After stumbling across this story last week, I realized I’ve been skirting the meat issue a bit on this blog, so I thought I’d take some time to address where I currently stand.
I’ve read a ton of articles arguing for or against meat. My final podcast from Semester in the West touched on the fact that the label “grass-fed” alone doesn’t say much about the impact meat has, just as “organic”, “free range” and “natural” can mean next to nothing. Even when you look behind that label, sides aren’t always clear. I’ve heard people argue that cows contribute more to climate change than the entire transportation industry. I’ve heard people say that cows can sequester carbon and have a net positive impact on climate when raised properly. Killing animals is wrong, but monoculture agriculture kills animals (and people) too. Ranches destroy habitat. Ranches save land from being bulldozed and developed. And with China and India’s rising middle class, the decision that a handful of largely privileged Americans make to go without meat isn’t going to tip the scale, change the world or end factory farming.
I think everything I’ve read, all the arguments I’ve had with my strongly vegan friends and my militantly pro-meat environmentalist friends, can best be summed up by this article’s title: Reasonable People Disagree About Eating Meat.
After flip-flopping for a while on meat’s environmental impacts on Semester in the West, I basically came to the conclusion that eating animals does more harm than good for the planet and the food systems I want to see. Major exceptions to this generalization would be game animals (shooting a deer sucks for the deer, but doesn’t do much harm to the planet since the deer was wild and would have existed independent of your desire to eat it) and animals raised at home (me having goats in my backyard and feeding them food scraps seems unlikely to destroy the planet). Given that I don’t own a gun or know how to hunt, and the fact that Whitman College has a policy banning pets which can’t survive being submerged under water for at least ten minutes, neither of these options seems to be feasible in the near future. On the flip side, I’m well aware that factory farmed meat is an ecological nightmare for literally dozens of reasons. So when I refer to eating meat, I mean meat produced by someone else in a grass-fed, contentious way (think Thundering Hooves or Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm).
My reasoning behind this came largely from the energy, water and oil needed to grow hay and other feed crops for cows (even grass-fed ones), the global warming issue and the fact that grass-fed cows don’t seem to be scalable to the extent required to feed growing world demand. Yet even after concluding this, I kept eating meat. Not much (1-2 times per month), only local beef, and never anything factory farmed. But still: I wasn’t a pescatarian/vegetarian anymore.
Where do I stand now? Basically, in a number of somewhat contradictory places:
-I believe that eating meat on average does more harm than good for the planet as a whole.
-I don’t believe that raising animals specifically for the purpose of killing them for food is wrong. I do object to not treating those animals like living beings who can feel pain while they’re alive. I believe we have a responsibility to be decent to each other (humans and non-humans alike), and that that responsibility is all the more true for a living being you’re intending to eat. I also believe we have a responsibility to ensure the continued survival of the communities of any living things we’re eating (whether they’re plants or animals)—traditional salmon fishing tribes in the Pacific Northwest made damn sure salmon didn’t go extinct from overfishing.
-Animals are an essential component of sustainable agriculture; without them, you don’t have fertilizer (except the kind made from fossil fuels). So some animal involvement in food production is necessary, but eating those animals doesn’t necessarily follow, and even if it did, those animals wouldn’t come close to satisfying global demand for meat.
-While I didn’t grow up eating meat and don’t “need” it, there are occasionally times in my life when eating a small piece of dead cow satisfies me in a way no other food would at that moment. Beyond feeling full, I feel nourished, which means I’m much less likely to binge on chips and cookies later.
-Dairy production is almost as environmentally destructive as meat production, and it seems like avoiding the issue to examine meat in this much detail without critically examining industrial dairy production as well.
-Given that my individual choices won’t change anything, I’m fine being 100% non-vegetarian while traveling, for the sake of cultural immersion (you can’t sample traditional Ghanaian cuisine very extensively as a vegetarian), sensitivity to hosts (if a Ghanaian/Ecuadorian/insertothercountryhere-ian has graciously prepared food for me out of an income which is several orders of magnitude below mine, the last thing on earth I want to do is refuse said food because of reasons that have more to do with American industrial agriculture than anything else) and practicality (with language and cultural barriers and the lack of familiar foods available in Ghana, finding something that’s safe to eat, filling and enjoyable is hard enough without excluding meat from the list). That said, I still get vegetarian food whenever possible, mostly because after 12ish years of eating that way, a lot of meat just weirds me out.
-While my individual choices won’t matter, there are ripple effects to any behavior. The increasing use of the label “vegetarian” has caused a whole lot of people to re-think their meat consumption who otherwise might not have. And as a vocal person who thinks, talks and blogs about food, I feel responsible to set some kind of good example about what I eat. So even if I’m ultra-conscientious about when I do eat meat, my visible choice to eat it at all lends support to the idea that eating meat is ok, which is not true 99% of the time given our current food system. While the screening processes and limits I have are clear to me, they’re often not to outside observers. I got home from Semester in the West and had various relatives, who had read all my blog entries about meat/food, offering to take me to steak dinners. When I explained that I wouldn’t be able to eat anything there, I got responses like, “But you eat meat now!” The fact that yes, technically I did, but only beef and only from one ranch in Eastern Washington took about five minutes of explanation.
Given all this, I’m not sure what to do when I’m back in the US. The fact that my one sustainable ranch, Thundering Hooves, has closed, adds to the quandary. Since I won’t really be home for more than a month until January, I’m not going to worry too much about choosing a “side” or finding an acceptable middle ground. I do know that I want to look much more critically at dairy and egg production, which will probably provoke another dozen blog entries. But until then, I’ll keep eating my way through the menu at Koforidua’s famous Linda Dor restaurant—meat included.
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