Accidental Gods

Stop eating Chicken! - The future of food with Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox

25 Jan 2023

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Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert with The Soil Association. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian’s International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association.The Meat Paradox is his first book, and goodness, it's been a world changer - since its hardback publication, Rob's become a global superstar: invited to speak to groups across the spectrum of industry and culture about the nature of our relationship with the food that we eat. We left our first conversation each feeling that we'd just begun to scrape the surface of possibility and it would be good to talk again. We had scheduled another podcast for later this year, but I saw that the book had just come out in paperback and that coincided with our having a total technological crash in this week's interview. So Rob really kindly agreed to fill in at super short notice so that we could talk more about life and death and food and the nature of the meta-crisis. There's so much to this that really cuts to the core of who we are and where we're heading as a species, and we ended - again, feeling that there was more to say. But in the meantime, we explored the nature of the food system, the concept of precision fermentation, what makes 'whole' foods and how we might feed the world without industrial agriculture. Rob gave his one big suggestion for moving things forward - stop eating chicken. At the end, we opened another huge topic and began to explore the nature of death, and who our fear of the unknown leads us to denial of the meta-crisis and, in the end, denial of death itself. So we'll be back when Rob's next book comes out, but in the meantime, here are more thoughts on the social, political, practical and moral aspects of how we take in the building blocks of life. Radio 4 Book of the Week https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hf27Rob's website https://rob-percival.com/about/The Meat Paradox in paperback https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9780349144573Rob on Twitter https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_Previous Episode https://accidentalgods.life/the-meat-paradox/Green Alliance https://green-alliance.org.uk/GA Report https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/shaping-uk-land-use-priorities-for-food-nature-and-climate/Bionutrient Food Association https://www.bionutrient.org/Global Governance Futures podcast that refers to how we cope (or don't) with the inevitability of our own mortality https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-governance-futures-imperfect-utopias-or-bust/id1548522280?i=1000590656384

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Accidental Gods

Stop eating Chicken! - The future of food with Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from Accidental Gods

What ought we be? Hope, despair and the resilience of life with Professor David Farrier

Seeing Round Corners: Upgrading Democracy with Suzette Masters and Dr John Izzo

December Solstice meditation - suitable northern and southern hemispheres

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