I am a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian by choice, and not for health reasons; in fact, I would likely be healthier if I had animal proteins in my diet. As an ethical responsible human being, you should have a moderate intake of healthy animal products.
Yes, you read that correctly. I am a vegetarian and I endorse you eating that steak.
If you look throughout history at the human diet, it consists of a large amount of raw plant products, and some meat for important proteins. Not to delve too deeply into the science behind all this, but the easiest way to get all of your essential amino acids is by eating meat. Granted, you don’t need four steaks and a chicken breast a day, but having at least some meat on the table once a week is going to be healthier for you unless you are very carefully planning your amino acid intake. Humans didn’t evolve our incisors for chomping down on leaves, and we didn’t evolve our molars to try and rip the flesh off of a bone. Omnivorous diets are what we as a species are designed for.
All health reasons aside though, it’s important socially that we don’t confuse the ideas of vegetarianism and animal activism. There are right ways to raise animals and there are efficient ways to raise animals. These two aren’t necessarily exclusive, but if you believe the megafarms, they’re doing what they have to do in order to “feed the world,” never mind that even here in the United States 14.5 percent of households go hungry or don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
The largest reason for this isn’t the inability of farmers to produce enough food, it’s the extreme inequality in food distribution that mirrors the economic dispersion in this country. So for all the farms who raise animals that never see the light of day, where they interact almost exclusively with machines, the excuse of “feeding the world,” just isn’t going to cut it.
The same goes for all the vegetarians out there who don’t eat meat to protest these conditions. It isn’t that hard anymore to find a semi-local farmer, no matter where you live. You can meet the farmers, talk with them, and find out exactly what kinds of living conditions their animals have.
What you absolutely should not do is insist that everybody you meet share your feelings and moral position on the subject. Both sides of the proverbial electric fence have been guilty of this. Vegetarians and vegans are often seen as pushy, throwing their ideals at other people. This is very much the wrong thing to do. But this also applies to you, dear reader, if you are an omnivore who likes to “casually” suggest that any vegetarian is less of a person, or just following a trend, or “missing out,” or any number of things I hear on a fairly regular basis when a person finds out my eating preferences.
So let me provide a little more perspective on exactly why I don’t eat meat, and why I do consume other animal products such as milk and eggs. There are plenty of reasons I got interested in animal rights as a young person, but none of them really caused me to stop eating meat. My family hunted both for meat and for sport, and I’ve been interested in gardening for a long time. At some point in my life, I made a connection that I was perfectly willing to go out and plant, care for, and eventually harvest my own plant foods, but was completely unwilling to raise an animal knowing that it would end up butchered, or participate in the process of killing or butchering my own meat. At some point in my development, because of my interest in farming and gardening, produce became more than something that was just bought at the grocery store, and eventually meat did, too. At that point, knowing that I was entirely unwilling to kill an animal to eat it, I made the decision to eliminate meat from my diet until I was willing and able to participate fully in the process that comes before consumption.
Note the word “until,” because it means that I fully intend to return to a true omnivorous lifestyle. At some point I will have reached a developmental stage where I am able to hunt, or raise livestock, pull the trigger, dress and butcher the animal, and cook the resulting food. I am not there yet, and many people will never be at that stage. But I also am not suggesting that one has to be willing to do these things in order to responsibly eat meat.
“Trophic levels” is a biology term used to describe different levels of a food chain with, for example, a blade of grass being the lowest trophic level, right up through the bugs that eat the grass, the birds that eat the bugs, and the foxes that eat the birds. At each level, a large amount of energy is lost due to the energy needed for those living things to survive, the heat they put out, and the fact that not every member of a trophic level is eaten for food. Actually, only ten percent of the energy that comes into a given trophic level goes up to the next higher level.
So in the previous example, if we set the grass as receiving 100% energy from the sun, the bugs get 10%, the birds 1%, and the foxes .1% of the total energy that came in from the sun. This on its own looks like a pretty convincing ecological reason to become a vegetarian, but just imagine if everything did that.
It simply isn’t possible to survive if every living thing is competing for the same resources. Yes, it is less efficient to eat a cow than it is to eat corn, but if we were competing with animals for all the plant-based resources available, we would soon push them right out of the food web entirely, destroying any benefit the species might have of not being eaten. Even the ideal 100 percent energy directly from the sun wouldn’t be a viable solution, because then we’d be in competition with the trees for sustenance, and would eventually end up wiping them out in order to secure more sun for ourselves.
Still, that supermarket-packaged ground beef from cows who never see the light of day isn’t your most ethical food choice, or your healthiest. Truly free-range, grass-fed livestock are going to be much healthier and much better for you to consume, and they actually get to live decent lives before slaughter. And it isn’t impossible to raise your own animals, or hunt truly wild animals for food, and then you know exactly how the animal was treated, if it was killed with respect, and how you feel morally about eating it.
Really, what it all comes down to is balance. Eat too much meat, and it becomes a poison to us–and it enables Big Food to increase the level of cruelty just to turn a bigger profit. Stop eating meat altogether, and we’d screw up ecosystems even worse than we already have. So instead of arguing over who should eat meat and who shouldn’t, we can all stick to our own personal preferences and start working on fixing the issues we’ve caused over the past years.