Why I've Decided To Be A Vegetarian

Since the seems to be coming up with increasing regularity now that I've decided to follow a vegetarian diet (though it is hardly a surprise that the graph of people asking me about my vegetarianism should have this enormous spike ensuing from about three weeks ago), I feel compelled to spell out my reasons for making a substantial change in my regular diet. Most of these you are probably at least passingly familiar with, since most of us have heard the arguments or reasons from vegetarians you have either met or imagined. Actually, that is probably why I really feel compelled to write this explanation. I want to make clear what reasons of those I found compelling, and also those that I did not. To put them in short order: I made this decision for personal health, economic, ecological, and evolutionary reasons.

I'm sure you don't need me to belabor the point on the negative health effects of meat. You've heard that meat is high in fat, which shoots the calorie count of meat way up there compared to other food. You know it is high in other 'bad' fat related things, cholesterol, saturated fat, and not particularly high in very many nutrients* (*most but not all of it; for my purposes, when I say meat I mean industrially produced beef, I cover the other stuff indirectly later) outside of iron in the case of beef, and other amino acids (protein) that are hard to get from other sources as easily. As someone who is overweight, and has been for a long time, I have often known that I would have to make lifestyle changes before I lost my excess weight. Cutting out a particularly calorie dense food is one of many ways that I've decided to go about my goal of dropping weight without gaining it back. Further, diets high in meat are looking to be at least correlated with very high rates of lots of bad things, like cancer, heart disease, etc. Given my already astronomically high (relatively speaking) likelihood of developing pancreatic cancer and dying before I reach sixty, I figure that nixing foods linked with higher rates of life-threatening diseases was a good idea.

An additional benefit of dropping meats from my diet is that I will then turn to other food sources to make up the large calorie deficit that has opened. Eating more vegetables, fruits, etc. is correlated with the opposite effects of typical meat products. Produce also takes longer to prepare and consume. This allows a person to feel full after eating a sufficient amount more readily, rather than eating largely unnecessary calories and suddenly feeling uncomfortably full. Again, with my dual goals of being less overweight and decreasing my chances of acquiring life threatening diseases, this is a good idea.

Meat is expensive. Not outrageously so, at first blush. Chicken thighs go on sale for as little as a dollar a pound sometimes. I used to buy loads of them whenever I found such a sale. Produce, on the other hand, is either cheaper by the pound in most respects, or provides more volume per pound, being less dense. Couple this with something that I've already pointed out, a reduction in weight and reduced likelihood of illness, and comparatively, the cost of meat increases in the form of higher insurance premiums, decreased quality of life (joints don't hold up well when you're carrying extra weight, and feeling sick sucks), more and more expensive medical bills as your life continues, the price of new clothes to cover your ever more ample frame, increased laundry costs (you can only wash so many clothing items at a time, fewer when you have bigger clothes) higher food bills to feed your expanding caloric needs, reduced fuel economy from your vehicle if you have one, public shame, fewer sexual partners, the list goes on. Being big costs more money than being small. You use calories more efficiently, fit into more places, and feel healthier when you are at a weight more appropriate to your height.

Ecologically speaking, meat is a terrible way to derive calories from our environment. Behold the comparative protein yields and CO2 production. There are a host of other issues in the general environment (I recall an article about the water quality in the Carolinas near pig farms being awful, but don't remember any other details) most of which I won't delve into, because they are related to my last point.

"Evolutionary reasons? What in blue blazes is he getting on about?" It gets better though. You see, I knew most of the other stuff but was continuing to blithely ignore those problems. Why shouldn't I? Everyone else is. They didn't bother me all that much. Enter Frank Herbert, Jared Diamond, Michael Pollan, whoever it was that broke the colony collapse explanation, Overcoming Bias, and some other ones I'm sure I'm forgetting. The lion's share of the credit must go, however, to Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee for my recent decision. The others formed a backdrop and foundation, but it was those recent readings that gave me that last push.

If you are familiar with that rogue's gallery, or know me well enough, or are just so gosh darn clever (good for you!) then you probably know where I'm going with this. For a long time (since reading Dune, consciously, anyway) I have found myself to be very concerned with human beings as a species, their survival, and relation of those choices to their survival. Ostensibly, one can take the "free market capitalism" outlook on human beings and say that human beings, when left to their own devices, will make the best decisions individually for themselves, and somehow, magically, everything works out _just_ _fine_. Human beings survive and flourish and everyone is happy.

History, I would argue, does not bear this out at all. We have managed to survive, certainly. So go us! But we've been doing so in a manner similar to how natural selection operates: blind, halting, with many false starts that waste resources. We have the ability to know better. In The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond quotes from Arthur Wichmann's (making this a quote by me of a book where the author is quoting another author, would that I could add more layers of quoting) treatise on the history of the exploration of New Guinea, and the continued repetition of mistakes made by every expedition. Wichmann, famously, concludes the three volume treatise with the line, "Nothing learned, and everything forgotten!"

My foundation of previous works and the colony collapse explanation now come into play. If you weren't aware, we've arrived at the conclusion that, as Unknown Armies put it, "you did it." Bees were used as part of an industrialized food production scheme based on monoculture. In order to get economies of scale really profitable, we grew lots of the same thing in one place. We used bees to pollinate those fields, but the problem with monocultured fields is that they tend to bloom all at once and have nothing much for bees to eat in the interim. So bees got mechanized, and were shipped from place to place. Malnutrition arose in bees, since they evolved consuming pollen from a variety of plant species, and were suddenly reduced to single food sources, very often the same corn that produces the high fructose corn syrup that is now blamed for you being fat, your children being disrespectful, milk curdling, and calves being stillborn. Then they started dying. Rather simple really, and illustrative of what I picked up from my foundation and recent pushes. There is a basic lesson that we haven't seemed to learn yet even though we see the results of it repeated again and again. Nature abhors monoculture.

"Okay, fine. But that has nothing to do with eating meat, stupid." Ah, but that's where you're wrong (also, don't be so rude, I didn't call you stupid). You see, thanks to agribusiness and the American government's continuing support of massive subsidies for agribusiness (not farmers, since they are largely squeezed out by the regulations put in place by our government; ostensibly to protect us from unsafe food, but much more effective at keeping small producers from being financially successful), meat is heavily dependent on the massive monocultured crops of corn (and antibiotics) that our flyover states produce. Corn is the cheaper to use as feed than a healthy mixed diet for the kind of meat production that agribusiness uses at CAFOs.

I have a rooting interest here, which I will allow Judas to state for me (just click play, stop after he completes his sentence, or don't if you like the song). While I'm disillusioned enough to think that I'm not going to change the world, I still have enough idealism in me that I don't purchase food from Whole Foods after their CEO spoke out in favor of barbarism, won't buy food from businesses that donate profits to Focus on the Family, vote, and now, resolve to avoid the purchase and consumption of meat generally. I make exceptions for farm-raised meat products, since they are generally not participating in the agribusiness model that I find so objectionable, are healthier (monoculture again rears its head, cows fed not much more than drugs and corn turn out to be less healthy for you than grass-fed cows that have a variety of grains to choose from, or buffalo for that matter), and I have to give myself an out for my roommate's delicious cooking.

Of course, I still eat eggs, dairy products, fish, and don't refuse meat that is offered to me in general out of a general feeling that it is more polite to accept offerings from others than refuse them, especially when my opinion is that refusal to purchase on my part is what matters. Meat that has already been purchased without allowance made for my particular consumption does not fall under such purview. Also, meat is delicious and I'm still accustoming myself to going meatless. I do aim to reduce my consumption of dairy products at some point, those being nearly as bad if not worse when it comes to ecology, but in the mean time I feel I will be more successful not going whole hog all at once, and cheese is delicious.

It's not ironclad, I admit. Fairly lazy thinking overall, or at least lazy writing, since I think I had more in the tank, but that hits the main points rather well enough, and this is quite long enough, and it is quite late enough.

After a night on the town with co-workers, I found myself wending my way down 14th Street headed for McPherson Square. Walking by a formerly Lutheran now non-denominational church, I saw a man ahead of me leaning against the low brick wall alongside the church. Another person walking in the other direction slowed down as he walked past the man, then hurried past. I assumed that the leaner had asked for money, and prepared my response ("I don't have any cash on me"). He didn't ask me for money.

He was gnarled. He smelled bad, and clearly his bone structure was not at all what it should be. On his head was a hat, with what looked like a Marine Corps logo of some kind. His face was healthy looking, remarkably so considering the malformation of the rest of him. It was too dark for me to see his teeth well.

"Can you help me walk home?"

I was taken aback to hear such a request. I paused. I had enough time before the metro stopped, and even if I didn't... well he was bringing himself to a standing position, his hand outstretched, and I didn't have it in me to tell him no at that point. I could afford a cab ride home if it took too long.

The joints of his hands were swollen. I was glad that it was cold and windy out, since it made it hard to smell him. His right leg was not at a normal angle to his body. I don't remember the litany of bodily ills he chanted to me as we made our jerky way. He told me that he had fallen twice already. We had to stop several times so he could rest.

His name was Mark. After walking him to an apartment building to find the automatic glass doors locked, I wondered if this was a particularly elaborate hoax. We stood outside, him in front of the door marked exit, me hanging back and wondering what to do. I tried to move him toward the door marked as the entrance, but he seemed to be determined to stand on the wrong side. I could see a booth off to one side, and the shoulder of a security guard.

After a wait of about twenty seconds, Mark pressed against the door and looking in, me standing uncertainly, the security guard shifted her bulk and began to walk toward the door. I was pretty sure at this point that my night was about to get interesting. The guard was going to tell him to go away and stop trying to get in. I was going to take him on a grand tour, or make some excuse and go home.

She opened the door, declared, "You had better find your pass. I'm not going to keep letting you in." Then she turned around and began to walk back to her station. Mark, unphased, hobbled inside. I called out a "Have a good night Mark." to him as he went in, feeling rather offended that a building security officer would have it in her to be so rude to a resident of the building who was so obviously not entirely capable of living on his own but was anyway.

I don't consider myself to be a particularly good person. There are plenty of ways that I don't live up to the standards I would consider as the threshold for decent behavior. But I do things like assisting random nearly disabled men to walk home instead of leaving them on the street in the middle of the night. At this point my thoughts came fast and jumbled. I was relieved that I had helped that poor man at so little cost to myself. I was angry that he was living in such a state. I was angry with the security guard. I wondered if I had any right to be angry with someone for not being nice enough to another person without knowing more about the circumstances.

As I turned the thoughts over in my mind, I turned to a more general line of thinking. I was reminded of a passage from the bible:

‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”

Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’

This, among many other passages, are what constitutes what I would consider the "true" teachings of Christ, and one of the ones that is very often ignored by those people who claim to be Christians. This stunning hypocrisy was one of the most significant wedges that drove me away from acceptance of religion when I was young.

As I mulled that over, I walked by the offices of the Republican National Committee. Not two blocks away from it are broken remnants of human beings. They have the unconscionable gall to go about the business of trying to secure political clout for th

This is the party that has claimed Christianity for itself. The party that says they believe in freedom from government interference. The party that worships at the altar of Reaganomics. The party that hates the poor.

Reagan appointed Milton Friedman, the father of the idea "natural rate of unemployment," to his board of economic advisers, and when Paul Volcker stepped down, Reagan appointed a disciple of Ayn Rand to be Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. To Greenspan, keeping unemployment high isn't a temporary exigency to reverse stagflation. According to Reaganomics, high unemployment is absolutely essential to capitalism. For the masses, Reagan himself talked about "Morning in America," but if you read the business pages and the economics press, the Reagan team was perfectly blunt. Yes, hundreds of thousands of middle class people were intentionally reduced to grinding poverty or worse. It was also tacitly understood that this policy was going to be devastating to African Americans in the working class; as the old saying goes, when the white economy gets a fever, the black economy dies of pneumonia. Last hired, first fired; that kind of thing. The Reagan team and their admirers have never openly confronted the implications in terms of public health, family stability, the effect their policies would have on children, or the thousands who've died over the years because of Reaganomics -- frozen to death under overpasses, murdered in over-crowded homeless shelters, or just the traditional way out for the obsoleted male, suicide. But even if they had, they would have justified the thousands of human sacrifices they've shoveled into the jaws of Moloch because those sacrifices prevented a bigger problem. If we hadn't killed those thousands of people, if we hadn't ruined the lives of millions of people over the years since then, then the US economy would never have recovered from stagflation. The resulting economic collapse would have ruined and killed many more. A few were sacrificed to save the many.

How were the American people persuaded to accept this? They were taught to hate the poor. They were taught that having a job is a precious privilege, and one that only the most special people deserve. The American people were carefully taught that the 6% of the adult population that have done nothing wrong but still can't find even part time or temporary work are unemployed because they just aren't good enough. It was their own fault. If only they'd been a little better at clawing their way to the top, it would have been somebody else, somebody less worthy than they, who'd be living in a refrigerator carton under a bridge on the waterfront. To a certain type of person, this was a very comforting message, because it absolved them from any feelings of guilt, and from any sense of obligation towards the needs of the down-trodden.

- From Infamous Brad

Dear Republicans, Libertarians, and anyone else who doesn't think they should have to pay taxes for social safety net programs: As you have done to the least of these, so have you done to me. When you declared war on the poor, you declared war on me, and you declared war on humanity itself. You are monsters. You sicken me.