Switch to soya

Published on 19/07/2012 00:00

The Rev Sally Foster-
Fulton is quite right to be concerned about food being a “gift from God” and how “we have to treat it with more respect” 
(Letters, 14 July). But if she is 
genuinely worried about the morality of food production, it is difficult to see why she is buying cows’ milk in the first place.

The production of milk cannot proceed without the slaughter of all male dairy calves within a year of birth (male calves don’t produce milk).

Dairy calves, like all other livestock, are very wasteful components of the food chain (they use 90 per cent of the food they eat just keeping themselves warm and other metabolic activity). Also, livestock contributes 
almost 20 per cent of all the greenhouse gas emissions which cause global warming.

Sally could obtain all the 
calcium and protein she gets from cows’ milk by switching to soya milk, without the immoral and cruel killing of calves, the inefficient use of farmland and the aggravation of global warming which dairy farming necessitates.

A litre of soya milk can be bought for 59p – a saving on 
Sally’s 50p per pint of 49 per cent.

The respect which Sally demands for food must surely extend to methods of food production and to the welfare of animals; what kind of just God would look favourably on the gratuitous killing of male dairy calves to support a product which is well past its sell-by date?

James Boyle

Glazert Road

Dunlop, East Ayrshire