Veganism is not the solution

I posted a version of this (ok, let's call it what it is) rant on facebook in response to someone else's response to an op-ed article in the times, entitled "Animal, Vegetable, Miserable" by philosophy professor Gary Steiner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html?_r=1



I know it's not fair to just quote a sentence (I encourage you to at least quickly read the article), but this sums it up for me:



"The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds."


He then goes on to say that being a 'pure' vegan is very difficult our in "meat-crazed" society (his word, but I can't say I disagree). Perhaps the difficulty lies in repressing the instincts of the most successful predator the earth has ever seen. I also don't disagree with his philosophical argument for respecting the sentient lives of all creatures, but I think that it is an incomplete view of what and how we feed ourselves. He ignores some basic biological facts that pertain to our place in the large and wonderful ecosystem of Gaia. I see veganism and its motivating guilt as a symptom of our industrialized system of feeding ourselves, not a solution to it. Steiner insinuates that to eat a vegan diet means you are concerned with the origins of your food, but many vegan food products (I'm mostly thinking of fats and proteins) do not take into account the seasonality or local availability of a given plant. It's deemed "good for the earth" simply because it's free of animal products, but is something that grew in a climate far from our abode, processed to the point of being unrecognizable, preserved with chemicals, and/or covered in several layers of disposable packaging really something to be proud to eat? Our complicated food environment requires more nuanced criteria than the black and white of an animal-free diet. The mere fact that bacon bits are considered 'safe' for ANYONE to eat (but - they're vegan!) frightens me. And that mango-avocado-banana-cacao smoothie a New Yorker can enjoy drinking even in the cold months of the year? Fashionable, vegan, and tasty, for sure, but possible only due to energy intensive transportation and refrigeration systems, not to mention the thankless labor of many third world people. Oh, and that banana plantation probably replaced what was pricelessly biologically diverse rainforest. How's that for a guilt trip?

Many of the arguments for the alleged superior health of a vegan diet are based in the decisions the FDA pronounced as nutritional law in the 1970s after hard corporate lobbying to demonize saturated fats. Their goal was to sell more of their soy and corn based products (the cheapest and most available food sources, thanks to subsidies). New science has shown that saturated animal fats are not the cause of heart disease or obesity, and that encouraging the American public to base their diet on these two mass produced grains has lead to our myriad of societal health problems. Traditional diets always include animal products, because animals are amazing resources of the one thing we crave the most: fat. When we don't eat enough fat, we often try to fill the void with the second most nutritionally dense food: sugar. The so-called "French paradox" (how to they get to eat all that cream and still be skinny?!?!) makes sense when you realize that a person whose diet is rich in nutritionally and calorically dense foods is going to feel psychologically and physiologically satisfied, and less likely to munch away on empty carbohydrates. (If this makes you wonder about my sanity, check out Sally Fallon's book "Nourishing Traditions" and prepare to have everything you thought you knew about food and health turned on its head.)

Yes, the industrialized production of cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys is disgusting. The monoculture of genetically altered grains grown with synthetic encouragement is equally forced and unnatural. The methods of industrialized production are only one way (unfortunately an appallingly common way) to bring and take the life of an animal for the sake of human food, and I simply can't bring myself to buy the idea that humans aren't supposed to eat animals. Women lose and therefore need to ingest too much iron to be totally reliant on plants (show me a vegan woman and 99.9% of the time I'll show you a case of anemia), and meat is the most available source of it for our digestive tract. Vegetable forms aren't at all as readily absorbed - a very interesting book on the subject of human evolution, which discusses our dependence on iron, is Sex, Time, and Power by Leonard Shlain. Cows evolved a digestive tract capable of turning grass into iron rich protein, and that is something that sheer human will power will never accomplish.

What compassionate, intelligent humans do is study patterns in nature to learn how we can live on this earth without depleting its resources. Grazing animals generally range over a large area, and are never forced to take a second taste from grass that hasn't had the opportunity to grow back after the initial bite. Industrial cattle aren't fed grass at all, are forced to attempt to digest the same genetically altered grains that are making the rest of the US population very sick. Apparently the cow's digestive tract hasn't evolved fast enough to digest the high sugar content of corn, and cattle fed this diet have to be fed anti-biotics just to live long enough for slaughter. But are these facts alone enough to say that eating beef is immoral? Grasslands that are responsibly grazed sequester carbon, and essentially create beef from the energy of the sun. Joel Salatin calls this "Salad Bar Beef" and he's written a book by the same name, describing how intentional rotations of grazing areas dynamically improve the health and fertility of the land. The "beyond organic" farm that the Salatin family operates, Polyface, is a beautiful example of a reasonable and humane way for people to raise animals for human consumption. Their website: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

The amount of life that exists on a microscopic level in the soil is mind boggling. Billions of tiny creatures exist in every tablespoon of healthy soil. Annual crops, like soybeans, require that the soil be tilled every year, even multiple times a year for the process of planting and harvesting to take place. The mass murder of these soil micro-organisms as their whole world is flipped upside down could probably be written off by vegans as acceptable because they are "non-sentient" lifeforms. But these life forms make ALL OTHER LIFE POSSIBLE. Without them, no trees could grow and produce fruit, no grass could create their seed heads, no bean could create a nitrogen rich environment in its wake. The only way to foster these very important parts of our planet is to leave the soil alone as much as possible. Planting long term crops in a mixture of species, in the form of food forests and grasslands, mimics the way nature has fed her animals since animals had more than one cell. With this knowledge, would you rather have a glass of raw milk from a cow grazing on perennial grasses, or a glass of factory created soy juice? I can tell you which one would win a taste test....

Steiner complains that there are few people willing to make the commitment to eliminate animal products from their lives, because the world is saturated with them. I find it telling that all the vegans I've ever met are city dwellers who have little to nothing to do with the production of their food. With organic methods, the most reasonable way to increase fertility is to incorporate animal poop in to the soil. Small farms the world over have traditionally raised plants and animals in symbiotic concert, and eating those animals becomes another part of this self-supporting loop, not a cruel act of murder. The abhorrence of vegans to the death of an animal for the sake of food demonstrates their utter disconnection with a true life cycle, and I suspect a fear of death in general. When I buy organic meat, eggs or butter (and I do every week because we're not yet near being able to feed ourselves), I'm supporting locally and family owned farms that are trying to survive in an environment that strongly favors corporations who farm with nothing but profit in mind. When I use a knife to cut open the guts of an animal I intend to eat, I have a distinct reverence and awe for the life that was, and an incredible amount of gratitude for the transmission of that life into my own. Just can't get that feeling from a jar of coconut oil. The more difficult choice, I'm afraid, leads back to the theme the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" explored to the utmost degree: to forswear all foods that are beyond the scope of our knowledge and reach.