An alternative course of action is to eat only beef produced by organic farmers. The price of the mad cow disease panic is not only the extra financial cost of these alternatives, but the cost in time and energy spent in reading food packages, checking out butchers and working out alternatives to beef. Another factor contributing to the mad cow disease panic is the popular hostility towards modern farming techniques which are widely regarded as a violation of the laws of nature. These views reflect modern society's extraordinary collapse of confidence in itself. It is a simple fact, familiar to every schoolchild before the corruption of the national curriculum by green prejudice, that human civilisation is based on 'breaking the rules' of nature, on increasing the productivity of nature by cultivating plants and domesticating animals.
Agriculture is by definition a violation of nature.
Its intensive development has allowed humanity increasing autonomy from hunger and the arbitrary effects of the elements. One can imagine the neolithic equivalent of the editor of the Guardian wringing his hands at the sight of people clearing and ploughing the land and telling them that they were 'asking for trouble'. When Jethro Tull invented the seed drill at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was no shortage of pundits arguing that nature would exact its revenge against such intensive farming methods. Yet this and other techniques developed in England in this period are generally agreed to have made a decisive contribution to the emergence of the capitalist system so celebrated by the editor of the Sunday Times. Undoubtedly in the course of history, humanity has experienced disasters as well as successes in its attempts to raise productivity and improve living standards.