Editor’s Letter – “Where’s the beef?”

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s many of you will have seen, Warwick held the “Festival of Imagination” this past weekend to celebrate its 50th Anniversary.
How we celebrate imagination, it seems, is to hold debates and talks (that don’t at all sound like TEDtalks), cookery demonstrations, and turn Butterworth Hall into some sort of science playground for primary school children.
What I was most happy to see, however, was a piazza full of food stalls. As a vegetarian, there’s usually at least one meat-free stall where I can pick up a decent quinoa and kale mezze with falafel and raw slaw for £7.99.

Yet I was left with very few vegetarian options on my Saturday lunchtime trip. I know what you’re thinking, big surprise, most people like meat.

What struck me, though, was a stall called The Beefer, whose black signage brandished two lethally sharp knives next to the name. To most eyes, there’s nothing wrong with this sign; the knives are in-keeping with the brand’s macho devotion to serving ‘really beefy’ food. Their display even tells us that ‘Beefer don’t do no chicken’ -Lest their masculinity be brought into question, I’m assuming.
Before you flick to the next page, expecting another angry meat-condemning rant, hang on. Whilst I do go on those occasionally, in this article I simply want to provoke a little thought. Don’t you find it strange that a company would use a knife, of all things, to advertise itself?
A knife, symbolising violence, pain and death, is supposed to appeal to members of the public and little kids running around the piazza. Isn’t that a little strange?
It’s like Primark using images of sad, overworked children in its adverts. Causing suffering – which is generally agreed on as a terrible act – isn’t even being hidden.

Isn’t it strange that as a society, we’ve become so used to meat, and where it comes from, that collectively we don’t have any problem with it?

If you haven’t already, watch the YouTube video called ‘Three year old kid explains why he doesn´t want to eat meat’. A little boy is getting his head around the fact that what his mother has served him used to be alive. Doesn’t this little boy represent our most natural human reactions?
His thought processes aren’t tainted by societally accepted norms, which is why he’s so upset at the fact that an animal had to die just for his dinner. This is a basic human instinct, which seems to have been beaten out of us by a culture that tells us eating meat is okay, because everybody does it.
I’ve gone on for long enough now, but take a minute to consider a scenario where everything about western society is the same, except we don’t eat meat and there’s no historical record of us ever doing so. If someone then handed you one of The Beefer’s burgers, wouldn’t you be disgusted about where it had come from?