I have eaten a lot of meat in my life. Although my mom is vegetarian, she allowed us to eat meat and even bring it into the home. I’m not sure why she was so flexible on something that she felt so strongly about for herself. Perhaps she didn’t want to create yet another reason for us to feel different from our American friends, or perhaps it’s because the morality of vegetarianism is such a complex issue.
Even as I ate meat almost every day of my teenage life, I thought often about the question of whether eating meat is wrong. There were many aspects of meat that were unappealing to me. Meat preparation was unbearably morbid, and the more hardcore forms like steak and ribs were just plain gross. Yet somehow I was always able to convince myself that there was nothing immoral about eating meat. We are omnivores. We have evolved to eat meat. Killing animals for food is part of the natural cycle of life.
During my third year at Stanford, I was introduced to the ideas of Eric Schlosser, who wrote a book called Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Schlosser’s book sheds light on the disgusting practices of the meat industry in America, with vivid imagery of the torture inflicted on America’s factory farm animals. These ideas presented the most compelling argument I had heard against eating mass-produced meat. Animals raised in factory farms are not only killed, they are tortured. Yet I still ignored my gut feeling about the matter and continued consuming meat daily.
In the spring of my senior year at Stanford I took a trip to India, which was accompanied by a two-week vegetarian fast. Although I had done this many times before in my life (i never eat meat when i am in India), something about this trip changed me. When I returned to Stanford, meat suddenly started smelling and tasting like “flesh”. It became increasingly unappetizing to me. I had already stopped eating beef a few years earlier for health reasons, but now even chicken and fish seemed gross. Somehow, after years of justifying my meat-eating habits to myself, I realized that my body was not meant to consume flesh. And so I became a vegetarian. Not exactly for moral reasons. Perhaps it was for health reasons. But more than anything, it was just a feeling I had about what was right for me. I could no longer eat animals.
I have now been a strict vegetarian for nearly five years and have since developed a pretty strong moral feeling about it — i believe eating meat as it is produced today is wrong. My reasoning is based on my own moral beliefs, combined with some hard facts:
Beliefs
Belief #1: inflicting pain and suffering on any conscious being is wrong. The greater the level of consciousness, the more wrong it is.
Belief #2: prematurely ending the life of any conscious being is wrong. The greater the level of consciousness, the more wrong it is.
Belief #3: humans who have the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, etc), should minimize their negative impact on the environment.
Belief #4: humans who do not have the basic necessities of life should be free to kill animals for food, but they should try to minimize the suffering of the animals they kill and treat the animals with respect while they are alive.
Facts
Fact #1: in order to eat meat, we must prematurely end the life of the animals we eat.
Fact #2: conventional meat production in modern society inflicts severe pain and suffering on animals throughout their lives.
Fact #3: conventional meat production causes severe strain on the environment by emitting massive amounts of methane.
Fact #4: conventional meat production creates “superbugs”, which are resistant to all existing forms of antibiotics, thereby endangering the lives of other humans.
And so, I do not eat meat, and I am encouraged by the growing interest in vegetarianism around the world. However, I still believe the morality of vegetarianism is a complex issue. First, there are a few nuances that raise questions about the beliefs I have stated above.
Nuances
Nuance #1: Professor and Author Michael Pollan raises an interesting question in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemna: if you remove all the negative stuff that comes along with mass-production of meat (say, for example, by raising and killing meat yourself on a small family farm), then you are bringing animals into this world (i.e., giving them a life that they would not have had otherwise), giving them a luxurious existence (plenty of food and shelther), and killing them without any suffering. Is it still wrong to eat meat in this scenario?
Nuance #2: According to neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, human awareness of emotion is a bi-product of our having such a large prefrontal cortex. In other words, we are aware of emotions like pain, suffering and anxiety because we have a large prefrontal cortex. So it is possible that animals without a comprable prefrontal cortex, such as cows, pigs and fish, do not experience such emotions at all.
The first nuance is not really relevant for most of us, who do not have easy access to “humane” meat. The second nuance is interesting, but highly speculative. Since science cannot tell us definitively whether or not animals are aware of emotions, I believe it makes sense for us to act based on our intuition. And my intuition tells me that animals can suffer.
My Own Moral Shortcomings
All this said, I must admit to a couple of my own moral shortcomings.
Shortcoming #1: although I have minimized my leather purchases considerably since I became vegetarian, I do still buy shoes that contain leather.
Shortcoming #2: according to everything I have said above, I also really should not consume conventionally produced dairy. While I try to buy organic dairy, I am definitely not strict about this, and dairy is a majory part of my diet.
Why do I continue to buy leather shoes and eat dairy? Because these are part of a happy life that I am not willing to give up. I like to wear leather shoes to my business meetings, and I like to eat low-fat dairy as part of a balanced diet. Each of us has our own limit for self-sacrifice. For most, that limit allows for eating meat. But I hope that every person is made aware of the facts and makes a conscious choice about the amount of pain and suffering they are willing to inflict on others.
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