Rob Percival Interviewed by Henry Mance

Writer, campaigner, and food policy expert Rob Percival looks at how our changing attitudes to meat and how they will be shaped by a range of forces and by our emotions.

Percival says new technologies, globalisation, geopolitical tensions, changing cultural preferences, pandemics, climate change, and ecological crisis will all affect our attitude to eating meat. However, it will also be shaped by our emotions. Whether we should eat animals was once a question for moral philosophers and an ethically minded majority, says Percival. Now it is being posed on restaurant menus, on supermarket shelves and on mainstream television.

Percival works as head of food policy for the Soil Association. His writing and commentary on food and farming has appeared in the national press and on television. Here he talks to Henry Mance, chief features writer, Financial Times.