Call me what you want - I'll keep telling the truth about livestock farming

Everything that makes campaigning against fossil fuels difficult is 10 times harder when it comes to opposing livestock farming.

- George Monbiot

Here you will find a similar suite of science denial, misinformation and greenwashing. But in this case, it's accompanied by a toxic combination of identity politics, nostalgia, machismo and the demonisation of alternatives. If you engage with this issue, you don't just need a thick skin; you need the skin of a glyptodon.

You will be vilified daily as a "soyboy", a "hater of farmers" and a dictator who would force everyone to eat insects. You will be charged with undermining western civilisation, destroying its masculinity and threatening its health. You will be denounced as an enemy of Indigenous people, though generally not by Indigenous people themselves, for many of whom livestock farming is and has long been by far the greatest cause of landgrabbing, displacement and the destruction of homes.

You will find yourself up against those who promote paleo diets (with or without added anabolic steroids), "agrarian localists" pushing impossible dreams of feeding 21st-century populations with medieval production systems, and culinary conservatism, which ranges, in different forms, from Donald Trump to MasterChef. You will find yourself fighting not only a very modern and peculiarly vicious demagoguery, but also a very old and deep-rooted romanticism, which still portrays the pastoral life much as the Greek poets and the Old Testament prophets did. There's a powerful, de facto alliance between the two.