In all the best ways, The Meat Paradox complicates the ongoing debate between omnivores and herbivores. It’s a funny, reverent reminder that meat has always been central to our story as a society.

How can humans simultaneously love animals and love to eat them? In The Meat Paradox, Rob Percival takes on this question, combining great story telling with the latest findings in fields ranging from psychology and neuroscience to anthropology and moral philosophy. Whether you are an omnivore, a vegetarian, or a vegan, this book is a page turner that will spin your head around.

Passionate, sophisticated, urgently important and compulsively readable. Percival’s enquiry dives into deep time, into other dimensions and ranges across the continents in a search not only for our relationship with meat, but our relationship with ourselves. It’s an exhilarating and salutary record of our stuttering conversation with the non-human world, and a robust interrogation of our whole way of being.

The Meat Paradox is utterly brilliant, in the range of its erudition, the power of its argument, its revelatory profundity and its compelling storytelling.

A fearless exploration of the question that has shaped human evolution and could determine whether we survive as a species into the future: Should we eat animals? Making an important contribution to the debate that goes deep into the question of whether we humans evolved to be omnivores, The Meat Paradox asks whether we should continue eating meat in the face of the climate catastrophe. Percival takes a detailed look at the history and the arguments and ultimately answers the question of how to be an ‘ethical omnivore’.

An even-handed and nuanced exploration of our deeply complex moral relationships with other animals, The Meat Paradox is a compelling journey into the evolutionary past, potential future, and conflicted psyche of the planet’s most dangerous and empathetic predator: us.

In searching for the answers to a complicated question, this beautifully written book will take you to some unexpected and fascinating places. Written by someone who clearly cares deeply about animals and our planet, it provides much needed nuance in an often polarized debate.

Brilliantly provocative, original, electrifying

It’s very much worth a read

The Meat Paradox is a fascinating book, part cultural history of meat, part manifesto, part pilgrimage. Percival is a gifted writer, marshalling evidence, weaving together interviews and offering descriptions that at times verge on the poetic.

In this fascinating must-read for anyone interested in understanding and addressing exactly why morally troublesome behaviours vanish into the commonplace and every day, Percival grippingly guides the reader through the psychological complexity of our challenges, finding a middle ground in the debate and helping people decide where they may sit in the midst of it all.

[This] provocative book presents a challenge that most haven’t even begun to confront – and few are ready to meet.

Impressively nuanced

Rob Percival delves into our carnivorous history and culture and examines its deep connection to the human psyche. It’s an erudite and entertaining excavation, but it also brings us to the present, prompting us to ask what relationship to animals, both wild and domesticated, we should choose now, in a warming world where very few of us need meat to survive. It’s one of the big questions of our age, and Percival compellingly insists we mustn’t shrink from it.

Rob Percival does for meat what David Graeber did for debt, drawing on a wealth of knowledge about the ways that humans have made life work in different times and places to redraw the lines of today’s ethical debate. Fascinating and unsettling, this is a book about how we became what we are – and where we go from here.

In searching for the answers to a complicated question, this beautifully written book will take you to some unexpected and fascinating places. Written by someone who clearly cares deeply about animals and our planet, it provides much needed nuance in an often polarized debate.

The Meat Paradox exposes the deeply complex and haunting relationship we have with the animals we eat. As a livestock farmer, I’ve considered this as much as I’ve dared, but Rob opens the paradox to unblinking scrutiny. The meat debate is one of the most contested raging in the world at the moment, with opposing camps waging war. Rob demolishes the propaganda on both sides, and having exposed the paradox, refuses to provide a pat solution. This is an existential issue which demands that we consider deeply but perhaps can never fully resolve.

An even-handed and nuanced exploration of our deeply complex moral relationships with other animals, The Meat Paradox is a compelling journey into the evolutionary past, potential future, and conflicted psyche of the planet’s most dangerous and empathetic predator: us.