As I sat in a café, wondering how to begin this post, fate threw a gift into my lap in the form of a French family at the table beside me.
The two parents were visiting their daughter, newly enrolled at Goldsmiths; the mother, bleach-blonde haired but with the darker, Mediterranean features of the south of France, had just enquired as to how her child was adapting to life amongst the English.
“Ma coloc [flatmate] est végétarienne….”, she began, “et je ne la comprends pas.”
She continued:
“She told me that she loves animals and doesn’t want to hurt them. So I told her, I like animals too, certain animals I like a lot in fact…I don’t want to hurt them either, but they taste so good, how could you not eat them?”
The parents nodded in agreement. Her father weighed in:
“Well, she may be right that it’s sad if animals are hurt. But to eat no meat at all? I find that a bit extreme.”
___________
This exchange encapsulates, on many levels, the main arguments given for eating meat. Though attitudes in the UK are far ahead of those in France – where I frequently encountered outright incredulity at my vegetarianism – this is still a response that I most commonly encounter when talking to omnivores here: ‘But meat just tastes so good though!’
Maybe you’re thinking this to yourself, right now: meat tastes good though. And I agree, it does. But frankly, an appeal to personal pleasure is a poor justification for an issue so clearly touched by morality and ethics. It’s just not an argument that would stand up in any other situation.
This is a point that Jonathan Safran Foer address in Eating Animals, a superb book charting his own difficult decision to stop eating meat and raise his children as vegetarians.
He writes:
Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.
And why could there be no other end? Because what we do to farmed animals is frequently so horrific.
For example, we keep pigs – animals with an intelligence comparable to dogs – confined in cages with no stimulation, to the point that many go insane from boredom.
We breed chickens that grow at such an abnormal rate that their muscles deform their bones, leaving them in constant pain.
We slaughter animals in such a way that they spend the last moments (hours, days) of their lives in abject terror, as they are beaten, shocked, strung up, and in some cases have limbs amputated while still conscious.
I’m not against eating animals, per se. I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with killing them, on a basic level. But I refuse to eat meat because the farming industry operates in a way that considers animals as machines, from which to extract the maximum output for the minimum expenditure, regardless of the practices this entails.
At the end of the day, that’s not something I find justifiable, however good they may taste.
And in light of that, I don’t think it’s the vegetarians who are extreme.
Thanks for your excellent article. It makes me happy to see more visibility of the meat industry’s practices.
I stopped eating meat products a little over a year ago. Ethically speaking, I’m a rational egoist, so I had very different motivations for my decision than animals’ wellbeing. Actually, my strongest motivation was to save money. Meat is excessively expensive for its relative nutrition (higher in unsafe fats, high in cholesterol, not a huge source of vitamins, not a great source of fiber, etc.).
However, as I’ve read more about the meat industry, I’ve come to learn that I’m also making several other great ethical choices:
1. I’m supporting my own wellbeing by lowering my risk of serious illness such as H1N1 – most commercial meat is filthy due to the conditions you described in your post, and I want no part of an outbreak.
2. I’m supporting local growers by refusing to invest in meat that is almost always corn-fed; corn farmers receive ridiculous federal subsidies and the majority of their crops is used for livestock consumption. As a result they have quite an unfair advantage in the agricultural market.
3. I’m sustaining the planet on which I live by lowering my dependence on foreign oil – the meat industry is the number one waster of oil between shipping and processing feed, water, medicines, and of course the meat itself.
4. Speaking of medicines, I’m seriously supporting my own wellbeing by avoiding consuming steroids and chemicals fed to animals for increased meat production and/or to supplement poor diets.
5. I’m investing in land that can be more ecologically and economically sustainable (that means a more stable economy throughout the rest of my life and therefore a better chance at my own financial security) by reducing the destruction of land for short-term meat production. Meat production on the larger industry scale is not healthy for land, and it can make it practically unusable for any other agricultural purpose.
I do find mass slaughter disgusting and a reflection of poor standards in the food industry, not for the animals’ wellbeing (though any sensible human being would feel gut-wrenching sorrow at the senseless misery of harmless animals) but for my wellbeing as the consumer.
Thanks again; I’m reblogging this piece and following you.
Reblogged this on Tiffany's Non-Blog.
Safran Foer’s quote is a good way of framing the discussion (why do people put taste over values when it comes to what they eat). I have been vegetarian since childhood, and vegan for a year, and it was only when I became vegan that I had to stop eating something the flavor of which I loved (namely, cheese in all its forms). As for vegetarianism, I couldn’t help becoming one: I never liked the idea of eating “dead animals” (as I would put it to my parents) and found the flavor and texture of any kind of meat repulsing. By the time I was 9 my mother and father had given up trying to make me eat meat, as meal times were a pain for everyone involved…
The longer I’ve spent without cheese the less I’ve craved it. Further, my taste buds seem to have changed, and I am now perceiving other flavors much more fully.
I guess what the taste/values argument forgets is how much societal norms shape how we see things. If we grow up surrounded by people who eat meat it will be much harder for us to see much wrong with it. Growing up in Argentina, I was always considered a bit odd for my dietary choices. Things have changed a little over the years, but not nearly as much as I would like.
Besides, most people choose to forget where their food comes from. I’ve heard meat-eaters say they would never harm an animal. Weird disconnect there, right?
[...] Except that I’ve spent too much time over this past month thinking about why I wanted to go vegan in the first place. [...]
I just came across your blog. Its good! I like this article, I’m a vegetarian too, out of choice, and it’s funny the reactions we get from meat-eaters. I’ll look for that book you’ve suggested. I’m sure it’ll be a good read. Thanks. Thejas