UK, April 16, 2012 (by Mark Bittman): Colin Spencer, whom Germaine Greer once called “the greatest living food writer,” turns 80 next year, and shows no signs of slowing down. “What I tried to do right from the beginning,” he told me, “was to make my food column political.” With that, he meant taking a stance not on matters of the government, but on food and the people who enjoy it.
Cooking, as it happens, took up almost none of our conversation, which quickly turned to “heretical” eating — which is how Spencer referred to vegetarianism in his history “The Heretic’s Feast.” Although the right to eat in any style one likes has not been a much-discussed issue, at least in huge public forums, vegetarians — along with people whose eating styles differed from the norm for religious reasons — were long treated as a minority in the West, especially, notes Spencer, since the advent of Christianity.
But it is not just about ethics or animal rights, he reiterated, it’s also the cost to the environment and indeed humanity. There is the issue of sustainability, he reminded me (by some estimates, it takes 30 times as much land to raise animals industrially as it does to raise vegetables), compounded by the fact that we’ll soon need to grow more food for ourselves rather than feeding it to animals. And, he said, “The thought of the developing world and malnutrition and hunger — it’s a hard call that we use that food for animals. Certainly, by the end of this century, industrial livestock will be a thing of the past.”