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Clearing
the Dinner Plate
A
few weeks ago, another one of PETA’s perenially nearly-nude
protesters headed for downtown Albany painted with various
cuts of meat to encourage people to go vegetarian. In a far
less posturing but no less serious (probably more, in fact)
turn, Albany’s Honest Weight Food Co-op is about to send a
referendum to its members about its new purchasing guidelines
that will include a question about whether the co-op should
shift from its current (unofficial) policy of selling meat
only on a special-order basis.
For certain a segment of the world—where health food and activism
overlap—meat is tricky business.
It’s also one where some of the arguments are getting a little
muddied, especially because there’s so much overlap between
animal-rights folks and environmentalists. It’s a natural
inclination of all big-picture thinkers to assume that all
of our causes neatly dovetail and back each other up. But
sometimes those assumptions obscure their slightly more complicated
interactions.
As far as I can tell, there are four major reasons for vegetarianism/veganism:
health, avoiding animal cruelty, supporting animal rights,
and reducing environmental impact. The first one I won’t really
touch—what constitutes a healthy diet is so variable, based
on context and person.
Animal cruelty is rife in the meat industry. There’s abundant
evidence that most factory farms (and some small farms, to
be fair) perpetrate on their livestock conditions that are
inhumane for any sentient creature, from small cages that
don’t allow a calf to stand, to force feeding of ducks, to
burning off chicken’s beaks. There seem to be two possible
ways to avoid ever supporting these conditions: veganism (eating
no animal products at all, including dairy or eggs). Or, as
is my own partially realized goal, limiting oneself to animal
products from animals that were raised and killed humanely:
usually some combination of organic, free-range, grass-fed
and locally produced.
Now, if you are a supporter of animal rights, taking the position
that animals should enjoy the same right to life as humans,
you might make a distinction between meat and other animal
products, even if they are all cruelty-free. This is a view
that I respect, though I don’t hold it, and it’s as hard to
argue about as any other core value.
All this said, what really gets tricky is the environmental
arguments. I know them well, because they are what I based
my own stint of vegetarianism on. The basic point is that
meat is a resource-intensive way to raise food, and more people
could be fed on less land with less pollution on a vegetarian
diet. Vegsource.com, for example, notes that the fossil-fuel
input required to produce a “meat-centered” diet is three
times that of a “meat-free” diet, that 85 percent of topsoil
loss is caused by livestock grazing, and that raising beef
requires approximately 12,000 gallons (this is hotly contested;
others estimate it’s more like 2,400) of fresh water (a resource
getting ever more precious) per pound of meat, compared to
240 gallons for a pound of soybeans. Others have noted the
environmental havoc created by the huge manure lagoons of
commercial hog farms.
These are very serious concerns, and they clearly point to
a need for the industrialized world to both drastically reduce
its meat intake and drastically reenvision the way we raise
our livestock. Cutting down rainforest for beef cattle, or
overgrazing delicate deserts to feed a three-meat-courses-a-day
society is a travesty. But swinging all the way to a meat-free
diet isn’t necessarily the best response.
If the goal is, which at least it is for me, to end up with
a sustainable food system that protects ecosystems, there
will have to be a lot more drastic changes than lowering our
consumption of meat products—shifting to local, seasonal food,
moving away from dangerous pesticides, eating a wider variety
of foods. There will be hard questions about how many people
various ecosystems can actually support. In the context of
this kind of system (which places like HWFC and our local
farmers markets and community supported agriculture are doing
much to support) raising animals as a small part of our diet
makes a lot of sense, for several reasons:
First, farming is incredibly disruptive to ecosystems. There
is quite a bit of land out there that is too hilly, too prone
to flooding, too arid, or otherwise too marginal to plow and
plant vegetables on, but can sustain a moderate amount of
grazing, especially by animals that are native to the area
(goats or sheep or bison, for example, depending on the locale).
Second, one of the major lessons that ecologists have been
trying to bang into our thick skulls for decades is that monocultures
are bad for the environment, are unstable habitats, and are
susceptible to disease. Today’s vegetarian diet relies very
heavily on one of the most genetically modified, pesticide
dependent vegetable products out there: soy, in the form of
whole beans, soy milk, tofu, tempeh, soy “cheese,” soy “burgers,”
textured vegetable protein, edamame, miso, etc. Obviously
one can and should have a vegetarian diet that has more varied
protein sources than that, but livestock can eat things that
humans can’t, adding further variety—and stability—to our
food system. (Of course the meat industry still feeds its
beef several times more soy than humans eat—another argument
for “grass-fed” meat.)
Finally, a revamped and sustainable food system is going to
rely heavily on small organic farms, which are, at least at
the moment, a very tenuous economic proposition. Often keeping
a coop of chickens or a few pigs to eat scraps provides a
farmer with both valuable fertilizer (hog manure is only toxic
in the quantities that come out of a commercial factor farm
set up) and additional income that can help them stay afloat.
There are probably other arguments out there, but the point
is that opposition to the meat industry is different from
opposition to the eating of animals, just like opposition
to agribusiness is different from opposition to the eating
of the products they grow. Those who are interested in vegetarianism
out of concern for the environment—and those who have other
reasons for it and try to draw others in with environmental
arguments—need to be careful to make that distinction. It
would be a shame to let too much focus on a contextless argument
about meat or no meat distract from the goal of building a
truly sustainable food system.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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