Back to veggie

After a year and a half of thinking about meat, I’ve made my decision. Starting when I get home from Ecuador, I’m going back to being a vegetarian.

When I first went vegetarian, I was in third grade. I was motivated by moral absolutism and fervent idealism. I believed that animals should not be killed to feed humans when we were clearly capable of living without taking life. Over the years, my reasons shifted to a general protest of factory farming. I read Fast Food Nation sometime in middle school and was so grateful that I was largely absolved of responsibility for the horrors described by Eric Schlosser as he toured slaughterhouses and food chemistry labs. I didn’t want to be complicit in the torture of animals, the exploitation of a largely undocumented Latino workforce, the carbon emissions that come from beef, the overflowing waste lagoons that border CAFOs.

Now, I’m returning to the same label, but with a vastly different underlying ideology. I’m fully cognizant of the horrors of agriculture. I know soy is an environmental nightmare that’s clear-cutting Amazonian rainforest and supporting the Cargill-Monsanto empire. I know that the prairies of the American West have been destroyed to feed the world, that a field of wheat is ecologically no different from a barren, eroding hillside that was once home to an old-growth forest. I understand that animals are necessary for sustainable food production, because the only way we’re going to be able to keep feeding the world is with permaculture, designing systems based on natural processes. And I know that while Americans eat more meat than is healthy for them, humans were designed to eat flesh at least occasionally.

But I also know that the world isn’t black and white. I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs, that solutions aren’t as simple as they seem, that an action can be good, bad or somewhere in between depending on timing and context. And in the food system we have right now, I believe that eating meat does more harm than good for the world as a whole. Most animals, even happy local ones, are fed crops that are grown in the same problematic ways that cause so many environmental problems around the world. Unless they’re managed very specifically to avoid this, cows and other livestock have a dramatically larger carbon footprint than plant-based foods. And because I have the means, knowledge and physiology to be a healthy vegetarian, I’m going to do it.

I’m switching back fully aware of another uncomfortable truth—my individual choice to be a vegetarian will never end factory farming. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until the left demonstrates an ability to think beyond personal choices as a venue for activism. But I don’t believe that the impotency of our individual actions as tools for change absolves us completely from personal responsibility. I own a cell phone which contains coltane, a mineral that’s found mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has been ravaged by war and conflict for years, largely because of desires to control the country’s lucrative mineral resources. Would choosing to not buy a cell phone end the rape and murder that shapes the lives of so many people in the DRC? No. Does that mean that there is no blood on my hands? Absolutely not.

The modern world is rife with stories like this one, and the modern consumer is often painfully aware of the horrors they’re supporting. The socially conscious youth of my generation have been bombarded with guilt-inducing facts about sweatshops, toxic manufacturing processes, the horrors of resource extraction, climate change and social justice. We know that most things we buy are killing the planet, and we also know that trying to avoid buying anything problematic ever is nearly impossible without making a full time job of it. Most of us aren’t willing to invest the time and energy to be perfect—something I don’t believe is the mortal sin many would make it out to be—so we pick our battles, choose the few we really care about, and promise ourselves that we’ll work to build a better world to make up for it.

For me, factory farming is one of those battles. When I was eight, I didn’t want to be complicit in this system. Now, at twenty, I understand that even as a vegetarian, I’m still guilty. Even if I choose to go without meat, I’ve never done anything to challenge the industrial meat infrastructure, whether it’s liberating animals from a slaughterhouse or writing a letter to Congress asking them to make changes to the Farm Bill. Which isn’t to say that factory farming is our fault, collectively—the road to hell has been paved by a very specific set of people with very specific goals, and most of us weren’t among the lucky few. But as long as our society continues to say that these institutions and systems are acceptable, anyone who doesn’t exhaust every available effort and resource to stop them bears some of the burden for their existence. Plus, we (almost) all eat industrial agriculture. Even if you remove the burden of meat, I’m still complicit in pesticides and horrible labor conditions and absurd farm subsidies and the existence of Monsanto.

What this all boils down to is a vegetarianism based on premises of moral conflict rather than moral clarity. Last time I made this choice, I was saving the world. Now I know I’m not, but I’m still unable to close my eyes at the sight of a feedlot, unable to turn away and pretend I don’t know what I know when I eat. Part of me is humble, knowing my actions won’t make a dent in the problem. Part of me still craves the moral superiority of knowing that no animals are directly tortured to provide my food. Part of me wants to lecture and evangelize. Part of me is afraid to go back after tasting and loving my first steak (age 18), my first chicken breast (age 20) and my first bacon in over a decade. Part of me still can’t decide if fish are going to count, if I’m willing to give up my absolute favorite food (sushi) just to make a statement that almost no one will hear. I’ve spent hour after hour of my life thinking about these things. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while have seen me write the equivalent of a full-length novel about the ethics and politics behind meat production and vegetarianism. At the end of the day, though, my choice is simple. I think about cows lined up for slaughter, waiting to have a bolt driven through their brains before they’re hoisted up by one leg to have their throat slit, and something deep inside me just screams no. It’s not the most well thought out argument in the world. But for me, it’s enough.