Firstly, I would like to say that there are good reasons to be a vegetarian: you don’t like meat, or you feel healthier when you don’t eat it, or you feel icky eating the muscles of something that died, or you don’t want to eat meat that has been factory farmed and can’t afford alternatives, or you have certain health problems with digesting meat, or your religion or other cultural customs prohibit it. Those are all fine with me. What isnot fine with me is saying either “meat-eating is bad for the environment” or “I don’t want to be responsible for the deaths of animals”.
"Environmental" vegetarianism
The way we currently farm meat is bad for the environment. But that’s because we, as a society, do almost everything in ways that are bad for the environment, and this is no exception. A healthy ecosystem includes carnivores and herbivores and plants in complex relationships, and if we can fit ourselves into a healthy ecosystem, as we have actually done in the past in lots of different ways, then there is no environmentalist reason not to eat meat.
When I envision my ideal agriculture, it includes fields of diverse grains, planted with cover crops and mulched with the unneeded straw in between plantings. There are birds and insects and mammals feeding on the grain, because you didn’t cover it in pesticides, but there are other birds and insects and mammals eating them, so it balances out. (See One Straw Revolution) Vegetables are planted as companion crops, and pollinated by the bees kept on the farm for honey and wax. There is coppiced woodland, where the pigs feed, eating things we can’t (not corn), and each winter, some of them are harvested, and every part of the animal is eaten or used or fed to some other animal or returned to the soil in another productive way. There are chickens, eating vegetable scraps and weeds we won’t eat (not corn), and producing eggs we can eat, and fertiliser to feed the plants we can eat. There are sheep, or goats, or cattle, grazing on the hillsides too steep for grain, eating grass we can’t eat (not corn), and providing in return meat, milk, and wool. (see permaculture)
There probably isn’t anywhere that does all of these things at once, but there are, and have been during human history, many places that do some of these things. Current industrial agriculture, which works incredibly hard to maintain enormous monocultures rather than ecosystems, are the exception, not the norm.
What does this mean? It means that when you say “we feed x million tons of food every year to our food”, I say, “that’s because we’re acting like idiots”. Humans use plants to turn sunshine into food. We use animals to turn non-edible plants into food. If we treated agriculture like an ecosystem, we could easily include meat in an environmentally responsible harvest.
There are three important things to remember here:
1. Create diverse ecosystems, not monocultures
2. Use every part of the animal (for food or not).
3. Return everything you get from the ecosystem to the ecosystem. Don’t flush fertiliser into the ocean - that starves one ecosystem and poisons another.
"Ethical" vegetarianism
Eating meat always requires the death of an animal; I do not deny this. The way we currently produce meat is unnecessarily cruel; I do not deny that either. But we don’t have to produce meat that way (see above), and eating meat is not the only way we cause animals to die. (Vegans, you don’t get a free pass here either.)
The production of any food causes the deaths of animals, plural. First there are all the animals killed by pesticides, and they are many. Second, there is the habitat loss necessary to create farmland. Depending on where you live, there are now kangaroos, or badgers, or orangutans, or deer, without a home, without food, and you are, at least in part, responsible for that. All humans are responsible for the deaths of many animals in the production of their food.
Humans, by the way, are not unusual in this, only in matters of scale. The way ecologies work is that everything gets eaten by something else. Even the top predators are eaten by bacteria and worms, as someday we shall be. It’s the circle of life, and all that.
We kill animals for food. That is inevitable, and sad. We also kill animals for lots of other reasons, which is less inevitable, and more sad. Urban living has spread across the globe in a wave of habitat loss - for every species (foxes, racoons, etc) which finds a living in the city, there are a dozen who are kept to the edges, and a dozen more who entirely disappear. Bats fry on our power lines, possums are run over on our roads. Bears and wolves and coyotes are shot to keep us safe. Seabirds choke on plastic bags. Bees are poisoned by the pesticides which “protect” the very plants they pollinate. Porpoises are maimed by boat propellers, and blind dolphins are deafened by their roar in the smog of the Yellow River. Every day of our lives, we are responsible for the deaths of animals.
We can and should grieve them. We should prevent their deaths whenever we can. We should eat less meat, indeed. But we should also try to consume less of every other kind of thing - less space, less water, less power, less clothes, less furniture, less stuff. We cannot escape death, our own or others’ For any creature to live, others must die, and we are selfish animals which want to live.
What we can do is this:
1. Remain aware of those who die for our sake, and mourn them
2. Prevent as many deaths as we can, by reducing our consumption of all kinds of goods
3. Do our best to make their lives good. If they can live in a habitat rather than a zoo, free-range rather than factory farmed, if we can make green corridors for them to travel down, keep their water sources clean…all these things can help pay the debt we owe them for their lives.
Let me conclude by saying: it would be a good thing if we ate less meat. Go ahead and eat less meat. I respect you. Do so for personal reasons, ethical reasons, cultural reasons, environmentalist reasons, health reasons. But do not let yourself believe that the environmentalist or the ethical arguments are logical reasons to eat no meat at all, and do not believe that by becoming vegetarian you have fulfilled your obligation to help our society live in an ethically and ecologically balanced relationship with the other creatures on this planet.
