subliminalpropaganda

I come from a Serbian family, a country where pork is a staple food. Like many people I was raised omnivorous and never really put much thought into meat-less diets. But after meeting many vegetarians while traveling, I decided to explore the reasons people choose to go veggie and determine if there was enough of a pragmatic benefit to myself or society in general to put up with vaginas growing on my face like in that one episode of South Park. What I found was that there are some semi-legitimate reasons to go vegetarian, but ultiamtely there are ways to work around them. Here I discuss what I feel are the most legitimate arguments for being a vegetarian and why they are specious.

1. Animal Cruelty

Why it’s legitimate:

It should come as no surprise how animals are treated in the American meat industry. Chickens are raised in cages they can barely stand in, much less move around. Feedlot cows are kept in pens for part of their lives and fed a mixture of corn, straw, and other filler that they wouldn’t normally eat. The unnatural diet makes them fatter quicker, but it can also make them ill, which is why they need to be kept on antibiotics during this time. This is all done for the sake of industrial efficiency: generating the greatest amount of product per animal for as little investment as possible. More directly, it’s done to maximize profits. Anyone who doesn’t cringe at least a little at the way industrial animals are treated truly has a black heart.

Why you don’t need to be vegetarian:

You don’t need to give up meat if you don’t want to support animal cruelty, just don’t buy meat from factory farms. You can choose to buy meat from humane farms where animals can roam freely, graze on pasture, and are properly stunned before slaughter. Look for the Certified Humane Raised and Handled label at your market. It costs more because these farms are much more energy intensive than their cutthroat-efficient industrial counterparts, but you can sleep well knowing that none of your money is supporting the cruelest factory farming practices. This meat is generally healthier and more nutritious as well. Check out the Certified Humane website to find stores and restaurants that carry humane meat.

Now, I know what your thinking. Humane practices vary with every farm. In one farm, it could mean pasture raised, in another it could just be a slightly larger pen. That just means you’ll have to do your research. Look what Certified Humane brands are carried at your market and check them out. If they don’t meet your standards, don’t bother.

2. The Environment

Why it’s legitimate:

The cattle industry alone produces a significant amount of the United States’ greenhouse emissions, as much as 18% according to the FAO. Think about that for a second. Including all the cars on the road, all the planes in the air, all the power plants, and all the kids burning wads of plastic bags for that neat fire effect, nearly a fifth of all the greenhouse emissions produced in the US every year comes from the cattle industry alone. Wow. To quote Bill Maher, “It’s actually better to eat a salad in a Hummer than a cheeseburger in a Prius.” So aside from biking to work, you would think that one of the easiest things you can do to reduce your footprint is abstaining from beef.

Why you don’t need to be vegetarian:

Two things. First, you can buy beef from grass-fed cattle raised on farms that have low-emission farming practices. There is a caveat in that grass-fed cattle actually produce more methane than feedlot cattle. The pasture on these farms, which is consistently trampled by free-grazing cattle and fertilized by their manure does act as a carbon sink, counteracting the heavy methane farts, but only if the pasture is maintained well. If the paddock is large and the cows stay in the same area, you don’t get this benefit. The paddock must be small and the cows have to ambulate all around it. Pasture growth must be observed carefully. The density and duration of the grazing periods must be controlled strictly. It may be difficult to find cattle farms that have such stringent practices.

This brings me to my second point. You can abstain from beef without being vegetarian. Pork, poultry, and fish are not nearly as energy intensive as beef. It only takes 2/5ths of the energy to produce pork as it does to produce beef, 3/10ths for poultry, and even less for fish.

3. Animals are smart / have feelings / are aware

Why it’s legitimate:

There was an article in Time magazine recently discussing animal intelligence and consciousness. Though Time magazine is only slightly more intellectual than Highlights, it’s still an interesting article and I encourage everyone to read it.

An increasing amount of evidence shows that animals have a sense of awareness close to or perhaps even equal to that of humans, awareness being defined as the ability to carry consciousness from one moment to the next. This is why cows are lined single file before they’re slaughtered. The lines sweep and curve to prevent the animals from seeing what’s ahead, panicking and reversing direction, or worse, causing a stampede. Pigs will back away from and turn their backs to a pen-mate if it’s being hurt, and chickens have been shown to anticipate the future.

This is more of a philosophical argument and is thus more subject to debate. Whether animals have a right to life and what characteristics give them that right is an argument that may have no objective conclusion.

Why you don’t have to be vegetarian:

Fish have very low levels of consciousness. Clams, oysters, mussels, and other shellfish have none whatsoever. There’s actually a term for this diet: pescetarianism. Though technically this is what’s called a “semi-vegetarian” diet, it’s still not vegetarianism.

* * *

The only completely justified reason I’ve found for being vegetarian is health (that and religion, but that’s a discussion for another day). I don’t mean “vegetables are good for you,” we know that already. I mean “if you have leukemia and eat red meat you will die.” I’m talking about the absolute inability of your body to process meat. I met a man in Ireland who, as a teenager, was a radical animal rights activist and thus vegetarian. In his adulthood, he mellowed out and became more apathetic, but never went back to eating meat, mainly because he just can’t. His body has gone so long without meat that he becomes ill if he eats any.

What I don’t understand is how vegetarians can justify their diet with any of the above reasons and still eat eggs and dairy products, including meat and cheese. They can avoid the cruelty and right-to-life arguments by consuming humane/organic eggs and dairy, no problem there. But it takes just as much energy to raise chickens and cows to produce eggs, milk, and cheese as it does to raise them for slaughter. CO2 emission is a byproduct of raising these animals no matter what food is being produced from them. I don’t get it!

And then there’s veganism. As much of a lifestyle as a diet, veganism is the abstinence of all animal products. Let’s discuss today’s comic further. Given the ubiquitousness of animal products in our lives, I believe being vegan is nearly impossible. You would have to disown yourself from modern civilization and live in a log cabin in the wilderness eating only the vegetables you grow in your own backyard, your wardrobe consisting entirely of hemp clothing (and honestly, except for the hemp clothing, I would not be opposed to such a lifestyle). Additionally, there are the nutritional concerns of veganism. A perfunctorily planned vegan diet will lead to serious health problems.

I had to be somewhat general about the products listed in the comic, which is why you’ll notice some repeating terms. Adhesives includes everything from duct tape to Elmer’s glue (the logo of which is, ironically, a smiling cow). Detergents include shampoo and any kind of soap used for washing, even biodegradable detergents! Cattle products like gelatin and bovine serum albumin have numerous applications in biomedical research including vaccine and drug research. Nitrogen gas is also important in scientific research, keeping instruments that are sensitive to moisture dry. I don’t need to go into how ubiquitous plastic is. I thought it would be interesting to note some foods made from cattle products like hard candies, refined sugar, imitation eggs, and cake mixes. But my favorite item on the list is rubber. Stearic acid, which is made from animal fat, is used in production of tires, an unfortunate truth for every pretentious, fixie-riding, vegan hipster out there.

Murderer.

Steven Davis, professor of animal science at Oregon State University, brilliantly noted that numerous field animals such as mice, rabbits, and small birds are accidentally killed every time a tractor traverses a field while plowing, cultivating, or harvesting. Tom Regan, professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University and philosophical founder of the modern animal rights movement, acknowledged this to be true but stated the purpose of veganism is to do the least amount of harm to animals. Davis then proposed a food production model that would do just that. Replacing pork and poultry with beef, lamb, and dairy production, Davis calculates that such a model would result in 300 million fewer animal deaths per year. You read that correctly. It’s possible to have an omnivorous diet that kills fewer animals than a completely vegan diet.

“I fucking hate animals.”

I can’t escape the feeling that people who choose to go veggie or vegan are not really doing it out of moral or ethical concerns for animals or the environment, but rather some superficial social status; a way to feel superior to others as Christian Lander writes on his blog Stuff White People Like. In the same way the most pretentious of hipsters exude a holier-than-thou attitude for listening to shitty bands you’ve never heard of that have never performed outside of lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, vegans and vegetarians can claim to be better than you for the reasons aforementioned in this post, reasons that, as we have explored, are untenable.

I will conclude by saying that, despite all this, I really, really don’t care what people eat. I wanted to investigate whether there were pragmatic reasons for being vegetarian. I discovered that while there are semi-legitimate reasons for going veggie, the concerns can be circumvented simply by being careful about what you eat. But ultimately, I’m not bothered in the slightest by people who abstain from meat. The vegetarians that I’ve encountered in my travels were some of the kindest people I’ve met in my life; individuals or the highest caliber and exemplars of altruism. They could have had a diet consisting solely of plague rats and it wouldn’t have bothered me and I wouldn’t have questioned why (OK, I would have but I want to make a point).

I hope you’ve taken something from this exposition. Hate mail can be directed to the comments section below or to admin@subliminalpropaganda.com.