We haven't exactly stuck to our proposed schedule for this project, but I wanted to take a little more time to frame the food issues that give this project meaning. I've already touched on some of the major criticisms of Big Ag and conventional agriculture. We've also talked about waste itself, which is, of course, the immediate focus of this effort.
But I feel like I also ought to address the issue of veganism. We eat a mostly vegetarian (non-meat) diet but dairy, eggs, and animal byproducts are commonplace in our kitchen. We also have meat on occasion, most commonly driven by Audrey's iron urges.
Three of our close friends are strict vegans, and other people in our lives whom we respect and value also choose to purge animal products from their lives. For all the thought and effort and additional cost that we willingly incorporate into our diet, and for all the talking and prosletyzing we do about our choices, shouldn't we have the courage to take all this to the next (last) level?
In short, yes. Kant tells us that one should not make an exception of himself; Matthew 7:12 tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Put another way: we should put our money where our mouths are. At present, I would say that we fall short of the goal of unalloyed idealism in our food choices but that overall these choices are defensible, even if they are not vegan.
[I'm no expert on veganism, so the following analysis should be read with appropriate skepticism.]
I am aware of three reasons that people choose veganism. First is a concern for one's own health: a diet of animals and their byproducts contains a lot of fat, cholesterol, and risk for gnarly diseases and forms of contamination. Second, some are vegan because they believe that eating animals causes those creatures to suffer indefensibly. Third, some vegans are motivated by concerns for the environment: from CAFOs to over-fishing, our hunger for meat contaminates the natural environment even as we divert precious food resources from human mouths to fatten up animals for slaughter.
The first motivator (health) lacks a moral imperative, so it seems philosophically inconsequential whether or not we choose to consume animal products insofar as they are more or less healthy for us. One could argue that avoiding fats and cholesterol is a morally important act insofar as it reduces overall social medical risk, but I can imagine a threefold counterargument: 1) this fat and cholesterol, in moderation, is statistical background noise; 2) eating animals is an efficient way to get some essential nutrients and vitamins that promote health; and 3) there may be health consequences to vegan diets that have their own negative impacts. (To the last point, consider that there is evidence that heavy consumption of soy products and processed foods [two common, but not necessary, features of mainstream vegan diets] can harm us.)
The second concern (suffering) is deeply in the realm of pure philosophy. Peter Singer (Animal Liberation) and Steven Wise (Rattling the Cage) are two thinkers among many who have shaped my thoughts on the ethics of eating animals. My clumsy recollections of their ideas are thus: Singer argues that we are ethically obligated to minimize/reduce suffering and therefore we cannot defend the slaughter of animals merely to satisfy our tastes; Wise argues that the lines we draw between ourselves and other species are arbitrary and therefore indefensible.
May I dismiss these ideas with a mere wave of the hand and utterance of "I disagree"? I feel pretty comfortable drawing a line in the sand between my fellow man and a cow, but I haven't examined that feeling very deeply. I also have to think that our domestication of many of the animals that we eat satisfy mutual goals (for us, tasty meat; for them, evolutionary drive to procreate); if we ceased to eat modern-day cows and chickens, would they survive as species? Where is the line between keeping animals for slaughter and keeping them as pets, and what does that line look like from the standpoint of animal liberation or self-actualization? The strongest philosophical counterpoint I can make to veganism is this: don't many of these arguments fall aside when applied to byproducts such as milk and unfertilized eggs?
[I need to make a BIG DISCLAIMER here: the two paragraphs above are NOT intended as a defense of the vast majority of animal products in today's marketplace. In pushing back on veganism here, I am presupposing the most ideal, dignified treatment of these animals. I have personal experience with the dignified production of chicken eggs and cow's milk, but I'm not sure that animal slaughter can be done humanely. I have seen it performed very intimately, but I think it still relies on a gut-level belief that we humans are justified in taking animals lives and my thoughts are not fully mature on that matter.]
Now, the third concern here (environmental) seems the most compelling. For reasons detailed elsewhere in this blog and more extensively all over the intellectual sphere, it is clear that eating lower on the food chain is better for the environment. But this is what economists might call a ceteris paribus comparison: holding all else equal, it is better to eat a brand-name vegan veggie burger than a McDonald's hamburger.
But what about a veggie patty versus a locally produced hamburger made of grass-fed beef? If you take animal suffering as a philosophical trump-card, the analysis ends there: eating animals is prima facie objectionable. End of story. But if you are trying to make a planet-saving analysis of the environmental impacts of food choices, I think you have to dig deeper. I can imagine that a veggie patty sold by ConAgra and made of a frightening concoction of corn-derived pseudo-foods grown with pesticides and harvested by exploited migrant workers and shipped thousands of miles in its factory-to-fork journey carries a heavier moral and environmental burden than does a chicken breast harvested from a hen that lived a full and happy life in one's backyard before it was efficiently slaughtered.
What might the upstream and downstream consequences be of nutritional supplements for vegans? How do these negative factors compare with the eco-benefits of eating low on the food chain?
An illustration of the challenge of analyzing veganism comes from a superstar co-founder of the Great Basin Food Co-Op. She was, for a time, an avowed vegan and would not stray from her principles. One day, a roommate called her out for hypocrisy: she was snacking on a banana -- neither fair-trade nor organic, a sliver of a dangerous global mono-crop that was flown to her grocery store from perhaps 2,000 miles away. She was eating this non-sentient snack with its heavy social and environmental footprint, but she would not eat the eggs being laid daily in her backyard by the group's chickens.
I often come back to this simple but powerful illustration, and it is a good check on my own efforts to vote wisely with my dollars. Seldom can we fully analyze a choice along a single dimension, and that means that we have to get creative and peel back the layers of the systems that supply us with our food, household items, and fun consumer gadgets.
Apropos this project, we would be enduring a very austere month if we were also keeping vegan. Because many vegan alternatives to non-vegan foods are creative endeavors of food science, they are extremely difficult to come by without packaging. Obviously we could still rely heavily on fresh fruits and vegetables and grains, but it is not obvious that we could go very far beyond those options.
So, those are some of my thoughts on the matter. I want to restate one final thing in closing. As I said to JM in a recent conversation, I think that regardless of the analysis above he deserves more credit for sticking to his vegan guns 100 percent of the time than I do for eating consciously 90 or even 95 percent of the time. It would be dishonest to suggest that Audrey and I eat only the grass-fed flesh of self-actualized cows. Probably once a month on average we have a meal of "restaurant meat," which is to say meat whose social, ethical, and environmental impacts are unknown to us and therefore must be presumed to be deleterious and therefore indefensible. I think I speak for us both when I say that we admire the discipline that it takes to keep a strict vegan diet.
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