Sunday, September 13, 2009

In Defense of Vegetarianism

A little more than a year ago I stopped eating meat. It was a goal I had held for several years, based primarily on the health benefits of not eating red meat in particular, but one I found difficult to accomplish. Ironically enough, I had not achieved my goal because I did not know how to sustain a healthy vegetarian diet — basically, I didn't know how to cook good food. Though it seems counterintuitive, many vegetarians live on a junk food diet, eating primarily cheese and carbs and gaining weight along the way. I didn't want to go that route.

The past year has blessed me with the opportunity to spend time with a great vegetarian cook and live a summer in the Bay Area, home to an incredible array of farmer's markets. I am now a passable cook, and will not drift into "junk vegetarianism" anytime soon. But only in the last couple of months have I acquired a real rationale for the way I eat. People become vegetarian for a multitude of reasons: health, spirituality, sustainability, as protest against animal cruelty, even economic populism. Most often, vegetarians I've met combine these rationales or start with one and gravitate toward another. When the logic for one reason falters, as it almost inevitably does, they argue another point and most often win the argument with meat-eaters.

I mention these rationales because now that I've learned how to sustain myself on a vegetarian diet, I find that the most difficult part of being a vegetarian is explaining the decision to carnivores. Most do not appear threatened by vegetarians — they're not converting anytime soon — but they want to push them anyway, see why anyone who otherwise appears smart would be dumb enough to give up eating meat.

Finding the real reason for my vegetarianism has taken quite a while. Plenty of people live healthy lives while eating meat regularly. Moreover, because the animals we eat subsist on grains and vegetables, the same vitamins and minerals found in meat exist in most vegetarian diets. (I'm leaving veganism out of this discussion because of its sheer rarity. I learned this summer that the only vegan I knew has dropped the lifestyle.) If it's the saturated fat in meat that you're trying to avoid, then you'd have to drop a lot more than just meat. Some oils, cheese, yogurt and other flavorful sources of protein contain plenty of saturated fat. Moreover, saturated fat may not be as evil as we once thought, anyway. There are plenty of health benefits from becoming vegetarian but at least in my experience, they tend to come not from the vegetarian diet itself, but from buying fresh ingredients and learning how to cook.

Ever since I read Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Friedrich Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, spirituality has taken a backseat to other priorities, to put it mildly. Spirituality, thus, is not my rationale. I still get plenty of satisfaction from eating mouth-watering meals, but I will not claim that it puts me in touch with a higher power.

Sustainability is a powerful argument for vegetarianism, and has gained much attention with the rise of Michael Pollan, the UC-Berkeley journalism professor and author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and numerous op-eds in the New York Times. The argument as I understand it goes something like this: to produce one pound of beef, a cow such as a cow must consume 16 pounds of grain. That's a lot of wasted energy. Wouldn't we be better off if we just grew more fruit, vegetables, and grain instead of trying to eat all those inefficient cows? Moreover, and here's where Pollan has really devoted his time, the fossil fuels required to move all this meat across the country is incredibly damaging to the environment. We would be much better off to grow and buy all our food locally. But as you can see, Pollan's argument (at least this last one) applies with equal force to all kinds of food: California strawberries consumed in Virginia, Iowa corn consumed in China, Wisconsin cheese consumed in Florida. This system exists (and here's where the economic populism argument comes into play) because we continue to subsidize the agribusiness industry and its factory farmers with billions of taxpayer dollars each year. Even if we all stopped eating meat tomorrow, our food distribution system would still place an unconscionable burden on the environment. We need to do much more than become vegetarian. We need buy local food and convince our farmers, grocers and senators to change the way they think about feeding America and the world.

And so I find myself back in a place I hadn't imagined, eating a vegetarian diet primarily because of the way we treat our animals. This summer I listened to Peter Singer's powerful book (on CD), The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. He illustrates, in an unabashedly graphic way, the repulsive ways that we raise and kill chickens, just to collect their eggs. We raise them in cages and breed them to lose their wings so that they pose less of a "flight risk." Then to try to kill them, we hand-dip them in scalding water. The chickens, if you can still call them that, live pathetic lives yet before dying, feel intense amounts of pain. It's enough for me to make sure that every carton of eggs I buy comes from "cage-free" hens. And having grown up in Iowa among hog confinements, I know that the way we treat pigs and cows leaves much to be desired. I will never believe that humans have a right to use the rest of Earth's creatures as they wish. It's just another example of where the Bible and I part ways.

And yet, even the animal cruelty brand of vegetarianism leaves a potential gap: what about those farmers who do everything they can to treat their animals well? Moreover, what about the farmers who, in addition to humane farming, sell their meat locally? And here's where my vegetarianism ends. Yesterday I bought a pound of ground beef from a local farmer who grass-feeds her cows. It may not be the most efficient pound of food I eat this month, but I can feel good about supporting her, much more so than I could about buying a bunch of bananas from Ecuador, produced with the labor of exploited workers and shipped thousands of inefficient miles to my grocery store.

Thinking about food, it seems, is a life-long endeavor, filled with complexities. But I believe I've found an argument that can withstand the scrutiny of non-discriminating carnivores, who eat whatever meat is put on their plates. And it might even hold up against other vegetarians, too.

1 comment:

Dan said...

Would a vegetarian that supports the law of conservation of energy eat the venison of deer that are decimating an organic farmer's corn crop? Or would s/he shoot 'em and let 'em become soil through the natural processes of decomposition? The deer are not livestock, and in fact they are pests. However, they are becoming a large meat source because of their fondness for the tasty corn.