All right, so what actually does go into the meal fed to Irish cattle? Even presuming that Irish-made meal is 100 per cent virtuous - a presumption which not even Larry Goodman being questioned by a backward infant would have the brass neck to suggest - what do we know of the imported pellet-meal which is fed to our beasts of the field? Is it composed of congealed liquid detritus from a slaughterhouse floor, perhaps mixed with sawdust, eyelashes and ground teeth from other unknown sources?
Moreover, aren't the delectable titbits which your average livestock gets for breakfast, lunch and tea not already available in imported and ready-prepared convenience foods on the counters of our supermarket? Did the chicken in the tikka masala not grow prematurely large from eating the scrapings of athletes' foot found in a Turkish wrestler's changing room? Is the beef in the stroganoff not cut from an ancient, tumour-ridden bullock which fed off scrumptious human faeces leaking from a toilet in Bombay?
Turkey escalopes
Was the pig from which those delicious-looking ribs were cut not nourished on recycled Spanish dog brain? Was this turkey for this escalope not fed on pellets made from the scum which floats to the top when the liquid sweepings of a charnel house are boiled up and then dried out and turned into pellets in lovely downtown Chernobyl?
It's more than possible. We know now that French beefcattle have been fattened on human sewage: and we already knew that we have been nourishing our domesticated animals - and therefore by extension ourselves - fishbrains and pigdung and eyelids and ground colons and henpoo and diseased lungs and of course brains which have been recycled into the foodchain of vegetarian animals.
So what other exquisite delights within the food industry await disclosure?
Yet there's a contradiction at the heart of the argument of most of those who condemn the use of such materials to feed animals.
The entire thrust of the green movement over the past two decades has been to applaud the recycling of waste. Are food manufacturers not behaving with impeccable ecological instinct by converting unusable bits of dead animals into living animals? And if animal waste is not converted into animal or grass, via slurry, and then animal, what will happen to it?
Right across Benelux, you can smell something. Animal sewage. This a small area with a large population: it can't dispose of the waste generated in feeding its peoples. Any more dung and its grasslands would check into the Betty Ford Clinic. The Benelux watercourses, awash with sewage 24 hours a day, became Clinic patients long ago. One of them even became Elizabeth Taylor's eighth husband.
Friend eats friend
So isn't it sensible for animals to eat the waste, and then for humans to eat the animals, rather as in the cycle celebrated in "Ilkley Moor Bar T'at", in which the hatless man who dies of cold will be eaten by worms, the worms by hens, the hens by his friends: thus friend eats friend at three removes? It costs £10 to dispose of the waste a single pig produces in its lifetime - provided you've got somewhere to put it. In the Low Countries, one of the best places to put animal dung is in the mouths of other animals.
So what way is there out of this conundrum? To go green would mean to go hungry; the greenest societies in the world are the ones for whom famine is their most unswervingly loyal companion. Cyclically cropped fields not renewed by selective artificial fertiliser will soon become dustbowls. But feeding us creates mountains of unwanted offal; and as we recycle animal products through the alimentary canals of vegetarian livestock which we then ourselves consume, we might well be trembling on the brink of a vast public health catastrophe. BSE was a warning shot across the bows; the next shot might be straight into the living-quarters.
We adore meat
Merely for the EU to ban animal sludge being fed to other animals doesn't end the problem. We could all, I suppose, become Buddhist monks and nibble tofu, but let us be frank. Few of us look our best in orange, and gongs at midnight can be a fearful bore. And we adore meat. If given the choice between compulsory public nudity or compulsory vegetarianism, the citizens of Carrickmacross would have their knickers on their heads and be rushing into their butchers' shops lassooing black puddings before you could yodel soya bean curd. That's the way we are; it's the way we always have been. The society which prefers eschewing meat to chewing it, unsupported by religious proscription, hasn't yet been invented.
So it always comes back to hooves and horns, feather and fin; an overpopulated but relatively small Europe not merely generating vast amounts of edible flesh for local consumption but also buying animal protein from all over the world, and then having to get rid of the cadaverous waste and the ice-covered Pyrenees of manure produced by its own livestock.
So where can we put it? Where can we put all this stinking, rotting, effluential continental mountain-range of filth? Answers on one side of the paper. You have half an hour, beginning . . . NOW.