Steak, Chicken, or Tofu?

A meateater's empathy towards vegetarians

I have spent many hours talking with my vegetarian roommate Vasu about the ethics of eating animals. When I' m eating dinner, I bite into my ever so succulent carnitas burrito not thinking about the poor pig who squealed and squirmed while succumbing to the butchers knife. But come the late night hours, when the pork is deep within my belly and the taste long gone from my mouth, I'd start thinking. I'd have extended discussions with Vasu which generally lead to an intense scrutiny of one anothers arguments.

My roomate and I, we both understood that we weren't going to actually convince the other to change their eating habits. It was just entertaining for us to try to come up with some philisophical argument having to do with ethics of eating meat. We would spend hours critiquing eachothers' arguments, or coming with with new arguments all together. The purpose of this essay is to explain one rather strange sounding idea I had that seems to make sense. So lets begin...

The main "problem" with eating meat is that you have it kill an animal to get the meat. Well, I suppose you could cut meat off of a cow, let it heal, and then repeat. But thats just nasty, probably not profitable for ranchers, and needlessly torturous to the cow. So lets ignore that possibility. Because humans are all high and mighty, sitting on top of the food chain, our instincts tell us okay for us to kill an animal to eat it. A vegetarian might say that it is bad to kill an animal just to eat it, and I might agree to some extent.

For the purpose of this argument, we must now assume something: I am not willing to give up meat completely (that is, burgers just taste too good), but I am willing to work with the vegetarian towards his or her goal of not killing or harming animals. One way I could do this is to eat less meat. Two slices of turkey instead of four. A hamburger and fries instead of a double burger. Less meat means less killing, which means less harm done to animals, right?

Enough qualitative stuff, lets get quantitative! I estimate that I eat a 1/4 pound of meat each day. Assume a typical cow yields 400 lbs of meat, and a typical chicken yields 10 lbs. I ain't no butcher, so these are just rough estimates. That means if all my meat is beef, it takes me about 5 years to kill a cow. Or on an all chicken diet, I kill a chicken every 6 weeks. This result surprised me. Those people from PETA handing out flyers on library walk had me convinced I was slaughtering animals by the hundreds! And I suppose I would be, if all I ate was shrimp. But even if I gorge on steaks, I might kill a cow every few years! I don't feel so bad after all.

The point is: Shouldn't I (A meat eating veggie-sympathizer) always try to eat really big animals? This seems to minimize the total number of animal deaths, and deaths is what vegetarians are trying not to cause, right? Or is number of deaths not a good measure? Most people would rather a fly die than a lizard. Rather a lizard than a squirrel. Rather a squirrel than a horse. So maybe "total number of deaths" isn't such a great metric. What else to use then? Clearly there must be some type of good metric, otherwise why be vegetarian in the first place?

We could measure the nervous system response of various animals by noting the firing rate of pain receptors. That might give an indication of the total anguish an animal is in, but I'd have to consult a neurophysiologist on this one. What is our goal, anyway? Are we trying to minimize anguish, or deaths. I know not all vegetarians are the same, and I suppose each one might have a different answer. But it might behoove PETA to discuss this issue and put up a unified front. I seriously think, given that some people will never give up meat, it makes sense for PETA (or any vegitarian) to argue that eating whales is better than eating shrimp, if your trying to minimize animal deaths.

So I've pretty much made my main point. I found this conclusion interesting, as did my roomates. If you also found the previous page amusing, keep reading and I will ramble on and on about my personal views of meat eating, as well as some other quirky arguments and hypothetical questions to a vegetarian.

My personal viewpoint goes something like this. Look at the gobal picture. Is eating meat bad for ecosystems? I want the earth as a whole to be healthy. Perhaps this is selfish, because the reason I care about the earth being healthy is humans' dependance upon a healthy environment. I don't care so much about an individual animal, though I don't like watching videos of animals being killed.

It turns out eating meat is bad for the environment. I remember from biology in 10th grade some rule about ecosystems. The higher up something is in the food chain, the more energy (from the sun) it takes to produce that thing. Most green plants convert sunlight directly into sugars or starches. Animals then eats these plants to create muscles and fat. This process of going from starch to muscles and fat isn't 100% efficient. The animal has to forage and digest the food. So only a fraction of the energy that was put into the plant ends up in the animal tissue. Thus, we can see it most likely takes more energy to make a pound of beef than a pound of grain. This is a rough analysis with a few holes that I care not to fill in, but it turns out to be empirically true.

Anyway, I found out a guy at Cornell, Micheal Pollan, who studies these things. He claims, and with evidence and analysis to back it up, that to make a pound of beef requires 145 times more fossil fuel that it takes to create a pound of grain. Further, burning down forests to make room for grazing grounds for cows is clearly detrimental to the environment. Also, by using the energy argument above, we can conclude that its a less efficient use of the land to take an acre and make cows for meat than to take an acre and make grain or corn.

I have heard some vegetarians use this as a justification for thier choice of diet. Sounds good on the surface, but its got some flaws. I care about the envirnment. I'll pay the extra few bucks for food grown with sustainable farming methods. And once I have a real job, I'll pay the extra lots of bucks for organicly fed chickens and cows. But a vegetarian must understand that no matter how organically certified their soy beans are, some rodent or worm or something was killed in growing the soybeans. Trees were probably burnt to make room for the soy beans, getting rid of habitats for animals. Soil (with happy little worms living just below the surface) was tilled by spiraling blades of worm-slicing steel. Then again, the worms nervous system is much less developed than that of a cows, and a dying worm is probably in less anguish than a dying cow.

While the simple (but certainly difficult) act of not eating meat is a step in the right direction, I think there would be some benefit in giving more thought to the end goal. The end goal isn't to not taste meat, it is something else. If its to minimize damage to the environment, then don't just stop at meat. Find out which vegetables are the most sustainable, which ones require the least amount of fertilizer. Perhaps some types of vegetables cause more damage than some types of meat. Given that a bottle of pomigranet juice costs as much as 2 lbs of beef, this could very well be the case. If the goal is to minimize animal deaths, then tell your friends to eat cows rather than chickens. If the goal is to minimize the animal suffering, then encourage your friends to buy meat that has been properly slaughtered. Kosher meat, by the way, supposedly causes virtually instant unconciousness to the animal, inflicting little or no pain.

Here are some other questions to ponder. Perhaps I will address them in greater length sometimes.

1) Is it worth raising a cow just to kill it? That is, if you purposly let a cow and a bull breed so that they have offspring, and you plan on raising those offspring in a good environement (think California Cheese commercials, open green fields), and then kill them quickly and painlesslsy, is that okay? The cow gets a whole life of happyness and very little suffering before death. Credit for raising this question goes to Dylan McNamara, the TA for Complex Systems at UCSD.

2) Question to vegetarians who don't eat meat becaues they are against killing animals: Will you eat a sea sponge?