agricultural practices have yet to be innovated and that they require, at least for the moment, a certain degree of industrialization and globalization. However, he cultivates the idea of an imperative green shift to fight against climate change. According to a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), titled Climate change and land masses, studies indicate that the adoption of a complete vegan diet by all of humanity would technically have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions significantly by 2050, in particular by allowing release and reforest part of the land. Also according to this report, reductions in global consumption of animal products could also limit GHG emissions to a lesser extent.
At the end of this correspondence, the two protagonists remain like dog and cat, accusing the other’s project of being unrealistic. Their well-established positions, cleared and documented, will however feed the reflection of the open and curious reader, who could be pushed to award them points in turn. They sow many good questions, some of whose answers have yet to be harvested.