Home Fire #9 - Reasons to Veg

Home Fire

Reasons to Veg

I have recently, after two or 18 years of deliberation, adopted a vegetarian diet. Of all my changes in the last few years, this may be the one with the most impact on both my daily life and the lives of others.

It Began Innocently Enough

Almost two years ago, I started leaving meat out of our meals as a way to save money. It worked. Protein occurs in nearly every edible plant but is most dense in beans, whole grains, and nuts. These are way cheaper than meat. It was easy enough to switch to whole wheat spaghetti and leave off the meatballs and to wrap black bean burritos in whole wheat tortillas. Everything was familiar, and within months we were eating meat only once or twice a week.

As always, a simultaneous motivation was to lighten our footprint. Eating lower on the “food chain” uses less water, fewer fossil fuels, and creates less pollution. A pound of beef from the grocery store takes an average of 435 gallons of water to produce, whereas a pound of wheat takes 151 gallons. This is according to www.beef.com, the website of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Further, almost 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions in this country come from waste “lagoons” at factory farms. (That one’s not from beef.com.) Estimates of agricultural petroleum usage range from 20% to 33% of the nation’s total oil consumption; half of that is used in feeding and processing animals. Of course, eating local and organic will also reduce the resources and pollution represented on your plate.

At this point, I had little understanding of just how atrocious and harmful factory farms are to the environment and how much of the country’s meat comes from them. (The answer is more than 90%.) I just knew that eating grains meant skipping the step where protein is processed through another living being before I ate it. By that summer, the only meat in our house was some tilapia once or twice a month, the occasional can of albacore, and grass-fed cows’ beef sold at the farmer’s market.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein

Streaking Yellow Arteries

Coincidental with the seasonal closing of the farmer’s market, I discovered my bad cholesterol was high. So, when the market closed, that was the end of red meat in our house. It was time to get serious about nutrition and weight loss. I started reading whatever I could find that would make me not want to eat junk. (The Crazy Makers, by Carol Simontacchi was particularly effective.)

A lot of people around me were losing weight with high protein diets, but trying to cure heart disease with meat seems a lot like trying to cure alcoholism with gin. A high protein diet is an animal protein diet, and no matter how you cut it, there will be saturated fat in meat. Lean meat is where the cholesterol is in the first place. As it stands, the average American gets between 200% and 400% of the RDA for protein. Too much protein is especially hard on the kidneys and causes the body to excrete calcium. (Yep, you read it right: too much milk can cause osteoporosis.) Plant foods don’t have saturated fat or cholesterol. In fact, the only nutrient present in animal products, including eggs and dairy, but not available from plants is vitamin B-12.

We need an astonishingly small amount of B-12 in our diets, but need it we do. Over the long haul, B-12 deficiency can cause anemia and severe nerve and brain disorders. We can get all we need by eating a small amount of dairy; using nutritional yeast, fortified cereals, soy milk, or meat substitutes; or taking a supplement. The interesting part is how well our bodies conserve B-12. If no new B-12 is introduced, our physiology can hold on to what it has for months. Otherwise when meat was scarce, as it has been for most of human history and still is for most of the 6.5 billion of us, well, as a species we never would have made it.

Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.

Robert Hutchison, 1930

Money ü Planet ü Health ü

At this point, we were still eating fish because of everything I read about how good it was for people with unsightly yellow plaque in their veins. And I had no problem chowing down on a rump roast at my mom’s house or a rack of ribs and Daisy Mae’s Stronghold. But I didn’t cook with cow, pig, or chickens who’d hatched. I started experimenting with new recipes, different beans and grains, and trying some meat alternatives.

Meat Market

Then, out of the blue, I decided it was time to read Meat Market by Eric Marcus. I’d seen it on the library shelf, there beside the other books on food and ethics, and I didn’t want to read it. I thought it would tell me things I couldn’t ignore. This book was going to instigate permanent and radical changes in my life. I just knew it. So, I didn’t read it. I put it off; put it out of my mind. Then one day, it was just time. As will happen, once the dam broke I went on a reading tear. Dominion by Matthew Scully; Eating with Conscience, by Michael W. Fox; The Meat You Eat, by Ken Midkiff; and Making Kind Choices, by Ingrid Newkirk followed in quick succession. While it was hard to find a purely objective point of view on this issue, the above mentioned books were written by a conservative Christian, a veterinarian, a resource conservation specialist, and an animal rights activist, respectively. It was getting difficult to believe I was hearing one skewed perspective.

Here’s what I learned. (This is the red pill. If you prefer the blue pill, stop reading.) Factory farms are the norm; they are horrendously wasteful of energy and water; they pollute, causing astonishing damage to land and rivers, wiping out nearby flora and fauna and housing markets; they load the American diet with pharmaceuticals, making antibiotics ineffective and introducing hormones the unknown effects of which will play out over the next generation; they genetically alter animals to be up to twice their natural weight regardless that their legs are unchanged and fracture under their new meatier selves; they keep animals in steel buildings with slatted floors from birth until the truck ride to the slaughterhouse. (This is not entirely the case with beef cattle, the luckiest of all factory farmed animals, who get to spend a few years outdoors until they are brought to the feedlots for “finishing.”) Slaughterhouses have the highest rate of on-the-job injury, at nearly 50%, and the highest rate of turnover, at nearly 100%, of any job in the U.S.; it is not uncommon for the line to move at 400 animals an hour; men and women lose their capacity for empathy, leave work to drink it off, go home to abnormally high levels of domestic violence, and come back the next day to do it again.

The animals are obscenely overcrowded and lack appropriate veterinary care. Injured and diseased animals don’t just do without treatment, they aren’t even euthanized. Pregnant and nursing sows are kept in the same situation as veal calves. Instead of grass, cows are fed corn which makes them sick, but it’s cheaper and causes their meat to become marbled; if their stomachs or intestines are too infected or swollen at slaughter, the result can be E. coli in the country’s ever more centralized meat supply. Dairy cows who used to give milk for 12 to 15 years are now spent and sent to become hamburgers after just 3 or 4 years. Pigs are without straw, calves are without mothers, and animals are without sunshine or grass or even dirt under hoof. The industry then looks to solve the problem of “stress” in animals, manifested by pigs compulsively gnawing on the bars of their crates until their mouths bleed and chickens cannibalizing each other. The solution is to genetically manipulate these traits out of livestock. (Meaning ridding baby pigs of their need to suckle and chickens of the instinct to peck for food.) This genetic manipulation leaves us with one type of animal produced by every grower. The industry loves this uniformity; it’s good for the slaughterhouse line and it provide the uniformity the consumer demands. It is the opposite of biodiversity and leaves us in a vulnerable position indeed.

This is the norm. Farm animals are no longer treated like living beings but as “production units.” There are few farmers left; there are now growers and producers. This is where 90% of the meat in this country comes from. Unless you get your meat, milk, and eggs from an independent family farm, this is the meat you eat. All of this for a source of protein we don’t need.

I’ve left out a lot. I haven’t talked about fish farming or debeaking, tail docking or the USDA’s complicity in this system. If you want to learn more, check out the Resources section at the end of this piece.

Veggin’

So, for all of the above reasons, I am vegetarian now, with vegan overtones. A vegan avoids animal products entirely, including dairy, eggs, honey, and other goods made with animal byproducts like personal care items with animal-derived ingredients or tested on animals. I am more aware now of what goes into what I buy, and I try to make most of my meals entirely vegan. (An added benefit: vegan meal scraps can go straight into the compost bin.) I still buy some organic dairy products and eggs from free range hens. I truly believe that there is a right way to raise, and kill, farm animals, and I want to support the effort to move in that direction. Even organic dairy and free-range laid eggs are problematic, though. Male calves born to dairy cows, even on an organic farm, have a high likelihood of ending up as veal. Male chicks born to laying hens on any industrial sized farm are discarded to suffocate in trash cans or are ground up, often alive, and fed to other animals.

It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Family

There is no meat in our house, since I am the one who shops and cooks. Rich and Ben still occasionally eat meat. Rich does less and less, though. And he’s been completely supportive of the changes I’ve made. As for Ben, well, I know the food he gets at home is enough to provide for his health. I see meat eating the same way I see religion and exposure to the dominant culture in general. Until he’s old enough to choose for himself, I want him to experience what’s out there. So he gets some meat, some TV, and some religion, but hopefully not enough to hurt him.

Oh, and my cholesterol is within the good range now. And Super Special Extra Added Bonus — it is absolutely true that vegetarian farts smell better. So, better for your health, better for your brain, better for the checkbook, better for the environment, better for the beasts, and you get a better smelling partner. What other change can you make that does so much good?

Home Fire

Resources

Fox, Michael W. Eating with Conscience, the Bioethics of Food.
Oregon; New Sage Press, 1997.

Lappé, Frances Moore and Anna Lappé. Hope’s Edge: the Next Diet for a Small Planet.
New York; Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002.

Marcus, Erik. Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, & Money.
Boston; Brio Press, 2005.

Messina, Virginia & Mark Messina. The Vegetarian Way: Total Health for You and Your Family.
New York; Harmony Books, 1996.

Midkiff, Ken. The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming has Endangered America’s Food Supply.
New York; St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004.

Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
Berkeley, CA; UC Press, 2002.

Newkirk, Ingrid. Making Kind Choices: Everyday Ways to Enhance Your Life Through Earth - and Animal - Friendly Living.
New York; St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.

Ornish, Dean. Eat More, Weigh Less: Dr. Dean Ornish's Life Choice Program for Losing Weight Safely While Eating Abundantly.
New York; HarperCollins, 1993.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals.
New York; Peguin, 2006.

Pyle, George. Raising Less Corn, More Hell: the Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food.
New York; PublicAffairs, 2005.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Simontacchi, Carol. The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children.
New York; Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

Amy Vaughn