Veg-O-Lution

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Common Ground, July 2008

<http://www.commongroundmag.com/2008/07/index.html>

 

http://www.commongroundmag.com/2008/07/vegolution0807.html

 

 

Veg-O-Lution

 

 

/Thanks to the twin drivers of personal and planetary health, our

hyper-carnivore culture may be taking a left turn/

 

 

By Gregory Dicum

 

" Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by

growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined

animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume

enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant

greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and

other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast

swaths of the world's tropical rain forests. "

 

A peta newsletter? No --- that's from the /New York Times/. At the start

of this year, in a long article entitled " Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, "

Mark Bittman, a leading food writer for the paper, laid out the

environmental case against meat production.

 

It's no secret there's a greenrush going on --- a re-evaluation of the

way our civilization works in light of certain inconvenient

environmental truths. While real change has only just begun, this new

perspective is circling us back to the wisdom of some of the oldest

concepts around. I'm particularly encouraged to see environmental

arguments for vegetarianism becoming part of mainstream conversation,

because they are the very reasons I gave up meat nearly ten years ago.

 

For millennia, vegetarianism has been an ethical matter, based on the

idea that living beings deserve to live. In every era, in nearly every

part of the world, the idea has percolated: imposing suffering on living

creatures diminishes one's own life. For much of our existence, we've

had to weigh that truth against the exigencies of living our own lives.

Killing an occasional pig, or living by hunting, was the best option for

generations of our ancestors.

 

But our modern civilization has removed many of the constraints we once

faced. It has, in effect, provided us with the means to transcend

biology --- to choose how we want to be in the world. And more urgently,

the side effects of this heedless abundance will soon force us to

choose: if we keep chewing our way through rainforest burgers, then we

won't have rainforest for long.

 

One Mouth, One Message

 

Nearly a decade ago, as an environmentalist, I came to understand there

was an innate hypocrisy in using the same mouth to espouse

sustainability and to consume the fruits of environmental devastation.

It actually happened to me at a farmer's market: I was perusing the

pamphlets at an activist's table, nodding in agreement with him as he

explained the unbridled horrors of milk production. " Yeah, " I said to

him, " dairy is the worst. " Then I realized I still held the stick from a

Peace Pop between my teeth.

 

So I became a vegan. I gave up eating anything derived from animals. No

more burgers, obviously, but also no more sushi, no more cheese, no more

honey. I stopped buying leather (although I continued to use --- and

still use many years later --- leather items I already owned).

 

It was liberating! But it was also frustrating. I had no grudge to bear

against the mass of humanity, eating meat in ignorance --- perhaps they

had not heard how damaging the stuff is, on so many levels. But my

fellow environmentalists? I remember vividly, attending barbecues and

seeing real environmental heroes --- impeccably-credentialed Earth

First!ers, just down from the treetops --- gnawing on ribs. Bringing it

up in those circles --- " how can you call yourself an environmentalist

and eat meat? " --- was met with the same sort of defensive derision

vegans got from the mainstream.

 

To be fair, it's unreasonable to expect any other response with a loaded

question like that. Nothing is more personal than what we put into our

bodies. Somewhere deep in our psyches " what you're eating is disgusting "

turns into " you are disgusting. " (And part of the problem is, of course,

that it's true.)

 

But still: less than two years ago, I was unable to convince the editors

of a major environmental publication I regularly contributed to that

maybe it would be a good idea to do a story on meat's footprint --- a

story that would have been far less hard-hitting than what eventually

ended up in the Times.

 

I myself had known the facts for many years before I stopped eating

meat. I had seen the films. I had even visited slaughterhouses. The

reality of the abattoir did not bother me, at least not enough to put me

off my meat. The killing of an individual animal has always moved me to

a twinge of remorse, but tender flesh on my plate, for most of my life,

helped me get over it.

 

After I became a vegan, a suite of changes came over me: I became

lighter, finding a new stable weight, I felt better, my bodily systems

worked more smoothly, and this: Simply because I had stopped being

complicit in their slaughter, I came to see animals in a different way.

I no longer had a need to rationalize at every meal, and I gradually

came to see the essential truths of the ethical arguments for veganism:

of course animals feel pain. How could they not? Of course they want to

live, and to enjoy life. Anyone who's lived with a pet knows as much.

But there's a difference between knowing and feeling, and no longer

having to defend my psyche against my actions meant that I came to feel

the reality of the animal experience.

 

Eating is the most intimate relationship with the planet: it is bringing

the universe into our bodies, and collaborating with it in the making of

those bodies. The fact of nutrition renders the interconnectedness of

all things obvious. We create the world, and our selves in it, a forkful

at a time.

 

Vegetarianism is the New Prius

 

2002 was the previous high water mark for vegetable-based diets in the

American media. In that year, /TIME/ magazine's cover story " Should You

Be a Vegetarian? " laid out the personal health reasons to choose

vegetables over meat (there are many, starting with far lower risks of

some of the top killers in America: heart disease, cancer and diabetes).

 

For most of human history the protein, fat, iron and other concentrated

nutrients in meat were a rare treat. Today, in our time of unsustainable

abundance, protein, fat, salt, sugar --- all the things our bodies are

programmed to crave --- are far too abundant for us to eat with abandon.

We have unlocked such a cornucopia that millions now eat themselves to

death; according to the /Journal of the American Medical Association/,

some 400,000 Americans die each year from " poor diet and physical

inactivity. " From the point of view of early humans, that is a stunning

achievement.

 

Since the /TIME/ story, the mainstreaming of veg diets has evolved into

a whole parallel universe of fake sandwich meats, vegan cheeses and

imitation stuffed turkeys. It's become hip: when Victoria Beckham was

photographed clutching a copy of /Skinny Bitch/ last year, the vegan

diet book became a bestseller. New vegetarian restaurants open all the

time, and not just in big cities: veg cafes are springing up from coast

to coast. In many areas, particularly the cities of the West Coast,

nearly every restaurant has at least one veg option on the menu. Michael

Mina, the celebrity chef's eponymous two-Michelin-starred restaurant in

San Francisco, features a permanent vegetarian tasting menu alongside

its more traditional fare. And nearly anywhere, it's no longer a

struggle to explain what you will and will not eat.

 

It's a mock-chicken and egg-replacer virtuous cycle: more availability

means more people can choose a veg lifestyle, and more people choosing

not to eat meat means there's a bigger market for alternatives.

 

A new survey by /Vegetarian Times /estimates that 6.2 million Americans

over the age of 18 are veg --- that's nearly three percent of the

population. More than a million are vegans. The twin drivers of personal

health and environmental consciousness have created a powerful engine

for change.

 

Just two years ago, meat was the inconvenient truth of Al Gore's

Inconvenient Truth: the film, and the personal actions it proposed to

head off climate change, ignored the biggest human-caused contributor

---animal agriculture --- and the most obvious step --- not eating the

stuff.

 

This spring, in a report called " Putting Meat on the Table, " a

commission formed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins

school of Public Health, and chaired by a former governor of Kansas,

concluded that industrialized animal agriculture is on a trajectory of

" increased environmental damage, worsening public health, dismal animal

welfare and a grave outlook for rural communities. " Last year, the

United Nations study " Livestock's Long Shadow " estimated that animal

agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas

emissions --- more than transportation. In 2005, a University of Chicago

study ( " Diet, Energy, and Global Warming " ) estimated that the difference

between a vegan diet and a typical American diet is equivalent, in terms

of environmental footprint, to the difference between driving a big suv

and a modest sedan, moving Huffington Post blogger Kathy Freston to dub

vegetarianism " the new Prius. "

 

But it's even better than a Prius; it's something you can do right now,

at no cost beyond what you ordinarily spend on food. For most Americans,

it's far easier to give up meat than to give up driving. And it's far,

far easier to reduce meat by half than to reduce driving by half.

 

Plate-by-Plate

 

Unlike ethical vegetarianism, which calls for a complete end to eating

animals --- killing is killing, after all --- the environmental

argument, like the health argument, allows for incremental steps.

Reducing meat in the diet, even without eliminating it, is better for

the body and for the environment. And even if it does not put a complete

end to animal suffering, it helps reduce its scale. It is an accessible

entry point to the veg life, through doable, small steps: plate by plate.

 

It's happening right now: Michael Pollan's advice on diet --- " Eat food.

Not too much. Mostly plants. " --- has become conventional wisdom

overnight. According to that /Vegetarian Times/ study, forty million

Americans are currently trying to reduce meat in their diets and have

regular meatless meals.

 

It's a movement that lives in small, personal choices made hundreds of

millions of times a day. Changing our own behavior in response to

rational insight might be the only human quality that definitively sets

us apart from other animals. But it's a very hard thing to do --- it is

a struggle between our instinctive and our higher selves.

 

I won't pretend going veg is simply a matter of swapping tofu into

long-cherished recipes. Or that, moral questions aside, the molecules in

meat dishes cannot simply taste great. Or that on rare occasions I

haven't shamefacedly indulged a craving for anchovies. There are clearly

strong evolutionary reasons why we innately enjoy the flavors of chewy,

savory protein.

 

So choosing veg is wildly optimistic: it is making ourselves into who we

want to be, and proclaiming that conscious change on a global scale is

something we humans just might be able to pull off. And that would be

nothing less than an act of intentional evolution.

 

Think it can be done? It starts the next time you sit down at the dinner

table.

 

/Gregory Dicum lives in San Francisco, where he enjoys boosting demand

for vegan entrées at fine restaurants./

 

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