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‘Where meat was once bound to the moral act of killing, it is now bound only to the market.’
While meat has played a vital part in the development of the human brain, according to the US author Harold McGee, our dependence on it could also be our undoing. The rise of meat production and consumption is proving environmentally disastrous, contributing heavily to water shortages, pollution and global warming. Knotty Objects: Steak is a brief plunge into the moral complexities of eating meat in the 21st century and some creative solutions that could help us overcome our inborn desire to eat animals.
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
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Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes
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Physics
Groundbreaking visualisations show how the world of the nucleus gives rise to our own
10 minutes