Breaking Vegetarian: The Ethical Implications of Eating Meat

In a recent column for NPR, Barbara J. King asks experts from the Humane Society, Farm Sanctuary, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals a question on many people’s minds as they make the decision to become a meat-eater again: does being vegan or vegetarian really help animals? As an advocate for ethical omnivorism, I was curious to see what the latest views are on supporting the well-being of food animals through dietary choices.

What I found most revealing in the panelists’ responses was how familiar they were, as they are many of the same ethical considerations I articulate when asked about the guiding principles of my omnivore diet: namely, the treatment of livestock animals in factory farm conditions, and the negative environmental and human health impacts of those factory farms.

I became a vegetarian for many of the same reasons: I decided it was wrong to participate in such a harmful system in exchange for some culinary pleasures. I spent the next seven years as a vegetarian, boycotting the meat industry, and researching additional ethical considerations related to food choices. In general, many vegans and vegetarians are concerned with not doing harm through their diet, and with making what they see as compassionate choices for life on their planet. And what I learned in that time is that nothing about eating animals is simple, black-and-white ethics.

Paula Lee, author of the recent memoir Deer Hunting in Paris: A Memoir of God, Guns, and Game Meat, says it’s important to remember that “all eating involves the death of animals, even vegan diets, because animal and human death is everywhere and cannot be avoided, no matter how carefully you’ve constructed your personal cosmological order.”

For example, as a vegetarian, I often purchased boxes of frozen meat substitute products—soy burgers and fake chik’n nuggets—which I discovered were often subsidiary brands of multinational corporations like Smithfield or Tyson, that own and operate inhumane animal feeding operations. I read Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland and learned that even produce sold at alternative grocery chains is picked by underpaid workers in near-slave labor conditions.

For so long, I had assumed I was maintaining a diet that caused less suffering, but my vegetarianism had blinded me to the myriad other ethical dilemmas that were a part of my eating choices. I started wondering whether not eating animals was the only, or even the best, way to make such a compassionate choice.

Antonia Malchik, a writer and former vegetarian, remembers similar realizations: “How, I thought, could I pretend that not eating pork from a locally-raised pig, while at the same time eating soy products whose cultivation has destroyed massive rainforest habitat for all kinds of animals could actually be considered an ethical choice?”

I was still a vegetarian when I moved to Iowa for graduate school, right into the belly of the industrial agricultural beast. I was surrounded, most of the time, by wide expanses of corn and soybean fields, most of which, I knew, would be used to feed livestock animals. I was saddened, thinking of how many bushels of healthy, diverse vegetables could grow in that same nutrient-rich soil. I didn’t have to drive too far to find livestock processing facilities, nondescript grey buildings surrounded by electric fences, or feedlots, half-mile-long pits of mud and feces where droves of cattle stood idly swatted their tails.

But I also saw farmers who weren’t participating in that food system. Who were, in fact, as opposed to and disgusted by it as I was. Farmers like Nick Wallace, whose growth hormone- and antibiotic-free cattle roam on acres of carefully-chosen grass species, and are slaughtered in a specially-designed, stress-free environment. Farms like Flavor of the Sun, whose heritage breed chickens roam in rotation through grass and wooded environments, receiving a high-quality diet of insects, grains, and berries, while supporting and regulating the natural ecosystem.

In summarizing the panelists’ responses to her question about whether not eating meat saves animal lives, King writes, “animal rescue is not as much about filling up sanctuaries with animals saved from slaughter, as it is approaching our entire food system with fresh eyes.”

This was exactly my goal when I decided to started eating meat again. I wanted to move beyond boycotting a food economy whose practices I found abhorrent, and move towards supporting what I see as a burgeoning food economy recentered on small-scale, local, sustainable farming, some of which does involve raising livestock animals. I decided that, by investing in these sources of meat production, we can attempt to offset the suffering implicit in any act of eating.