Thoughts on Vegetarianism

I'm taking a break from political analysis to discuss a topic that has casually been occupying my thoughts lately; namely, vegetarianism.

Growing up in rural West Virginia, there was always some kind of meat on the table - we kept hogs, chickens, and beef, much like our neighbors did. And throughout the seasons of the year, we'd sometimes have the occasional deer, catfish, rabbit or squirrel. Needless to say vegetarianism wasn't much in vogue in the 1970s, certainly not at our dinner table.

My father was an avid outdoorsman, so I was very much at home with hunting and fishing. But I was always reluctant to kill anything. I really didn't want to see it die - I had too many pets as a child, and I knew I wouldn't eat the gamekill, so what was the point of killing it? I also saw how most of the hunters I grew up around killed far more than they would ever eat, and wound up throwing the surplus to their dogs. For most of them, the sport - the thrill of the hunt and the kill - seemed to be its own justification.

My first introduction to real, live vegetarians came through my father, who had been nursing a dream for years of trying his hand at self-sufficiency. If someone had asked him what he meant by that term, he would have replied: "living off the land, raising all our own food, and minimizing our reliance upon fossil fuels and technology." Of course, to me it meant another thing entirely - loss of creature comforts, no telephone, and just one more thing that made me stand out from my peers. In a small rural town, that is never a good idea. When Dad finally decided to launch the family into this enterprise, I met several kinds of "hippies", or homesteaders, as they preferred to be called. Among them were several vegetarians, and their "bible" was a magazine called The Mother Earth News.

I spent my college years at the University of Washington in the great Northwest - the epicenter of ecotopia and all things environmental. It was there that I met the political kind of vegetarians: people for whom vegetarianism was a statement of belief, with nutritional aspects coming secondary. I also met the religious vegetarians: those for whom vegetarianism was a moral choice, or a question of faith. I learned that there are different kinds of vegetarianism: lacto-ovo; those who permit themselves to eat dairy products and eggs, as opposed to vegans, who really mean no animal products whatsoever. Then during my years at a Major Northwest Software Company (ahem), my co-workers from India and Sri Lanka introduced me to a kind of ordinary, daily vegetarianism that was totally removed from the political and counter-culture version I saw in college.

I was beginning to see that vegetarianism was multi-faceted.

I've always had this nagging belief that the vegetarians may be right. I'm not a nutritionist, but if vegetarianism had any really substantial nutritional drawbacks, I suspect that the several hundred million Hindus would have discovered that by now. And before I acquired a better understanding of evolution and evolutionary processes, I also use to think that the presence of canine teeth in humans somehow "proved" that we were meant to consume meat. It does not, actually; gorillas have far larger canine teeth than humans do, and yet are 100% vegetarians. (They use their teeth in dominance displays and self-defense.)

What about the resource questions? In a world of scarce resources, can we really justify allocating 100 pounds of grain to feed to one cow, to create 1 pound of beef? Wouldn't it be more effective to just consume the 100 pounds of grain directly? Skip the middlemoo and go right to the grain? Not to mention the additional petroleum products it takes to raise the cow, the destruction that cattle cause to the environment, especially to salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest? And how about the fact that most Americans (myself certainly included) are overweight, and could easily forego some red meat with no bad side-effects (and probably some good ones)?

The morality of vegetarianism is also compelling. Of cours it's true that in some countries, eating meat may be a case of life or death. But how many of us in North America can truthfully claim that situation? Or in Europe?

Using history to justify eating meat is a dangerous game. Does the fact that history has always seen humans eating meat somehow justify continuing the practice? That argument can be used for continuing human slavery.

If you expected to find a clear-cut answer at the end of this essay, you're going to be disappointed. I have not made up my mind on this. In truth, the best vegetarian I could ever become would be the lacto-ovo kind, but I doubt I could even pull that off. Instead, I have satisfied myself that I am probably always going to eat meat. Therefore, I should try to do so in the most responsible and humane fashion:

1. I will not kill anything for sport;
2. I will try to buy organic and free range products when I can;
3. I will not eat endangered seafood when dining out at a restaurant

I'm not sure if this is a compromise (middle ground) or a compromise (selling out). I guess I'll have to keep thinking about it - after my next hamburger.