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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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Animals and humans
Why be dragons? How massive, reptilian beasts entered our collective imagination
58 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
Flirtation, negotiation and vodka – or how to couple up in 1950s rural Poland
5 minutes
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Biology
How the world’s richest reds are derived from an innocuous Mexican insect
5 minutes
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Physics
The abyss at the edge of human understanding – a voyage into a black hole
4 minutes
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Stories and literature
Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone
5 minutes
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Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
8 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
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Architecture
The celebrated architect who took inspiration from sitting, waiting and contemplating
29 minutes