Rob Percival - The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat

Rob Percival

The Meat Paradox

Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat

In all the best ways, The Meat Paradox complicates the ongoing debate between omnivores and herbivores. Its a funny, reverent reminder that meat has always been central to our story as a society.

Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

THE MEAT PARADOX

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2022 by Rob Percival

First Pegasus Books cloth edition March 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-873-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-874-9

Jacket design by Derek Thornton / Notch Design

Jacket imagery courtesty of Shutterstock

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

INTRODUCTION

T he artefact was unearthed in the Swabian Jura, at the rear of a cavern carved into a limestone rib. Geologist Otto Vlzing made the discovery. He was leading an excavation financed by the German military, and time was pressing. Europe was poised for the Second World War, and it was the final day of the dig. In the hindquarters of the cave, folded through archaic sediment, Vlzing came upon a fragment of engraved ivory. There were hundreds of them. By dim torchlight, the geologist made his excavation.

It would take many years for the fragments to be reassembled. Archaeologists returned to the cave in the 1980s, and further pieces of the puzzle were exhumed. Vlzing had unearthed a statuette, a hybrid figure, upward standing and humanoid in form, but with the head of an animal. It was only in 2013, following the discovery of more than a thousand additional fragments, and after years of painstaking reassembly, that the restoration was declared complete. The figure was named der Lwenmensch, the Lion Man. The statuette had been carved from a mammoths tusk 40,000 years ago.

As scholars pored over the figure, archaeologist and craftsman Wulf Hein set out to create a replica using the tools and materials available in the Upper Palaeolithic. Hein sat among hammerstones and rabbit trails and chipped away at his laborious task. The Lion Man, he says, would have taken more than four hundred hours to sculpt the equivalent of working for six weeks, seven days a week, eight hours a day. This was a phenomenal length of time for our ancestors to have spent on a task that had no obvious pragmatic value. Europe was a windswept steppe. Our forebears were nomadic hunters who tracked reindeer across its expanse, armed with wooden spears. They dressed in animal skins. They burned bones for warmth. Those four hundred hours could have been spent in more practical pursuits: hunting, foraging, planning, parenting, cooking, sewing, tending to the camp. The Lion Man did not aid their survival directly, but he was of evident importance to the community.

You scratch and scratch, and days and days of working and working, and blisters on my hands, my finger was aching, Hein recalls. A real artist made this. He was set free by his community to do this piece of artwork. If you do this, you cant go hunting, you cant go fishing, you work all day on it.

Who or what was the Lion Man? The statuette stands thirty-one centimetres tall, the head of a cave lion perched atop human shoulders. The eyes gaze and the ears are alert. The arms, which rest close to the body, have been enhanced with the paws of a feline, while the lower body belongs to a human. The figure appears to be standing on his toes, or perhaps he is floating. Was this a mythical monster, a hunter in disguise, a shaman draped in an animal hide? What did the Lion Man mean to the sculptors community? Why did the artist choose to depict this, of all possible images?

The cave provides some clues. The mouth faces north, rendering the site cold and unsuitable for habitation. No one lived here, but they might have visited on ceremonial occasions. The Lion Man had been stashed forty metres from the cave entrance, along with a handful of perforated fox teeth and a cache of reindeer antlers. Some scholars have suggested that these might have formed part of a decorative garment. Perhaps a group came here to perform a ritual. Someone entered the cave, their dressing room, to retrieve the Lion Man and don their ceremonial attire. Analysis of the carving shows that the surface has been rubbed and smoothed, as though the statuette was passed from person to person, from hand to hand, to be held and beheld. We imagine a fire at the mouth of the cave, a group before the flames. A story is told, a tale in which the Lion Man features. The statuette is passed as the story is spoken.

The Lion Man is the oldest figurative sculpture in the archaeological record, among the very first works of art. He is also the oldest known representation of a supernatural being we do not know who or what the Lion Man was, but we know that this human-feline anatomy is not found in the natural world, only in the meeting of that world with the human imagination. The statuette provides the earliest evidence that our ancestors had entered a psychologically modern relationship with the animals around them. They were entangled in a web of ecological relationships with these animals, but they were also entangled in a web of cultural narrative; they told stories that helped them understand their place in the world in relation to other species.

I sought out the Lion Man tracking him down in the Natural History Museum in London because I was searching for evidence of this archaic storytelling. I wanted to know when we first began to tell tales about the animals around us. I wanted to know how our cultural narratives today derive from those earliest accounts. I found the statuette in the corner of the Human Evolution gallery. He was surrounded by hominid skulls and flaked stone tools, primate teeth and fractured jaw bones.

That wasnt the only reason I sought him out. There was another reason I went to the Natural History Museum and found my way through the Human Evolution gallery to the Lion Man.

I had come to pick a fight.

The Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) was perched high on the wall, its talons wrapped around a short branch. Wings bowed. Shoulders hunched. Most vultures are bald an adaptation that prevents their feathers from being matted with blood when they stick their head into a carcass to feed but the Egyptian vulture wears a crown. A white crest atop an egg-yolk face. A haggard old monarch. Beneath the bird there was a sign. Endangered.

There were other birds arranged across the cabinet. Ou, Stellers sea eagle, St Vincent parrot, rufus-necked hornbill, Gurneys pitta. Only a fraction of the Natural History Museums avian collection is on display; its research repository holds close to a million specimens drawn from more than 95 per cent of the worlds bird species. Many are decades or even centuries old, but new birds are donated from time to time and are passed to the museums taxidermist for preparation. Those heading to the research repository will be laid out flat, in preordained posture, their wings tucked to the side, while those destined for the public galleries receive more elaborate treatment, bodies contorted to mimic their living kin. The Egyptian vulture had been suitably contorted. It stood erect but stooped, its hooked beak primed for the kill.