Talking to Colin Spencer - NYTimes.com Colin Spencer, whom Germaine Greer once called "the greatest living food writer," turns 80 next year, and shows no signs of slowing down. His latest book, "From Microliths to Microwaves," a history of food in Britain from pre-historic times to the present, is the work of a scholar. In it he argues, in a way that's reminiscent of Jared Diamond, that agriculture - or at least agriculture as it's practiced now - is one of the great tragedies of the human race. Yet Spencer's scholarship is only one of his many achievements. Indeed, he's as close to a Renaissance man as you can get, an accomplished artist, novelist, analyst, activist, playwright and journalist. And cookbook writer. Also, needless to say, cook. Which was my excuse for looking him up in England a couple of weeks ago. We'd never met, but I've admired his work for 30 years, since he began writing a column in The Guardian. This had followed his publication of a vegetarian cookbook, and was ostensibly a vegetarian column. "But what I tried to do right from the beginning," he told me, "was to make the column political. I was supposed to be talking about food, but you can't talk about food without being political. People have, of course - even Spencer has managed to, producing more apolitical cookbooks than you can easily count - but the point is a good one. Spencer lives in the modest south coast town of Seaford, and spends most of his time painting, writing his autobiography, cooking, gardening and wandering the meadows that lead to the area's dramatic limestone cliffs. Cooking, as it happens, took up almost none of our conversation, which quickly turned to the history of the relationship between "heretical" eating - which is how Spencer referred to vegetarianism in his history "The Heretic's Feast" - and other "heretical" behavior, like homosexuality. Spencer has "always" been bisexual, and has written authoritatively about sexual issues, especially in his 1995 work, "Homosexuality in History." Although the right to eat in any style one likes has not been a much-discussed issue, at least in huge public forums, vegetarians - along with people whose eating styles differed from the norm for religious reasons - were long treated as a minority, especially, notes Spencer, since the advent of Christianity. He's written that the story has long been one of "persecution, suppression and ridicule," because vegetarianism is "not simply a criticism of meat-eating but a criticism of power ... Not to eat meat, or to frown on the captivity and killing of animals, went to the heart of society." The conversation ranged from rights for those with non-heterosexual gender behavior to those with conscious or ethical eating habits to those for animals. He recalled routine beatings of homosexuals by police in his youth, and wandered in his memory through the last 50 years or so, as it gradually became respectable rather than illegal or ridiculous to "be gay," just as it's recently become respectable rather than foolish or eccentric to adopt an ethical diet. It was an encouraging conversation, reminding both of us that despite what seem like constant steps backward, there has been progress in many arenas since the end of World War II. He asked rhetorically, "It's partly the decline of religion, isn't it? Society no longer believes that the Bible is the arbiter of morals. I asked how he became an ethical eater (he isn't a strict vegetarian: "I'm much too fond of all the fleshly delights to be a Spartan"), knowing that at least partly it was because his sexuality already put him on the outside looking in. "It was in the "70s, about 1975. It was the horror of factory farming. The other issue was the fact of the ecology. In our conversation he continually linked rights for those deprived of them - for the most part, that means minorities, regardless of the type of minority - with rights for animals. I mentioned to him that he'd once written, "In order for humans to allow natural rights to animals, they must first find them for themselves," and asked whether you could fill in almost any minority for the word "animals" and track the same path. The optimistic supporters of animal rights believe that in 50 years we'll be amazed at the way we once treated animals, just as supporters of human rights are now amazed at the way we treat ... well, fill in the blank. That what amounts to mass enslavement and torture of animals without conscience will end before too long. But it is not just about ethics or animal rights, he reiterated, it's also the cost to the environment and indeed humanity. There is the issue of sustainability, he reminded me - by some estimates it takes 30 times as much land to raise animals industrially as it does to raise vegetables - compounded by the fact that we'll soon need to grow more food for ourselves rather than feeding it to animals. And, he said, "The thought of the developing world and malnutrition and hunger - it's a hard call that we use that food for animals. Certainly, by the end of this century, industrial livestock will be a thing of the past. Please visit my blog and join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.