I quit eating all non-bird meat when I was fifteen because I read that you could feed six people for their life span on the grain required to feed one cow for its. Obviously this is inefficient and I realized that, by simply not eating it, I could make a small difference. I began to understand food as more than just sustenance, more than just an enemy of my waistline. Food was political.
Within a few years I had friends in the punk scene, and the granola scene, most of whom felt that vegetarian wasn't going far enough and you were a brutal boorish caveman unless you were vegan. I often thought about changing my diet in those years. Vegan food, when they shared, was delicious and I admired their principles and work that went into the diet. But I never made the switch in part because most of them were either overweight from eating too much processed junk food, or like my roommates, were pallid, spindly and sickly. So, understanding that eating a truly healthy vegan diet required knowledge and effort I was not prepared to make at the time, I continued to eat eggs and dairy. I ate chicken if I was in a restaurant, though I never bought it in the grocery store or cooked it myself.
In my mid twenties I decided that plants, as living beings, are no less or more important than any of us animals. It would be rather arrogant and arbitrary to assume they were. So the argument regarding the cruelty of killing and eating animals no longer held sway with me. We are all a part of nature, we all have roles to play within nature and it's important to our fulfillment, whether animal or vegetable, to be allowed to live out those roles to their logical conclusion.
What is cruel, by my measure, are the lives most animals are subjected to while they are being raised. What is objectionable are the genetic modification and poisons plants are subjected to in the name of cheap, mass production. What is unconscionable is the damage we are inflicting on our only food source, the planet, and our bodies by not accepting that we are actually a part of nature.
I once overheard some co-workers having a self righteous discussion about hunters and hunting. "I eat beef but shooting a deer is just unnecessary and cruel," was the crux of the argument that went on for twenty minutes until I couldn't bite my lip for another second.
"Actually, eating a cow that has spent his life trapped in a feeder barn being fed hormones and antibiotics is unnatural and cruel. Hunting your own food for the meat of an animal that has lived a good life roaming the forest and foraging like it was meant to can bring dignity to both you and the deer."
Urban life has created a false illusion, a disconnect. A deer has become Bambi, while a cow or pig is not even an animal, it is "beef" or "pork". This is part of an even greater illusion that we can control nature or at least separate ourselves from it. We are, somehow, above it. We use language, and butchers, to distance ourselves from our food. We build dams and flood arable land to save cement cities. We spray insecticides and herbicides that weaken, make sick and kill whole ecosystems in attempts to control what we deem ugly and undesirable, all in the name of having what we want, when we want it, at prices far less than we can pay but at costs far greater than we can afford. What the planet has offered in good faith for our use we spoil, corrupt and abuse.
A few years ago I discovered that a big part of why I had been so sickly for several years was an intolerance to a grain protein called gluten. So, after fifteen years, I have made adjustments to my diet. Unable to eat the most commonly available grains I began to eat more animal products including meat. I still don't eat as much meat as the average North American and, when I do, I try to look for halal meat, organic pasture grazed cow or bison, or organic free roaming chickens. At the moment it's next to impossible to know how the dairy cows who contributed to my yogurt or cheese were treated. I wish these products were easier to find and the cost less prohibitive because more North American consumers would demand ethical food.
I think a season spent in nature, possibly three-spring through fall- should be a requisite part of high school. Without it well-meaning, bleeding heart urbanites, hippies, yuppies and punks are at risk of developing dangerous pretensions about their place in the universe. I support vegetarians and vegans and their right to choose not to eat other animals but I think their accusations that carnivores are barbarians is a misguided conclusion based on the denial of our true nature as animals and the even more sinister assumption that we are god(s).
