A few days ago, in a fit of moral honesty, I decided that it is ultimately hypocritical and lazy of me to openly view the global meat industry as ethically fucked up and yet still directly give it my monetary support. I started thinking: seriously, why should I not at least try adopting a vegan lifestyle? In the end I came up with a few reasons:
1) I live in a flat situation wherein food is largely communal, and I think it's unfair for one person in the group to expect everyone else to conform to their dietary restrictions. I have a flatmate who's allergic to bananas, and we still collectively buy those with her money. I can't reasonably request that we all stop buying meat, eggs and dairy with my contribution just because I personally have an ethical problem with it.
However, all going according to plan, next year I'll be living in a smaller flat with a smaller group, and we're considering the possibility of sharing only some of our food/meals and taking care of the rest individually. In that case, I don't think my hypothetical vegan diet would be too restrictive on the flat as a whole. I don't believe in policing anyone's eating habits, and I honestly could not give a fuck if everyone in my flat decides to eat steak every night with a side of bacon-wrapped sausages and fried chicken for dessert -- it's none of my business. Similarly it's no one else's business if I decide to live on tofu, lettuce and vitamin pills for the rest of my life.
2) It's expensive to maintain a healthy vegan diet. By cutting out two food groups, you limit yourself in terms of quick, easy and cheap options for working in protein, iron, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and a few other necessary aspects of a healthy diet. While it definitely is possible to make up for the lack of natural sources of these things, it adds up. I'm a tertiary student in New Zealand, which is the only group in the country that is expected to borrow money just to live. While I would love to be able to buy five or six litres of iron, calcium, and vitamin B12 fortified soy milk every week, it's not financially viable.
3) I don't know how my body is going to react to suddenly being deprived of some of the only nutrition it gets. I can safely assume that any attempt to actually plan meals -- which I would need to do -- would automatically result in a much, much healthier diet than the one I have now. My current diet is the kind that causes people to express surprise that I'm not hideously sick and/or obese. However, there's no predicting individual reactions to a sudden lifestyle change; some people seem to be able to adjust without a hitch, and some end up with rickets and rotting teeth. As far as I can tell there's no way of telling beforehand which is which, even with the help of a dietitian (many of whom are simply stumped when the recommended supplements just aren't working for certain people).
The health problems that commonly occur in the vegan community are exactly that -- problems that occur in the vegan community, usually as a result of cutting dairy products from their diet rather than the no-meat aspect. Because of this, combined with my limited finances and sincere love of woolly clothes in winter, I'm taking a step back from my original proposal and considering vegetarianism as a more viable and healthy option.
II
In my internet-trawling for information, opinions, and various perspectives on the issue of animal cruelty and ways to mitigate it, I came across a number of unapologetically stupid and/or bizarre views.
You're either for or against killing animals for food. Choose one.
This strikes me as incredibly black-and-white, and is invariably the opinion of someone who sees the world in simplistic enough terms to have chosen a side on the matter and denied the existence of the fence entirely. I am neither for or against killing animals for food, because the matter is not that simple. I am against the massive waste of resources, the social and environmental impact of large-scale farming. I am not necessarily against the killing of animals for food. In some circumstances I have no issue with it. Some people find it abhorrent, and that's fine. Some people are happy to raise an animal in good mental and physical health and then take a knife to its throat themselves. I don't see that as abhorrent, I see it as one person taking responsibility for the way they choose to eat.
It is the suffering I object to; while it's true that a herbivore taken down by a carnivore in the wild could potentially suffer much more in its death than a factory-slaughtered animal, that doesn't justify a human causing unnecessarily suffering. If you're going to maintain that humans deserve the right to kill their meals because they are more intelligent, you must equally maintain that humans' intelligence makes them wholly responsible for the preventable suffering of their prey. In a 'civilized' society, suffering is unacceptable, period. It doesn't matter who or what is doing the suffering. If you keep an animal in overcrowded conditions or deny it medical attention or castrate it while it's conscious without painkillers or keep it in an enclosure that is proportionally far too small for it to happily spend its life in, then you are engaging in institutionalized barbarism. That I have a problem with.
Humans are herbivores.
This is just blatantly silly. Humans are obviously not herbivores by any stretch of the imagination and the 'evidence' these people like to offer to support their 'argument' is incredibly selective. Humans are omnivores, which means we achieve optimal health on a mixture of meat-based and plant-based diets. If you're going to try to back up your moral superiority complex with science, please ensure it actually is science, not a selection of disparate facts arranged so it seems as if there might be a correlation between them. At any rate, if you try to exist on an entirely plant-based diet with absolutely no human-developed supplements (not just pills but calcium fortified tofu, vitamin D fortified soy milk, etc), you will develop health problems. Because you aren't a herbivore. Clearly.
If killing animals is wrong, why is it not wrong to kill a tomato?
The imbeciles who ask this question in all seriousness have somehow managed to completely miss the most important aspect of this issue is not the death itself, it's the suffering. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that a tomato plant suffers when a tomato is taken from it, or indeed that it is capable of suffering at all. There is endless evidence, intuitive and scientific, that animals can and do suffer due to farming. Say it with me: suffering is not acceptable. Ever.
You'll never completely stop animal cruelty anyway, so why not just give up?
This is called the 'Perfect Solution Fallacy', which is a logical fallacy that
a) assumes there is a perfect solution to the problem, and
b) concludes that because the proposed solution is not perfect, it is entirely without worth.
To anyone who has rejected defeatism as their overall approach to life, it seems obvious that the actions of individuals alone are not going to have a measurable impact on something as enormous as the meat industry; but it is equally obvious that the more individuals who refuse to support it, the less successful it will be. In this case vegetarianism has been steadily gaining momentum (and strict devotees) over the past few decades and shows no signs of stopping. It has become so common that it's almost unusual to find a Western restaurant that doesn't have at least one vegetarian option on the menu. That doesn't strike me as "no impact whatsoever".
Long story short: people are still stupid, world continues turning, I continue to regret knowing these things.
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