Ridge followed with an eloquent and enthusiastic discourse on the merits of meat-free dining. ‘There has been a revolution in vegetarian and vegan cooking and eating in the past decade,’ she started. ‘A new generation of cooks are using vegetables, pulses, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices in incredible ways. Gone are the mung beans and bland wholemeal pies that accompanied the whiff of 1970s hippiedom.’ This dislodged some murmured grumbles from the more curmudgeonly in the crowd. ‘In fact,’ she continued, ‘much of the pleasure and excitement in eating today is this new wave of vegetarian and vegan food that follows an ingredient-led locavore agenda. Let me share a dish with you from Europe’s finest vegetarian restaurant, Cafe Paradiso in Cork, Ireland. Its description:feta, pistachio and couscous cakes with sweet and hot pepper jam, citrus greens, coriander yoghurt and spiced chickpeas.’
Days later Ridge trawled through the Twitter feed from the town hall that night. ‘As soon as I mentioned “feta” and “coriander yoghurt” the Twittersphere went off,’ she says. ‘“She has lost the argument!!!” declared one Tweeter. The Tweeters were saying that because I was referring to dairy I wasn’t in fact taking meat off the menu. There is a link between dairy and veal production.’
The Tweeters in the audience were quick with their censure. The mention of dairy in a vegetarian debate was an act of betrayal. Milk comes from cows. Cows need to calve to make milk. Female calves will most likely join the herd. Male calves are killed at around a week of age. That is the inconvenient truth behind the dairy industry.
Hot on Ridge’s heels was Adrian Richardson, a chef known for his love of meat and sausages. He delivered some well-written comic lines with impressive timing. With a more receptive audience, the effort would have been well worth it. Unfortunately, the response was ungenerously flat. ‘A few meat-free days and lots of leafy greens will do wonders for the planet and your health,’ he said, aligning himself with the affirmative. In a clever piece of strategic argument to win over the room he said, ‘If you want to stop factory farming, don’t eat supermarket meat. Go to your local butcher: remember him? I’m sure there are some ladies here who do. As long as death is quick and painless, eating animals is okay.’ He then declared that the proposition that Animals Should Be Off the Menu was ‘ridiculous’. If he had wanted to win the room and not the argument, he couldn’t have done much more to offend the crowd, other than biting the head off a chicken.
With the debating part of the night over, the moderator, Simon Longstaff, turned the microphones to the floor of the town hall and had the audience question the debaters. As this was a debate won on the popular vote and not by adjudicators, the battle had not already been lost and won.
Not comfortable with what looked like a win for the vegetarians, the vegans faced up to Ridge, who, as the last speaker, was standing in defence. A clean-shaven and very erudite young man directed a polite but stinging attack on Ridge. He appeared to be on the non-meat eater side, but went for Ridge’s jugular. ‘Did you know that one of your pin-up chefs is a carnivore?’ he asked, throwing the word ‘carnivore’ down with disdain as if it were synonymous with ‘terrorist’ or ‘paedophile’. ‘Did you know that Yotam Ottolenghi eats meat and is a meat eater,’ he went on, with a note in his voice that made it sound as if he were clasping both sides of a pulpit in his hands. ‘And that Yotam says that he enjoys eating meat?’
Ridge was taken aback. This was an unplanned attack from the flank, coming from what should be considered an ally and unrelated to the point she had made that Ottolenghi’s vegetarian recipes created dishes that were easily as innovative and delicious, or more so, than any meat dish. The same person went on to quiz Ridge and her team, asking if any of them had bought a wool suit or leather shoes recently. Wollen, a self-proclaimed changed man from his former wool-suit-and-leather-shoe-wearing, steak-for-corporate-lunch-eating days, stared the young man down by swearing that the only way he could look himself in the mirror was to know that he wore a vinyl belt. This pleased the crowd and they burst into spontaneous applause.
Next to the microphone was an older but just as clean-shaven man, well dressed in country gentleman chic. Chequered blazer, open neck shirt, denim and R. M. Williams boots. ‘My name is Michael O’Neill,’ he said. ‘And I raise ethical cattle.’ He went on to describe the high level of ethics he adhered to and the attributes of the animals he raised. He turned to address Ridge directly, but he didn’t address her by name. She had published a story about the English White Park rare-breed cattle he and his partner reared on their farm in Central Victoria..
‘The third speaker highlighted a number of dishes,’ said O’Neill, ‘that leading chefs here and internationally all served and held them as a paragon of vegetarianism.’ His words were perfectly chosen and carefully delivered. ‘Over half of these dishes contain dairy products,’ he continued in a very measured but decisive tone. ‘One of the principal arguments for the “yes” team is the cruelty aspect and ethics of meat production. Yet the dairy industry is one of the most unethical industries,’ he said. ‘Dairy products come from milk. For a cow to produce milk the cow has to conceive, and deliver a live birth. What happens in the dairy industry is that progeny is forcefully taken from the mother so the mother can produce obscene amounts of milk. How can they advocate that we eat dishes with dairy products?’ Longstaff pulled up the speaker at this point because of time. The room erupted into an anti-dairy outburst of sustained cheers and applause.
This was the attack that Ridge foresaw but was advised not to broach in her prepared debate. Logically ‘Animals Should Be Off the Menu’ meant that meat, not dairy, was up for debate. The attacks on her argument felt personal. Ridge was a public vegetarian but to those in the room that night had not been vegetarian enough.
Ridge was visibly taken aback and avoided discussing the dairy issue until pressed again by a member of the audience. ‘If we had more time I could have offered you a thousand dairy-free dishes,’ she said. Longstaff asked her, ‘Are you arguing against the dairy industry with the same vehemence as you are arguing against the meat industry?’
Ridge paused. ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘We are.’
This was a confession extracted under duress. It was a sideshow to the main argument. It was the nasty truth about the dairy industry that was used by both vegans and meat growers. Vegans want all animal products off the menu. Meat producers like to denigrate another industry to confuse and obfuscate the moral argument.
Ridge’s team not only won outright, but was able to convince 12.5 per cent of the undecided voters to vote for their cause. They celebrated at a nearby restaurant where animals were definitely off the menu.
THEY SHOOT CALVES, DON’T THEY?
It was dark, cold and still. There was not a star in the moonless sky. A plover cried with its ragged call somewhere further down the hill. You could smell the cows before you heard their heavy breath and snorts. The air was full of the sweet smell of chewed grass and warm breath. Like sniffing the freshest warm milk. It was a familiar scent.
I grew up on a dairy farm and I had never thought of what we did as cruel or unethical. We didn’t kill cows. We just milked them. But the anti-dairy sentiment in the Melbourne Town Hall sparked my interest in examining the dairy industry afresh.
I visited two farms. One a modern dairy farm on the Murray River flats west of Echuca. It was large and at its heart it was a motorised rotary dairy servicing 250 cattle twice a day. The cattle were feeding on irrigated pasture and were being supplemented with silage and hay. They were Holsteins: tall, lanky, bony black-and-white animals, all protruding hips and ribs. Just the frame from which to hang a great big udder capable of producing nearly 50 litres of milk each day.
Dairy cattle are bred to produce calves efficiently and safely. Without a calf, cows do not lactate. Dairy cattle are also bred to produce large quantities of protein-rich milk. Smaller Jersey and Guernsey cows produce less milk but it is much higher in butterfat. Milk protein and butterfat are exportable co
mmodities derived from cow’s milk. Echuca is a dry area and it seemed ironic that farmers spend a fortune irrigating their crops with water while the processors spend a fortune on electricity to separate and dehydrate the milk.
Milk herd cattle are generally artificially inseminated. Pregnant cattle are removed from the herd and placed with other pregnant mothers. At birth, calves spend the first twelve hours to a few days with their mother to drink the all-important, but commercially unsuitable, colostrum. This is the nutrient- and enzyme-rich secretion that is produced by a mammal’s mammary glands after birth. It has a different nutrient composition from the milk that follows. After this, the calves are separated from their mothers.
To separate calves and mothers is distressing for all concerned. The mother and calf bellow for each other for days afterwards. To say that a cow can make a mournful sound is an understatement. When you take her calf away a cow searches for her infant in an imploring voice that has evolved to penetrate forests and pass through valleys. Some mothers will break through fences to get back with their calves. Bonding and motherhood are instincts that breeders can’t eliminate from dairy cattle. Once separated, the mothers are returned to the milking herd, where they are milked twice a day. Our family milked cows during the 1950s to 1980s. We had a small herd of just forty cows. They would be milked for nine to ten months, around 300 days, then were dried off. Most of the ‘girls’, as they were referred to, stayed with us until they were around ten years old. Now the average Australian dairy cow is milked for 400 days and slaughtered when she is three to four years old. In large dairy areas there are specialist ‘chopper cow’ abattoirs specialising in ex-dairy cows. Here cows are slaughtered, and flesh stripped from the bone, boxed, frozen and shipped to the United States, where they will become hamburger mince.
While some breeders have been able to breed cattle without horns, or ‘polled’, most cattle are born with their horns intact. Both male and female cattle have horns. The reason you don’t see dairy cows with horns is because they have their horns removed. A cow with horns won’t fit into the bale when she is being milked. The bale is the trough from which she eats energy-rich food when she is being milked. This is part of the feed regime and part bribe. The horns can be burned off while they are at bud stage. This is when the bone and skin is removed either with a red-hot iron or with a chemical. Fully-grown horns can be removed later with a guillotine-like dehorner that cuts through the live bone. I have seen both processes and it is clearly painful. They bellow, snort, froth at the mouth and their eyes roll around in their heads.
Almost all male calves and three-quarters of the female calves don’t have to worry about getting dehorned. These are the ‘bobby’ calves. It’s a cute name. These are the calves that are surplus to requirement. Only about a quarter of each season’s calves are required to replace their mothers in the milking herd. The rest become bobby calves. In almost all cases, male calves are consigned to bobby-calf status, as artificial insemination is the industry norm. Bobby calves are held on the farm for a minimum of five days. During this period they can be fed the colostrum or powdered milk replacement. After this they can legally be shipped to market. Some of the calves will be raised to become veal or rose veal, adding a few more months to their life. (Some of the young females will find themselves on a plane or boat to establish herds in China.) The rest are slaughtered as young calves. Their pelts are made into leather goods, their bones ground for fertiliser, their tissues harvested for the pharmaceutical industry. The trip to the abattoir for a calf can be a long one. At this stage of life they haven’t learned herd behaviours, so rounding up calves is metaphorically similar to rounding up cats. It’s frustrating for all concerned. And stressful for the calves. The bobby calves are penned overnight and not given a drink before the next morning. Tired, stressed, thirsty and hungry the next morning, the bobby claves are given a bolt gun to the head, then everything turns to black.
Although much larger than the farm I grew up on, it was a pretty similar operation and work practices had not changed much in the last forty years. The narrative our family and our community of dairy farmers had developed to describe what we did for a living was a gentle lie. It was a cover story, a false narrative, to blur and obfuscate the reality of the misery we were causing in the name of earning a living. We even invented a pretty and inoffensive little word: ‘bobby’. It’s easier to live with than ‘killing baby calves’.
I love dairy. I like drinking milk (unhomogenised, at the very least) and I enjoy cheese. I will forgo dessert in a restaurant for a white mould, washed rind and blue cheese. Which is why I was trudging around this other dairy farm, in the green hills of Gippsland’s Strzelecki Ranges, one pitch-black winter’s morning.
Walking next to me was a dairy farmer with a different way of raising her herd and a different business model. Vicki Jones is a quietly spoken woman. I could barely make out her outline in the dark but she seemed petite for someone who spends her life with such large and heavy animals. Her voice has a lovely high yet mellifluous quality. If she sang, I imagine she would sound like Minnie Riperton.
On Jones’s farm, Mountain View Organic Dairy, south of Warragul in West Gippsland, a completely new model of dairy farming has been created, not from a period of researching and reflecting on existing food-political business practices, but from an existential crisis. To her it was a spiritual dilemma.
‘Killing calves? It’s like killing children,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s psychotic.’ Jones walked quietly through the barely visible herd. They were lying down in the shelter of a row of pine trees and you could hear them breathe and their teeth grind through wads of cud. They lazily got up. Backs legs first. Front legs kneeling. Front legs straightening. These cows were not as big as the ones on the other farm near Echuca. They were smaller, fatter and somehow more amiable. ‘To have an industry that creates live animals as a waste stream is ridiculous,’ she says as she slowly wakes her herd. ‘It is insane.’
With a glow welling on the eastern horizon, silhouettes of the cows could be made out against the pre-dawn sky. Between the legs of some of the cows appeared another finer set of legs. Calves. Jones does not systematically remove calves from their mothers. Some she lets stay to be raised by their mothers.
In a normal economic dairy model, calves are a liability. They consume the product one is making with little return. It would be like a lettuce grower keeping caterpillars or a forester burning a quarter of his wood. Running a dairy farm is a costly business. The power bill to run the machinery and to bring thousands of litres of milk down from the body temperature of 38 degrees Celsius to a safe temperature of under 4 degrees Celsius costs Jones $4000 a quarter. In larger dairies you can triple this figure. On top of this there are feed, veterinary medicine, fencing, fertiliser, labour, diesel and other costs and outgoings. At the time of writing, the average farmgate price for a litre of milk was 50 cents. Farmgate price is the gross price the processor gives the farmer. From this, he or she has to pay wages, electricity, gas, rates and bank loan interest, and buy feed, cleaning chemicals, farm machinery, fertiliser, fencing wire and other sundry items before they bank whatever, if any, is left over. ‘A dairy farming friend of ours is losing $100 000 for every million litres of milk he produces,’ said Jones as we head towards the dairy, a blob of green fluorescent light on the hill ahead. ‘The only reason why we have a dairy industry in Australia is that families are borrowing money against their farms and working incredibly long hours with little return.’ She paused. ‘It is a form of indentured labour. The dairy industry in Australia is broken and in its present form is not sustainable.’
In 2007, in the midst of the millennial drought, Jones found herself bleeding money. The price of fuel had gone up and despite her living in one of the most fertile places with some of the best rainfall in Australia, she had to buy in food for her animals. She was angry and wanted change. She contacted the CEO of Dairy Australia, asking that a concerted effort be made to raise the pric
e of milk. He responded, ‘You think it fair that people should pay more for their milk?’ Jones was flabbergasted. “If people want dairy farmers to be around in the future,” I thought, “Of course it is fair people pay more for their milk”.’ Jones’s soft voice trembled a little.
She and her husband worked out a different model of how to make a living from a dairy herd. They realised that the bobby calves are actually an asset. They could be raised for beef. Older cows in their herd and cows that presented with ongoing mastitis (an udder condition that renders their milk unsuitable for further processing) were sent to other pastures to raise the bobby calves. Those mothers whose maternal instincts were very well developed were allowed to keep their calves until they were weaned. ‘Instead of seeing animals as either being productive or nonproductive we saw value in every animal in every stage of its life,’ said Jones. ‘It’s about empathy. I am not a person who can commit an animal to a life of misery,’ she said matter-of-factly.
Jones doesn’t remove her animals’ horns. For her it is simply too cruel. She is slowly breeding horns out of her herd by crossing her cows with a bull, using a breed called Aussie Reds, itself a mix of Scandinavian old-fashioned milk breeds and modern genetics. For Jones, her milk production is not about volume but quality and taste. She does not sell her milk to a large factory or dairy cooperative. Instead she has a client base of around 300 families to whom she sells dairy products and meat. Her customers want milk that is full flavoured with plenty of fat. Fat in milk in a carton has been standardised to 3.8 per cent. Milk comes out of most good cows, depending on the season, at 4 per cent. Jones’s milk is 5 per cent butterfat.
Dairy cows are not known for their flesh. While meat-breed cows produce quite white fat, dairy cows tend to produce yellow to deep yellow fat, something modern meat eaters have been steered away from by the meat-industry marketing people. The flesh from dairy cows can also be considerably more flavoursome. Jones has been able to educate her customers that yellow fat is good and that the full flavour is desirable. Her animal husbandry is of a very high standard. Her cows spend eleven productive years in the herd before being moved off into the nursery herd. Their ‘cell count’, or ‘plate count’, is low. This refers to the number of different organisms and quantity thereof that is found in the milk. The lower the plate count the healthier the milk. It’s an indication of not only the health of the udder but of the cow herself.
My Year Without Meat Page 13