One Shouldn't Eat One's Friends
For four or five years now I have been a vegetarian--for no particular well-motivated reason, it just sort of happened. One day at work recently I was munching my lunch of rabbit food when one of my coworkers looked at me quizzically and asked, dead-pan, flat-out, "Why don't you eat meat?" I opened my mouth to reply but no sounds came out. Hmmm, good question, I thought. So I went home, every bit as puzzled as my coworker, and tried to write down my particular well-motivated reasons. This is what I came up with.
Dr. Doolittle But it occurs to me whether those of us with less friends might nevertheless also find some good reasons to be vegetarians. Are there such reasons? One or two perhaps.
Matters of Degree Granted, the difference between killing a potato for ones lunch and killing a beef cow is one of degree, but this difference is a perfectly satisfactory reason to refrain from slaughtering cows. That plants cannot scream very loud is no small detail. To state the point more formally: a good place to start here would be to adopt the principle that, other things being equal, one ought to eat as low on the food-chain as is convenient. I will return to this principle in a moment, but first let me traipse about a bit in the thicket of other possible notions as to how one decides what one is to eat.
No Feet I have a slightly eccentric friend who has a culinary principle which at first blush seems well into the moderately eccentric. She refuses to eat anything with feet. This lets her eat fish of course, but little else. (Although she somehow interprets feet in such a way that chickens don't have them, but I won't press her on that one.) Now it isn't that she has a fetish for feet; no it is rather that she has a fetish for scientific distinctions. And she has decided that it wont do to eat organisms high enough on the phylogenetic scale to have reticular activating systems--and this corresponds very roughly to those critters who have feet. A reticular activating system is a fancy name for a bit of brain tissue which modulates cycles of waking and sleeping. Her notion is that such cycles have something essential to do with conscious awareness. The idea being that to kill an organism which possesses full-fledged consciousness is a cruel act, the infliction of a needless suffering. Animals less conscious presumably can thus be thought to suffer less vividly somehow, and so the killing is morally more palatable. Feet or no-feet is her version of the Watt's principle of who screams how loud. Now this whole business of screamers and feet, and reticular activating systems, raises an important consideration. There is a moral issue in our choice of a diet. The issue being that we take a life, of some form at some level of complexity, in order to live ourselves--in order to eat. The taking of this life may involve inflicting suffering, and at a minimum, deprives someone or something of its right to life. None of which should put us off our appetite necessarily--it is simply the way of things. But it should give us cause for reflection. Here then are some of my reflections.
Other Things Being Equal Manifestly, there is a sort of continuum of life forms on the earth, an evolutionary scale so to say, ranging from the most elaborate and sophisticated to the very humble indeed. The lower we go on that scale to commit our murders the less morally troublesome they seem. I am convinced, for example, that cows desire, in their own way, to go on living; and that the killing of such a being causes it at least momentary pain and suffering. All of which may not be necessary, other things being equal (I will make music with this accordion phrase later). So I would like to look for a moment at this great scale of being, and point out a small detail or two about the places along it out of which we take our bites.
Screaming Pork chops I am not trying to insinuate that anyone should feel guilt about any of this. If you can contemplate this spectacle without moral discomfort then by all means there is no reason whatever why you shouldn't go right on enjoying your Big Mac with gusto. The point is simply that one should take one's bite along the scale of being at the place at which one feels morally and spiritually comfortable. But how can we know where that place is if we are alienated from the real process of our feeding. The real process involves murder, violent or subtle, and the processing of the corpse in ways to render it attractive to our palates. We should look at the actual process as it in fact happens, to see just how low we might want to aim along the chain of being eating being. To harvest a field of wheat, although evocative of more pastoral imagery, is also of course an act of murder, and of self-deception, in precisely the same way. We never contemplate a shaft of wheat, notice its tasseled fruit, see the color and line of its growth through the air, sense the force of life it contains, appreciate its rootedness in the earth, and notice that to eat it requires taking its life, ripping it from the soil of its being. We don't eat shafts of wheat either, we eat Wonder Bread. But Wonder Bread is just as much a fiction as Big Macs.
Meat & Potatoes There is almost a mythos about eating steaks. Quite apart from their old image as icons of financial status (although not unrelated) is their role as significators of a certain vital, faintly aggressive, suggestively macho, attitude toward life in general and feeding in particular. What I have in mind here is that whole business about thick chunks of meat, the bigger the better, the rarer the better, and meat and potatoes men, and the whole subtle cult of male display about devouring slabs of meat. It is somehow about manhood (real men don't eat quiche ?), about male sex roles. (If you don't know what I am talking about here try being a male in this culture who doesn't participate in this ritual--you will soon find out). Women eat beefsteaks too of course, but usually less rapaciously, with less subtle swaggering and chest-pounding male clubiness. Although I seem to notice changes in this in recent years as sex roles shift about a bit, and maybe even from generation to generation I notice that my father and his peers somehow manage to suggest that eating meat is a manly thing to do more than do my peers--but only just. Some of this same strange business is I suppose why men's portions are usually larger than women's, why the Papa burger at A & W has two pieces of meat and the Mama burger only one. And why Swansons once hired Rocky Blier and Joe Green to trade jibes about manhood as they glory in who can eat the biggest helping of Hungry Man dinners (and why they put Joe's son through what seemed almost a puberty ritual in which meat was the ritual object). Of course more is going on in some of this than just meat versus quiche; it is also about that stuff regarding men having more voracious appetites in general, and about social and sexual roles. Nevertheless I don't believe I have ever seen any pro football players pitching hungry man avocados. All of these little social quirks are vehicles of vast information about the largely unconscious images a culture has about the matter of its food. It hints at the symbolic overlays meat-eating has. That Swansons commercial tells us a lot about stuff we would just as soon not have to notice too closely. It would be adolescent folly of course to become so hypersensitive to the true process of our feeding that one could not bear to eat much of anything. We are fleshy mammals living on a planet on which one must kill and eat other living things in order to live and grow. Nothing is deplorable about this. It is our human condition. To try to avoid our earthiness, our fleshiness, our humanness, will make us both spiritually and physically unwell. All these questions are only questions of degree--of balance and health, not of moral or spiritual piety. The temptation to get very pious and fanatical (and usually evangelical as well) about some particular place on the scale of food is just so much lunch righteous, and is not what I have in mind at all.
Five Little Ways There are only five little ways I wish to mention here, five little ways things may or may not be equal. There are moral considerations (with which we are largely finished), matters of health, ecological and economic issues, and something which for want of a better word I shall call a spiritual wondering or two. I have the knowledge and expertise to say only a very little about each of these topics, so very little is just what I intend to say. Health considerations are the most perplexing, the most controversial, the most information-overloaded of these topics, and consequently the one about which I plan to say the least. Vegetarians and meat eaters have debated for decades about which diet is healthier. I will not declare a winner. I do think it fair and honest to say however that, perhaps with certain supplemental nutrients and care in choosing foods, a vegetarian diet is a perfectly healthy and viable alternative to the feast of flesh. In other words, it is not necessary to eat meat in order to thrive. Things are at least equal in this area. The ecological and economic points can be quickly made. The process of converting the stuff of earth into foodstuffs consumes time, energy, and resources. As foodstuffs are processed into ever more complex forms this consumes ever more time, energy, and resources. In order to grow grain we must invest a certain portion of the ecosystems capacities. In order to grow a cow we must in turn take that grain and invest more time, energy, and resources to transmute it into a form (a cow) which can then, through the application of yet more time, energy, and resources, come out as a Big Mac. The pertinent statistic is I believe 20 to 1. Which is to say that it takes 20 lbs. of usable protein in the form of grain to produce 1 lb of usable protein in the form of cow. The other 19 lbs. are burned-up by the cow doing its cow-business; circulating its blood, breathing, walking around, smelling the air, chewing its cud, emitting its melodious moo, and in general desiring to go on living. From the point of view of the planet's resources, from the point of view of the human food supply, the lower on the food-chain we eat the more efficient is our use of our food. We pay a price in terms of the planets resources for the luxury of eating foodstuffs in elaborate and complicated forms. As scarcity of food becomes an issue of increasing urgency, as the population of human eaters grows we may see a shift toward less consumption of meat, out of necessity. (Although in passing we should remark on the fact that there is no shortage of food on the planet today. People starve on the earth not because there is not enough to go around, but because we are unable or unwilling to distribute the available foodstuffs to those who need them. But at some point in the foreseeable future we may face actual scarcity.) Now the economic consequences of this process of investing ever more time, energy, and resources to produce ever more elaborate foodstuff is just what you would expect. Generally meat costs more than non-meat food. Financially, then, the lower you aim to eat on the great chain of being the less it will cost you. And the less it will cost the planet. Here at least things are not entirely equal. As for spiritual matters, here we must tread lightly lest we fall prey to all sorts of self-righteous bullshit. The only moral I wish to have drawn from this little homily is that it may make subtle differences of various sorts whether one eats flesh or non-flesh foods. As to what those differences are I am not so sure. One set of clichés I have heard bandied about (usually by vegetarians) is that eating meat tends to make one fiery, perhaps even aggressive. Maybe. I haven't eaten flesh in nearly five years and I would be hard pressed to say what, if any, difference it makes. We must in all candor however note that there exist venerable spiritual traditions, especially in the East, which hold that a vegetarian diet is an important ingredient in spiritual practice. Which is not to imply that vegetarianism is sacred and meat-eating profane. What we should notice is that these proscriptions suggest the spiritual adepts of these traditions sensed subtle differences occasioned by diet. Again, the point is only that it may make some differences what one eats, and some of these differences may not be obvious--your Home Economics 101 instructor may not teach you of them. What I suggest is experimentation. If you have always eaten meat why not try to eat none for several months and see what happens. We can play with our diet you know, there is no reason to be fixed or serious about it. So, as far as the spiritual consequences of eating meat or eating veggies things may or may not be equal. Experiment and see.
200 Billion and Rising As we have evolved into a complex technological culture we have abstracted also the process of the husbandry of our future food. Thus we now have the barbaric vision of huge quantities of animals brought into being for the sole destiny and purpose of ripping our teeth into their flesh. Animals are brought into living being for our willful appetites, never being permitted anything resembling a normal existence. They live their unnaturally short lives in mammoth feed lots where they are bred and fed, fattened and plumped and primed, and held sterile captive until they satisfy our sense of when their life should end and our dinner begin. Assembly-line life. This is the only way, no doubt, McDonalds, can spew out billions of servings of contented cow. There is an important difference between this institution and our traditional relationship to our animal food. In less complicated times we raised our animals for the purpose of eating them too, but we were actually present in the process. We fed them, looked into their eyes, and knew them as living beings. The inevitable slaughter was thus somehow more connected, more genuine, more a part of the processes of earth--more honorable somehow. Now of course I readily admit that this same abstracted alienation afflicts our appreciation of the real process of harvesting heads of lettuce or fields of wheat as well. Again I openly confess that the differences here are only ones of degree. All I can say is that degrees sometimes matter. For myself I am able to view the display of huge agribusiness combines ravaging their unfeeling way through fields of wheat. But when it comes to cows or pigs or chickens coming to consciousness, living, growing and dying in a feedlot pen, I am moved by a sense of the vulgarity of the whole business. I prefer, other things being equal, to decline my condoning participation in the latter performance.
Only Lunch I do not wish to create the impression that this topic of food is an excuse for dramas of guilt or self-reproach, or for missionary zealotry or recrimination. Food is just food. It is not medicine. It is not holy sacrament. It is not a form of ethical superiority. Only lunch. So, all things considered, for myself, I am an unreluctant vegetarian. And, to tell the truth, I suspect Dr. Doolittle was really one too.
Epilogue |