Can eating meat ever be ethical?

Meat has been so cheap for so long that it became easy to forget exactly how it is produced. However, various food scandals, including the horse-meat controversy and, most recently, the marketing by Tesco of a range of meats, labelled with fictional farms to convince us it was somehow from a more wholesome source, has made many people think twice about what they are eating.

The reality is pretty grim.  At one end of the spectrum, factory farms keep tightly packed animals indoors, feeding them grains to fatten them up quickly, before slaughtering them on huge production lines. This method of production accounts for a staggering 70 per cent of the 75 billion animals farmed worldwide each year.