why is battle for middle earth so expensive

In Britain a November 2007 survey by the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs showed two per cent to be vegan, three per cent vegetarian and a further five per cent restricting themselves to fish or chicken. On the other hand, many friends who once seemed just as committed have reverted to eating meat, while in society as a whole vegetarians and vegans remain a small minority. When I first joined in 1984 I was profoundly shocked to find I was the lone vegetarian. Less surprisingly, the New Internationalist co-operative also now splits down the middle. Extraordinarily, given the shocked disbelief when I first made my stand all those years ago, my extended family now splits pretty much down the middle (turkey-eaters were actually a minority last Christmas). Friends and family already know where I am coming from. Parenthood tends to focus you inward more, and to put you less in the paths of strangers to whom an ‘abnormal’ diet would need explaining. I had expected at least one of them to experiment during adolescence but instead they still perceive eating meat as both distasteful and unnatural. I have retained my convictions and my diet and have raised children for whom vegetarianism seems to be a fundamental part of their identity. In more recent years, whether because I have become more mellow (or more cowardly) with age, I have rarely ended up in such arguments. I saw eschewing meat as ‘a conscientious objection to a system with waste at one end and starvation at the other’. However, if I chose the ground on which to do battle, I tended to talk about the misuse of food resources in a world where people still went hungry – the enormous amounts of grain and pulses fed to cattle to produce a much smaller amount of beef. There was also my abhorrence of the treatment of animals in factory farming. But those rarely cut any ice with committed meat-eaters. There were reasons of dietary health – avoiding fat and cholesterol – and distaste for the idea of feeding on the flesh of another sentient being. There were so many reasons to be vegetarian that I felt (and still feel) that the burden of justification should be turned around – not ‘why are you vegetarian?’ but rather ‘why on earth do you eat meat?’ When I first became a vegetarian 30 years ago I used to find myself in passionate discussions about food issues all the time.

Why is battle for middle earth so expensive