Evolution

I grew up in a steak and potatoes family.  We had meat with most meals.

Today I am a vegetarian who eats mostly vegan.  I also try to eat local and organic, but that can be expensive, so sometimes it’s either local or organic.

Even as a vegetarian, I didn’t used to think it was wrong to eat meat.  I didn’t see meat-eating as inherently problematic.  I saw our meat industry as a horrible torture-machine and I stopped eating meat because I believe that animal treatment on the vast majority of American farms is grotesque and inhumane… it is torture.  We torture our food.  Read “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Or watch “Vegucated.”

And then I learned that animal agriculture is the leading contributor of greenhouse gases.  If we are taking environmentalism and climate change seriously, we need to be cutting back our consumption of animal products.  Animal agriculture contributes more to greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector combined (planes, trains, automobiles, boats…).

And then I learned that plant based lifestyles lead to a healthier body.  Meat consumption is associated with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cancers, most food-based disease outbreaks, heart disease, and many other health problems.  In fact, after I stopped drinking milk, my bad cholesterol went down significantly (according to my doctors).  I have naturally high cholesterol that I may need medication for later in life.  Or maybe I won’t need it.

I know we have sharp-ish canines, but we have plenty of vestigial stuffs that our bodies don’t use because evolution is imperfect.  Many other herbivore animals have larger canines than we do.  Whether or not we can digest meat, our bodies digest plants better and we don’t need to eat meat.  As I mentioned, people with plant-based diets are generally in better health.

More recently, I have come to believe that eating meat is wrong.  Killing other animals for food is wrong.  I think it is seminary and my increasing rejection of hierarchies wherever I find them.  It is an act of cruel arrogance to eat animals.  

If tomorrow, our planet was invaded by aliens who wanted to enslave or eat or destroy us in some way, what would we say?  Why should they not?  We justify locking up, torturing, breeding, and killing animals despite the reality that very few people need to eat meat.  Because they are lesser beings, right?  Because we are more intelligent and we have the power, we think it’s okay.  Non-human animals are not as smart.  So when the alien race shows up and is smarter and more advanced than we are, why should they not kill us?  

I don’t want to be eaten or tortured by someone who thinks they are better than me.  I don’t want to be complicit in cruelty and torture.  I don’t want to contribute to these systems that privilege humans and our shitty desire for the way meat tastes in our mouths over the health of our planet and the integrity of other sentient beings.  

I think it’s wrong– inherently wrong.  Irresponsible and cruel.  

That is my truth.