For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat...1/3 of one?

Here's an article I wrote for our student-run newspaper. If you know me outside the blog, you've probably already read it, but, ah well. Beyond being published in the paper, it's also been my writing sample for just about every internship I've applied for lately, so pretty soon every single person in the world will have seen it.

For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat...1/3 of one?
April 16, 2008
Confession: I’ve never been a very good vegetarian. When I saw the facebook group “For Every Animal You Don’t Eat, I’m Going To Eat Three”, I laughed and briefly considered switching back to eating meat just to have that on my profile. Pet peeves of mine include self-righteous vegetarians, anyone who has ever been on a raw diet, and anything involving the words “fruit fast” and “healthy”.
Now I’m considering switching back to the omnivorous side of things, and not just because I want to microwave myself whenever I meet people who think fruit juice fasts/vegetarianism/five daily infusions of soy and flaxseed oil will make them Crazy Androids of Health and Fitness. Not because I miss meat, either; because after 14 years, the entire thing really does sound a little... gross. But I’ve begun to feel that the best eating plan is probably the one that meets all of my nutritional needs on its own. Strike me down, ok maybe, but after more than a decade of popping iron and B12 supplements, I’m kind of thinking that maybe my body knew what it was doing back in the day when it craved meat.
Lately, meat’s been getting a bad rap. The New York Times, for instance, recently ran an article titled “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler”. I’ve heard so many people who love meat suggest that they’re going to become vegetarians for the “good of the environment” or for their own health that if I hear it one more time, I’ll probably let out a really good primal scream.
As far as it goes, though, the vegans aren’t crazy. Slaughterhouses are full to the brim of excessive atrocities and violence that often borders on sadism. Happily, though, while the horrific information in all of those vegan pamphlets is pretty accurate, the problem is NOT necessarily with meat. The problem is with the meat industry and the government. Laws are vague and poorly enforced, and the production of meat is on such a large scale that profit is basically the only bottom line. Billions of animals are turned into meat each year, and the great majority is produced in factory farms. However, some smaller producers actually give their animals pretty decent lives, with space to roam and real food to eat; the kinds of lives where they get to keep all their body parts and don’t need to be fed antibiotics every day to be kept alive. These are, for many reasons, probably the people from whom you want to be buying your meat. Local, traditionally-raised meat is better for the environment (less oil used—since it doesn’t have to be shipped or trucked across the country—means less pollution). It’s also looking like it’s better for you. Animals that have been shot up with hormones, antibiotics, and chemicals are going to make meat that is also full of hormones, antibiotics, and chemicals. Animals that live and eat in the ways they have for centuries are going to make for meat that is much more similar to meat in past centuries (centuries when, we hear, diet-related health problems were much less common, despite the inclusion of meat in people’s diets).
Not all producers who advertise as “free-range” and “organic” actually raise their animals in conditions that we would normally associate with these words; the law gives a lot of loopholes for labeling. A good rule of thumb is the more local the production of the animal, the better. Of course, this isn’t always true. But Safeway and Trader Joe’s = huge corporations who can profit from buying large amounts of cheap meat from the Midwest. Meat producers who sell at farmers markets and directly to co-ops = people who have to make the decisions and deal with the animals, and who as part of a niche market, have a much bigger investment in treating their animals in a respectful way.
If you specifically don’t eat meat because of how you feel about eating animals, then most of this article isn’t for you. Except, remember that while your approach is a valid one, it’s not the only one. It’s not necessarily the most healthful or the most environmentally or economically sound. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver points out that in many locations with rocky or otherwise unfertile soil, meat and animal products are some of the best sources of food, as animals can turn tough, inedible-by-humans grasses and plants into protein and other nutrients in a digestible-by-humans form. The oil used to ship food to people who live in climates where there cannot be lots of produce year-round is a huge contributor to our growing environmental crisis.
Realistically, not everyone is willing to give up meat. People enjoy eating it. People have been eating it for as long as people have been people. It seems to me that reducing animal cruelty is at least a good first step for vegetarians and vegans who do it for the animals. Encouraging responsible and respectful meat producers, and creating an economically visible market for that meat, is an active step that is just as important (possibly more) than passively taking oneself out of the system. That isn’t to say that all vegetarians should start eating meat, but it is to say that they should keep broad horizons about how to encourage responsible meat-related behavior in others.
And on a final point, yes, meat that is raised humanely is expensive. Super-expensive, in some cases, which is right about where it should be. We don’t need to eat meat every day, and we certainly don’t need to eat it every meal. Buying better quality, better-raised meat is a good way to naturally limit one’s meat consumption to a healthy and natural amount.