No More Meat

It’s tough to be a vegetarian. Not only are humans conditioned omnivores, but refusing meat often labels a person an environmental extremist.
It’s been over ten years since I last ate beef; I have never eaten seafood, lamb, rabbit, or anything other than pigs and poultry. But three weeks ago, after extensively studying the process by which animals are readied for human consumption, I decided to quit meat “cold turkey.”
Recently, professors and scientists have joined environmentalists in the vegetarian cause. Two University of Chicago professors, Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, claim the amount of energy and greenhouse gases required to produce even the smallest amount of suitable animal protein are astronomical, and the meat and fishing industries are main contributors to global warming. In a 2005 issue of Physics World, British physicist Alan Calverd announced we could cut 21 per cent of carbon emissions by eliminating production of livestock. Calverd said, “Worldwide reduction of meat production in the pursuit of the targets set in the Kyoto treaty seems to carry fewer political unknowns than cutting our consumption of fossil fuels.” So why isn’t anyone listening?
I blame barbeque pork ribs.
Barbeque pork ribs are tasty as hell. It is easy to grab a rack of ribs and forget about the land used, carbon emitted and animals tortured while indulging on them; the only immediate problem the customer has is the sticky fingers the ribs cause.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations states, “The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral reefs. The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.”
Not only is livestock polluting our atmosphere, water, and land, but meat may be directly causing major health problems in consumers. “Hormonal substances” are widely used by industry for the “development of more lean meat with less fat deposited on the meat”, “more growth using less feed,” and, “reduced cost for the cattle producer and less expensive beef for the consumer,” according to the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and Beef Information Centre.
The effect these hormones have on humans has been the subject of great debate in the health and scientific communities, and many groups claim the injected hormones are carcinogenic. Widespread illness has also been known to crop up in our mass production livestock, such as mad cow disease and avian flu.
On top of health and environmental issues, with expanding human populations, it just isn’t practical to devote vast sections of land to food that is then fed to food; it is a sort of worldwide double handling. Why not just stop at the grains and beans, instead of passing them on?
Then there is the humane aspect to this meaty issue. Chickens, for example, seem pretty stupid. They have small, beady eyes and act as though they are just walking vegetables. They even keep running around when their heads are cut off. I, as a devourer of many chickens, used this excuse and justified my diet with the “stupid animal” argument.
Every living thing on this planet, including chickens, barnacles, and people, only gets one lifetime, one chance to experience anything and everything they can. Humans may have conquered other animals, but they need to keep respect for other creatures that share the planet. Keeping a bird in small cage all its life, chopping off its beak, and then stringing it up on a production line and boiling it alive is not respect. Separating calves from their mothers and shacking them up in pens to be fed on all-liquid diets before slaughtering them is not valuing life. And manipulating animals in painful ways so they may die for our dinner is wrong.
So, how does one know what is ethically edible? Free-range, cage-free, organic—who regulates what? Which meat is more environmentally friendly? Which one saves more lives? Who can be trusted?
It’s much easier to simply cut meat out of a diet all together—it really isn’t that hard.