God took pity on me for my lack of an evangelical conversion experience and provided me with one. The only catch is that it doesn’t involve my eternal salvation. It involves my diet. I’ve had a vegetarian conversion.
My Bible for this conversion was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I purchased it on a whim after reading a blog post singing it’s praises. Meticulously researched and skillfully written, it’s less a persuasive essay than an inner dialogue shared with the world. In the end it serves as a sobering presentation of modern meat eating.
Did you know that:
- Over 99% of animal products come from factory farms.
- We’ve modified the turkeys and chickens we eat so much that they are incapable of living to adulthood.
- The average chicken whose eggs you eat lives in 67 square inches of space. That’s smaller than the computer monitor you’re reading this on.*
- Free range? It just means there’s a door somewhere that leads outdoors.
- It’s not uncommon for animals (chicken, pig, cow, take your pick) to be alive during the butchering process because the stunning method fails.
I’ll stop there. There are more facts to present than I have space for. I’d highly recommend that you read Eating Animals or do your own research.
In the end it’s hard to argue with the facts. Modern meat comes from factory farms. Factory farms are almost inevitably cruel and inhumane. Shall I complete the logic?
Bacon is good. Bacon is really good. There’s no denying that. There’s also no denying that the pig you eat the bacon from probably never saw outdoors. It was fed a completely unnatural diet replete with antibiotics to keep it alive. There’s a good chance it was born in a gestation crate not even big enough for its mother to turn around in.
How good is that bacon now?
And this doesn’t even get into the public health, environmental, climate change, or nutrition aspects of eating meat. Not to mention the ethics of eating meat. But let’s leave all that aside.
Knowing that you can eat a perfectly healthy diet without meat, is the cruelty worth it to you? Can you justify it?
One of my favorite passages from Eating Animals is Foer’s response to the accusation that vegetarians are sentimentalists. He politely points out that people who eat meat do so because of tradition and people who don’t because they know the facts of animal welfare. Who’s the sentimentalist here?
Some would say that real men eat meat. I say that real men look at the facts and decide if their actions are worth it. I’ve decided mine aren’t. Are yours?
I’ve asked a lot of rhetorical questions. So does Foer. But there’s a reason for that. No one is going to force you or I to change our diets. There’s no law against eating meat. It comes down to personal choice. A judgment call, if you will. You have to ask questions, of the meat industry, and of yourself. You may not be comfortable with the answers.
I challenge you to give it a go. Ask the questions. Read a book. Do the research. Maybe you’ll have a conversion like me. Maybe not. But at least you’ll know what it means for us to be eating animals.
* If you’re on your iPhone, imagine a space about 6.5 times the size of your phone. Yes, it’s that small.
Tags: animals, cruelty, factory farming, meat, vegetarianism
James, it is wonderful and coincidental that you have made the decision to abandon factory farmed meat. I read eating animals over the last month and also cannot justify eating meat any longer. It has been easier than expected. Tofu is actually quite good. What is your opinion of ethically, truly freely ranged raised meat?
I have no problems with truly humanely raised meat, though I’m not sure if I would eat it myself. Why take a life if I don’t need to? We are getting humanely “raised” eggs, which is good. Those are easier to come by than meat.
I always thought tofu was bad for some reason. Just goes to show what stereotypes our society has.
In my opinion, a drastic change in eating habits isn’t a solo undertaking for those who are married–presumably your wife is OK with this? (I’m assuming you shop, cook, and eat together.) Maybe she already was a vegetarian?
I don’t think we can criticize eating meat as a general concept, since both our evolutionary and our Biblical ancestors did so, under God’s command. That being said, you do have a point about ugly conditions in which commercial meats are raised.
Lastly, how do you plan to handle dinner invitations? I can be very awkward if one is invited over for dinner then refuses to eat what has been prepared.
As soon as I read Eating Animals I shared it with Stacey. Thankfully she felt the same way as I did after reading it. In fact, learning to cook vegetarian has been a fun activity together!
Yes, it is hard to criticize the general concept. But the general concept of meat eating has become so corrupted as to be almost unrecognizable. Finding truly humane meat is very difficult (and expensive!), which leaves vegetarianism as the only option if you wish to avoid cruelty.
Dinner invitations are tricky, but the course of action is fairly simple. As soon as you are invited (and not a minute later), you specify that you are vegetarian. Most people will be fine and can handle it. If their reaction is clearly confusion about what they could possible serve, you can offer to either go out together, have them over instead, or bring a main dish to share. It’s common enough these days that almost everyone will be able to handle it.