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Common Justifications for not eating animal products by Trevor Griffey |
As you meet new people here at Wes, you may encounter some that you have had limited or no experience with before coming here: vegetarians and vegans. So rather than not understand why anyone would ever want to make this choice, or start an argument right there as to why anyone would abstain from the use of animal products, I would like to inform you so you can eat in peace with vegetarians, and, who knows, maybe even become one yourself.
A vegetarian is someone who abstains from all animal flesh, usually but not always including fish. A vegan is someone who abstains from the consumption, and usually any use, of animal products. And there are a vast number of reasons for being both.
First is the condition of the animals. Thanks to greedy food companies, an economy that rewards profit initiative regardless of means, and consumers that don’t want to know, most animals raised for slaughter, dairy, or eggs live in a state of complete suffering from beginning to end. Both chickens and pigs (which are raised separately) are raised in cages tightly packed with other creatures for most and sometimes all of their lives, never able to do more than turn around. Deprived of all social needs, of movement, and of natural light, covered with sores received from rubbing against metal cages, genetically altered to have so much flesh that their bones can’t support them anymore, they soon become deformed; going completely insane; becoming hyper-paranoid or attacking one another wildly, sometimes becoming cannibals. Many of these animals are fed recycled waste (including their own feces) which have high toxin content, in addition to their diet of pesticide saturated crops. These conditions are not healthy for animals (whose life expectancies in factory farms are 10% of their normal rate), so they are pumped full of antibiotics, hormones, and sulfa drugs to ward off the plagues of diseases that befall typical factory farm animals. But even this is not enough. Not counting all the other ailments and diseases that befall factory pigs and chickens, 90% of most chickens in factory farms are infected with a kind of cancer peculiar to chickens, and 80% of pigs have pneumonia at slaughter time.
Cattle are not treated much better. Bulls are castrated to get a higher fat content in their meat and then pumped full of hormones with carcinogenic risks to keep them from feeling the deficiency. Milk cows, on the other hand, are kept in cages ten months out of the year in which they cannot move or turn around, are kept constantly pregnant, and are pumped full of tranquilizers to keep them from going insane. Once again, they are also given steady amounts of antibiotics and other drugs to stave off infections since youth-some of which are recognized carcinogens for humans. In some cases, their feed has included meat of other animals, even other cows, and this practice has lead to diseases such as mad cow disease for these herbivores. They are usually transported in trucks, since laws made to reduce cruelly treating them in transport only apply to train cars, in which they go without food or water for as much as three days and it is usual for a large minority to be crippled or die in the process.
There are laws in the US that protect animals and prevent their inhumane or cruel treatment. But no such laws apply to any animal raised for food purposes. Regardless of the law, some vegetarians, for obvious reasons, find the support of such systems morally reprehensible. Even if some vegetarians could support the killing of an animal in the most humane way, very few would be willing to work in a factory farm or a slaughterhouse, or wish the kind of unnecessary suffering so many life forms endure for our sake.
But then again, some vegetarians don’t emphasize the total suffering endured by animals from birth to disgusting slaughter. They emphasize other things.
Like, for instance, that untested pesticide-treated grains, tranquilizers, sulfa drugs, hormones, and antibiotics are not exactly the makings for a healthy meal. Nor, probably, are disease ridden animals who are pumped full of them in vain. It is an established fact that toxic chemicals, some which are difficult to dissolve into neutral substances, collect in greater concentrations the further they progress up the food chain (as much as 25 times). This means that humans who eat such products have a greater risk of collecting potentially dangerous amounts of these chemicals in their own systems. They are dangerous because some of the most lethal carcinogens and dioxins, which could potentially mess with our mental capacities and reproductive systems as well as give us cancer, require only the most minute of concentrations (parts per billion and sometimes per trillion) to have drastic effects on us or, more likely, our children. And the government provides little if any protection. Of the 30,000 drugs used in animal raising in this country, only 10% have even been tested and approved by the USDA. Furthermore, the USDA makes preannounced safety checks at maybe 1% of all factory farms and slaughterhouses. And the USDA sets its standards for safe toxin intake as if the substance in question were our sole source of the toxin. This stupidly excludes the possible effects of other tainted meats in our consumption, as well as grain, air, and water pollution. But the FDA’s standards are better than nothing, which is what a good deal of people get when they buy meat from countries (not always labeled and used heavily in fast food) that permit the use of DDT and other chemicals banned (yet still manufactured) in the US. Evidence of these effects in our population has been hinted at in studies which show increasing rates of cancer and decreasing sperm counts, but such evidence will not be conclusive for years to come-until we wait to see whether future generations of children start entering puberty earlier and become more prone to cancer. As David Steinman says in Diet For A Poisoned Planet, the results of toxic poisoning are "reduced mental functioning, decreased IQ and mental acuity, inability to concentrate, and loss of feeling. Cancer... is one of the last consequences to appear." Whether or not we want to wait for the results to come in is up to us.
But, not all vegetarians will make pesticides and chemicals their primary motivation either. For some, it has to do with the environment and global hunger. The world’s population experiences a net gain of 90 million each year. The majority of these increases are made in the poorest of countries, countries which contain a disproportionate amount of the world’s 1.3 billion people in absolute poverty and 800 million who do not get enough food each day. World grain production must increase 78,000 tons per day simply to keep pace with current population growth. It thus seems wasteful to support the raising of livestock when one pound of beef requires the consumption of twelve pounds of grain that could have otherwise fed many more people, and when twenty times more people could be fed from the same amount of land if they had vegan diets. It especially seems unnecessary when many meat eaters consume far more calories and protein than they need to while others starve. And the raising of cattle is not only wasteful, but environmentally destructive as well. Rain forests are being cut down (especially for Burger King beef and fast food in general) for land that can only support cattle for a few years and then is turned into desert. Desertification is increasing as topsoil, requiring five hundred years to regain an inch, is being rapidly eroded with the raising of livestock: the US averages an inch lost every sixteen years, 85% of which comes from the raising of livestock. And, with a huge number of cattle in the world, there is now too much waste to dispose of in many areas. Animal wastes create ten times more water pollution than human pollution, and the methane from the animals may be increasing the deterioration of the ozone layer.
And then, there is health. Beyond the chemical contamination, it’s simply not healthy to eat lots of meat, dairy, and eggs. They’re too fatty to be consumed in large amounts on a daily basis without incurring high cholesterol and heart disease later in life. They aren’t necessary to healthy living. In fact, vegetarians and vegans are often better informed about nutrition and eat more healthily than meat eaters because they do the research needed to debunk the ideas put into schools by meat and dairy lobbies about nutrition pyramids that include meat and dairy as essential. For instance, meat is not only an average (rather than huge or important) provider of protein, but there are very few occasions when meat is necessary to meet the average person’s protein requirements. This is not to say that one can just stop eating meat and be more healthy, but those who know do not consume as much meat as the average American.
Which leads me to the most important point-many vegetarians didn’t change their diets (pardon the phrase) cold turkey. One can reduce meat and dairy consumption in one’s diet and still have a great effect on one’s own health as well as the environmentally and socially destructive world we live in. If the world’s wealthy were to reduce their consumption of grain-fed livestock products by just ten percent, they could free up 64 million tons of grain for human consumption as well as affect many other areas in smaller ways. Vegetarians are sometimes people who found it so easy to reduce their meat consumption, that going the extra step toward no meat just made sense.
Finally, if a vegetarian or vegan does nothing else, he or she learns about tolerance. I know of no vegetarian who openly seeks to change people’s habits by engaging them in arguments which the vegetarian him or herself started. Many vegetarians who mind their own business are challenged by meat eaters, but most vegetarians seem to know that telling someone, unprovoked, why to be a vegetarian usually solves nothing. Most people just don’t want to hear the reasons for becoming a vegetarian or vegan-or, think they already know the reasons when they don’t. Personally, I think vegetarianism arouses hostility partially because there is little if any reason to eat a lot of meat other than the following empty arguments: it’s natural, it tastes good, or, it’s easy. Some argue that vegetarian diets are boring, as if this would justify the effects of a meat-heavy diet, but this is generally untrue: not dependent upon meat, many vegetarians have learned to experiment with the vast array of fruits and vegetables in the world, and are able to prove daily that their diets are not only healthy, but incredibly good and varied. So there are some of the major reasons for being a vegetarian or vegan in general. If you are interested, or even if you aren’t, please inform yourself about your nutritional needs and the food that you eat. For information on potentially toxic chemicals in our food supply and a guide to which foods in supermarkets (and presumably from Aramark) are chemically more safe than others, consult Diet for a Poisoned Planet by David Steinman. For information on the condition of factory farm animals and your daily nutritional needs, consult Diet for a New America by John Robbins. For more complete information on nutritional requirements, their relation to world hunger and democracy, as well as healthy recipes for vegetarian cooking, consult the twentieth anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Moore Lappe. Or, search out one of the many other books in this field.
And, if you’re still unconvinced, or need more reason to consider reducing your meat intake, ponder this. The FDA does not guarantee us safe meats and dairy; meats and whole milk have much higher concentrations of potentially unsafe chemicals from hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, fertilizers, and pesticides; toxic chemicals are most contained in animal fat; and, rumor has it, Mocon serves grade D meat: acceptable for human consumption.
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1. Percent of animal foods which could easily contain carcinoginic pesticides: 50
2. Percent of pesticide violations reviewed in 1988 which could not be fully investigated:79 3. Percent of antibiotics made in us which go to animals: at least 50 4. Percent of US hogs that never leave their pen for their entire life: 20 5. Percent of cattle raised for slaughter in US that receive hormones: 65-99 6. Percent increase in pesticide use since 1945: 3000 7. Percent of US food consumed with detectable residues:35 8. 20 times more people may be fed from same acreage of land if land not used for animal products. 9. Years it takes to create an inch of topsoil: 500 10. Rate of topsoil loss in US: 16inches/year 11. Years to create an inch of topsoil on an acre of land: 100 12. Amount of cropland lost in US every year: 4 million acres 13. Tons of topsoil loss: 7 trillion tons 14. Percent of this loss associated with raising of livestock: 85 15. Percent of soil used by meat eater which vegan needs to support him/herself: 5 16. Acres of forest cut down in US each year for livestock raising or livestock feeding purposes for every acre cleared for malls, roads, houses etc: 7 17. Number of species that go extinct each year: 1000 18. Amount of water used per day for meat based diet: 4000 gallons 19. For a vegetarian based diet: 1200 20. For a vegan based diet: 300 21. Amount of waste (fecal and urinary) from food animals every day: 20 billion lbs 22. Animal wast contributes to ten times as much water pollution as human population 23. Meat contains 14 times more pesticides than plant foods 24. Dairy products contain 5 1/2 times more pesticides that plant foods 25. Amount of slaughtered animals tested by USDA for chems per 250,000: 1 26. Number of people who starve to death each year: 60 million Sources: 1- 5: Diet for a Poisoned Planet; 6-7: Our Stolen Future; 8-26: Diet for a New America. |