For the record, I always felt a wee bit sorry for the vegan dog in "Shirley Valentine."
Consumption of meat in my own diet falls somewhere between two poles. On one end is the place of my birth, my heritage, and on the other is an iconic musician.
Cattle country. It's where I was raised. It's where my heart still lives. That same world Glenn Close brought to screen in "Do You Mean There Are Still Real Cowboys?" still exists. Although we weren't ranchers ourselves we lived among them, cattle and oil a way of life, and ranching was in my blood, ancestors who'd come from England raising sheep and cattle came to the sagebrush of Wyoming to do the same.
Going to the ranch was something we did in the summertime to see great aunts and uncles and second-cousins. We'd seen everything from branding to haying and were well familiar with cattle drives, when friends would be excused from school to help move the herd, often right through the center of town.
Our freezer always had a half a beef in it. It's how we survived, how we got through the winter, growing family eventually of eight. The local grocery which in my childhood centered on a pot belly stove where the locals gathered to swap tales got produce once a week--on Thursday--and often it wasn't more than lettuce, maybe some tomatoes. Because the growing season was short where we lived most other vegetables came from a can, occasionally frozen. Dinner for us rarely did not include meat, and most often was a beef-centered dish, a stack of Wonder Bread with butter to pass, some canned vegetables, mashed potatoes, and the Jell-O dishes stereotypical to my culture. I didn't think much about the animals on the plate until school friends of mine were in 4-H showing their animals at the county fair and it occurred to me how difficult it must be to raise an animal and be attached to it, then offer it for sale as someone's food.
Hunting was just as much a part of the landscape, although we resented the trophy hunters who came up from California and left the carcasses behind. The men in our family hunted deer, elk and other game which always ended up on our table, although I didn't care for the taste of venison or elk or any other game particularly and I never participated in the hunt. It was understood that hunting and fishing were means to provide more food for the table, not bloodsport. My dad made a personal decision to completely stop hunting one day after stumbling onto a wounded pregnant doe. For him, that was it. I always knew where the trout on our table came from, since I'd seen it caught and cleaned.
Moving to Wisconsin after college I ended up in the heart of dairy country where veal was a natural byproduct. I hadn't really thought about it before then, exactly what my favorite childhood dish--breaded veal--was and how it was raised, but got an education in it very quickly in a state where veal barns dot the landscape.
'Vegetarian' was a word I hadn't heard before college. Back then I placed it somewhere in the stratosphere with people who made the pilgrimage to Woodstock or hiked to San Francisco in the Summer of Love and those bald guys in the airports swathed in orange and pink passing out the Bhagavad Gita.
In the 70's, the first person I knew even approximating vegetarianism was musician Bobby Shew who told me over a hotel dinner in the heart of cattle country he'd given up red meat and sugar and recommended I read "The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath." I checked the book out of my college library, loved it, and contemplated how great steak was. Medium rare.
Going meatless for Macca. Over time, my circle included increasingly more vegetarians, people I came to respect for their own decision regarding dietary choices. The person I admired most as a very public vegetarian was the late Linda McCartney. The tale her husband Paul, the music legend, shared publicly about how they made the switch had an impact on me. Rack of lamb would forever be green English pastures with baby animals, the sheep I'd count at night, the lambs my Uncle Hight nursed with love.
I contemplated it more than once and even discussed it with a dietician at Mayo Clinic some years ago during a regular physical, who to my surprise advised against it in my particular situation. I've gone short stretches entirely meatless in my adult life but have never a fully committed vegetarian. Even now, there are times I abstain from meat in the short term but not permanently.
I thought again as I was at the Paul McCartney concert in Miami in March, I could do this, I could go meatless. He doesn't seem to be suffering for it, and is an ardent spokesman for it.
Still, it's meat that got my pioneer ancestors across those plains a hundred years ago. Going meatless wouldn't have been practical for them, nor would it have been practical for my family at the time and place we were living.
It seems to me as a culture we have evolved to the point where there are dietary choices that didn't exist before largely because those who went before, who were dependent on the flesh of animals, made it happen. One can be a healthy vegetarian where it might not have been possible a hundred years ago. One can be an omnivore, as I confess happily to being, and still try to be a responsible citizen of the planet. But we owe the ability to make that choice to carnivores who went before us.
My cousins still ranch in the high Uintas, raising livestock for show and for the table, as do many people I've known, an important part of the local economy in the state known both for cowboys and for giving women the right to vote. It's a rugged state still, shaped by its past. You won't be judged for going meatless there like you might have been fifty years ago, but your choices might be somewhat more limited.
It isn't easy being omnivorous, isn't always popular, and one is constantly faced with the realities of how the flesh of animals comes to the table. Never was this more keen in my own life than at a bullfight in Acapulco several years ago, when a young Mexican boy came up to me after the bull's passionate fight for life and asked me, in Spanish, what was to become of the bull.
"McDonald's," I told him. He shook his head, clearly dumbstruck, not understanding.
"Hamburguesa."
top and third photos: My cousins still working cattle in the high Uintas of southwestern Wyoming (photo courtesy Diamond X Guest Ranch/Proffit Ranch)
second photo: Dairy farm in southern Wisconsin, with rows of veal barns center left of photograph. (photo: Kathy Riordan, taken with permission)
bottom: In happier times, Sir Paul and Linda McCartney (photo: chainedand perfumed)
On the Web:
Ethics of Eating Meat - Wikipedia
What Do You Know About Beef? - Wyoming Cattlewomen
Veal from Farm to Table - USDA
Why Macca Won't Touch a Big Mac
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Comments
The thing is, as much as our normal meals centered around meat, these veggie dinners were seen as a special treat and we all enjoyed them a lot.
Also, I was wondering why the young Mexican boy might have asked you about the bull's fate instead of asking the people (perhaps his family) with whom he came. Were you a buyer for McDonald's?
I've hunted, and have eaten my own kills, and fished too. It would be too easy to ignore how food got to our table, so I respect it.
I have niece who is vegan, her motto is to not eat anything with a heartbeat, face or mother. In that case I'd be apologizing for the pansies I ate at her mother's wedding. Even so, the choices today make it easier to go without.
The young Mexican boy appeared to be wandering around, and unaccompanied by anyone near us. I can't tell you why he asked me the question. I suspect he thought I'd know, or maybe I looked non-threatening.
I didn't go veg for Paul McCartney, but for my darling Jim, who was a "rock star" at the time I met him. We're both eating meat again, me probably more conflictedly than him.
As usual, a nice piece of writing.
From what I've read, it's healthier to have a veg diet, though you do have to take care to get the proteins and certain minerals. But the occasional meat dish won't harm anyone. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
The process of using grain to produce meat is incredibly wasteful: the USDA's Economic Research Service shows that we receive only one pound of beef for each sixteen pounds of grain. In his book Proteins: Their Chemistry and Politics, Dr. Aaron Altschul notes that in terms of calorie units per acre, a diet of grains, vegetables, and beans will support twenty times as many people than a meat-centered diet.
As it stands now, about half of the harvested acreage in America and in a number of European, African, and Asian countries is used to feed animals. If the earth's arable land were used primarily for the production of vegetarian foods, the planet could easily support a human population of twenty billion or larger.
Points and facts such as these have led food experts to point out that the world hunger problem is largely illusory. The Global Hunger Alliance writes: "Most hunger deaths are due to chronic malnutrition caused by inequitable distribution and inefficient use of existing food resources. At the same time, wasteful agricultural practices, such as the intensive livestock operations known as factory farming, are rapidly polluting and depleting the natural resources upon which all life depends. Trying to produce more foods by these methods would lead only to more water pollution, more soil degradation, and, ultimately, more hunger."
A report submitted to the United Nations World Food Conference concurs: "The overconsumption of meat by the rich means hunger for the poor. This wasteful agriculture must be changed--by the suppression of feedlots where beef are fattened on grains, and even a massive reduction of beef cattle."
"If you could feel or see the suffering, you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat."
---actress Kim Basinger
Describing his reaction to a visit to a slaughterhouse, Canadian tennis champion Peter Burwash wrote in A Vegetarian Primer: "I'm no shrinking violet. I played hockey until half of my teeth were knocked down my throat. And I'm extremely competitive on a tennis court...But that experience at the slaughterhouse overwhelmed me. When I walked out of there, I knew all the physiological, economic, and ecological arguments supporting vegetarianism, but it was firsthand experience of man's cruelty to animals that laid the real groundwork for my commitment to vegetarianism."
Ethical considerations moved Benjamin Franklin, who became a vegetarian at age sixteen. Franklin noted "greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension." In his autobiographical writings, he called flesh-eating "unprovoked murder."
The poet Shelley was a committed vegetarian. In his essay, "A Vindication of Natural Diet," he wrote, "Let the advocate of animal food...tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood...Then, and only then only, would he be consistent."
Shelley's interest in vegetarianism began when he was a student at Oxford, and he and his wife Harriet took up the diet soon after their marriage. In a letter dated March 14, 1812, his wife wrote to a friend, "We have foresworn meat and adopted the Pythagorean system." Shelley, in his poem "Queen Mab," described a world where humans do not kill animals for food:
"...no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,
Which, still avenging Nature's broken law,
Kindled all putrid humors in his frame,
All evil passions, and all vain belief
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death disease and crime."
"It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action," wrote Mohandas Gandhi. "I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage." Gandhi wrote several books in which he discussed vegetarianism. His own daily diet included wheat sprouts, almond paste, greens, lemons, and honey. He founded Tolstoy Farm, a community based on vegetarian principles. In his Moral Basis of Vegetarianism, Gandhi wrote, "I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it...I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants."
"...the whole point of life is to harmonize with everything, every aspect of creation. That means down to not killing the flies, eating the meat, killing people or chopping the trees down."
---George Harrison
Kim Bartlett of Animal People in Clinton, WA, similarly writes:
"Something to think about: We believe that the Golden Rule applies to animals, too. We don't accept the prevailing notion that 'people come first' or that 'people are more important than animals.' Animals feel pain and suffer just as we do, and it is almost always humans making animals suffer and not the other way around. Yet in spite of how cruelly people behave towards animals -- not to mention human cruelty to other humans -- we are supposed to believe that humans are superior to other animals. If people want to fancy themselves as being of greater moral worth than the other creatures on this earth, we should begin behaving better than they do, and not worse. Let's start treating everyone as we would like to be treated ourselves."
In the Table of Contents to Rynn Berry's 1993 book, Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes: Lives & Lore from Buddha to the Beatles, Pythagoras is described as an ancient Greek religious teacher. Gautama the Buddha is similarly described as an ancient Indian savant and religious teacher. Mahavira is described as the historical founder of the world's oldest vegetarian religion---the Jains of India. Plato (and Socrates) are described as Pythagorean philosophers who are the founders of the Western philosophical tradition. Plutarch is described as an ancient essayist and biographer, famous for his Lives of notable Greeks and Romans.
Leonardo da Vinci is described as an "Italian Renaissance man; Leonardo is one of Western Civilization's greatest geniuses." Percy Bysshe Shelley is described as a "scientist, classicist, aesthete, Shelley was probably the most gifted English Romantic poet." Leo Tolstoy: "Nineteenth century Russian author, Tolstoy is considered to be the world's greatest novelist." Annie Besant: "Nineteenth century English social reformer and spiritual leader...at once a feminist, a labor leader, a theosophist, a freethinker, a devoted mother and a founder of the planned parenthood movement. She is one of the most remarkable women of modern times."
Mohandas Gandhi: "Indian civic and spiritual leader; inventor of the hunger strike; architect of Indian independence; father of modern India." George Bernard Shaw: "Celebrated wit; peerless music and drama critic; essayist and dramatist of genius." Bronson Alcott: "American transcendentalist philosopher; father of Louisa May Alcott; founder of the first vegetarian commune, Fruitlands." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: "World-class surgeon, pioneering nutritionist, and food inventor extraordinaire. Kellogg invented peanut butter, flaked cereals, and the first meat substitutes made from nuts and grains."
Henry Salt: "Venerable figure in the vegetarian movement; author of such vegetarian classics as Seventy Years Among the Savages, and Animal Rights." Frances Moore Lappe: "Author of Diet for a Small Planet, Lappe's two million copy bestseller put vegetarianism on the map, and awakened Westerners to the nutritional and economic benefits of a vegetarian diet." Isaac Bashevis Singer and Malcolm Muggeridge are described as the first major literary figures in the West to turn vegetarian since Tolstoy. Brigid Brophy: "Noted for her formidable intellect, Brigid Brophy is an English novelist, biographer, and critic of the first rank. She is the first major woman novelist to become a vegetarian."
http://www.raven1.net/seclife.htm
Further experiments showed that plants can sense when a person or animal that might be harmful to them come into the room, even go into a "faint," not responding apparently from fear on some sort of cellular level.
Vegetarians who proslytize from a position of superior consciousness for their vegitarianism are simply deluded animalcentric supremacists, non-comprhensive of the lives lived by plants.
Just imagine the poor shreaking little grasses ripped up from their roots, friends, family and lives by the cud chewing cattle in the fields!
Besides. Cows are dumb. Save a plant! Eat a cow!
Another good one, Kathy. ;)
Save a poor little plant!
I love meat so I just have to compromise. I was a vegetarian for a long time but I eventually went back to fish and chicken, figuring their capacity for suffering isn't nearly as great as cows and other mammals.
Women are still the nutritional gatekeepers in most families and I think it's a decision that should not be made lightly or because it's fashionable.
"And then there's "The Secret Life of Plants"...
"Just imagine the poor shreaking little grasses ripped up from their roots, friends, family and lives by the cud chewing cattle in the fields!
"Besides. Cows are dumb. Save a plant! Eat a cow!
"Save a poor little plant!"
My college roommate John Antypas once poked fun at vegetarians with his friend Richard, in the spring of 1985, saying: "I think it's wrong to kill plants."
I don't mind a friendly poke, but it shouldn't take a college education to realize that people become vegetarian because they're morally opposed to killing animals; to taking the life of a fellow creature.
Your argument that it's wrong to kill plants, along with another argument -- the debunked myth that Hitler was a "vegetarian" -- shows that vegetarianism is still associated with nonviolence in the mind of the public...
...rather than seen as merely abstaining from certain foods, following a peculiar set of "dietary laws", etc., despite the propaganda from the Christian right in this regard.
Your argument seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.
Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.
Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, isn't hard. Plants are incapable of feeling pain. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not.
Animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals actually suffer at the hands of their human tormentors and exhibit such "human" behaviors and feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding, group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy, competition, territoriality, and cooperation.
Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal rights movement and author of The Case for Animal Rights (1983), notes that animals:
"...have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; and emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their being the object of anyone else’s interests."
In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975) suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most." (Singer also debunks The Secret Life of Plants book which you mentioned.)
Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly.
Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!
Humans resemble the frugivorous primates. The healthiest populations with the longest lifespans — the Vilacambans of Ecuador, the Abhikasians of the former USSR, and the Hunzas of Pakistan — live almost entirely on plant foods.
Whereas a gulf of difference can be found between plants and animals, none of the differences between humans and animals seem to be ethically significant. Animals are just as intelligent and communicative as small children or even some mentally defective adult humans. If we do not eat small children and mentally defective humans, then what basis do we have for eating animals?
C.S. Lewis and other Christians have even acknowledged that denying rights to animals merely because they do not exhibit the same level of rational thought most humans exhibit upon reaching full development justifies denying rights to the mentally handicapped, the senile, and many other classes of humans as well.
John Stuart Mill observed, "The reason for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves— the animals."
In his 1987 book, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, notes that "In some ways, Christian thinking is already oriented in this direction. What is it that so appalls us about cruelty to children or oppression of the vulnerable, but that these things are betrayals of relationships of special care and special trust? Likewise, and even more so, in the case of animals who are mostly defenseless before us."
The way we treat animals IS indicative of the way we treat our fellow humans. One Soviet study, published in Ogonyok, found that over 87 percent of a group of violent criminals had, as children, burned, hanged, or stabbed domestic animals. In our own country, a major study by Dr. Stephen Kellert of Yale University found that children who abuse animals have a much higher likelihood of becoming violent criminals.
Some of the greatest figures in human history have been in favor of animal rights. These include: Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Alice Walker, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Browning, Percy Shelley, Voltaire, Thomas Hardy, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Wesley, Victor Hugo, St. Francis of Assisi, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Pythagoras, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Schweitzer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Douglass, Francis Bacon, William Wordsworth, the Buddha, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau.
Patrick Corbett, professor of philosophy at Sussex University, captured the spirit of the animal rights movement with these words:
"We require now to extend the great principles of liberty, equality and fraternity over the lives of the animals. Let animal slavery join human slavery in the graveyard of the past."
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA): animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment.
The animal rights movement should be supported by all caring Americans.
If there's anything funnier in your post than thinking I was making a real plea for treating plants as equals on the moral scale of life with animals, it's vegitarians trying to place animals as equals on the moral scale of life with humans. My post was simply ridicule of that. Nothing more.
I mean if you are a caring vegetarian person, do you condemn your brother or sister because they eat meat? Do parents go to hell because they just miss a hot dog so bad or the corned beef they used to have so many years ago.
Sometimes people are neglected. Do we demand they be vegetarians at the same time we won't join them for lunch, or won't find their jokes funny or just can't agree with them about anything? Do we care in general or is this just about this vegetarian issue?
Animals can no more have rights than a woman can have puppies. If you love animals, pass laws to protect them, give them food and money, or let them sleep in your bed, but don't use the construction "rights" to try to persuade me, because I find that kind of talk absurd.