Letters to the Editor
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non-veg
Hi there non-veg,
I'll contact you off Salon, thanks for your kind invitation. I am not a prof of philosophy. My training/teaching is in an aesthetically oriented sub-discipline of the humanities that includes a great deal of Theory (allied to philosophy). I also teach Yoga(philosophy), but not in an academic context.
-wonder woman
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the morality of food
I wonder, do vegans object when a lion kills and eats a zebra? When a bear chooses salmon over blueberries? Certainly native American Indians could have attempted to live solely on grains and not hunt and violently kill deer and buffalo - but they didn't. Were they immoral?
Lions and bears have claws, speed, and teeth that make it easy for them to defeat, every single time, an unarmed man. Man has his brain, and it's been up to him to figure out how to use it to defend himself from predators - to eat rather than be eaten. Clubs, spears, fire, bow and arrow, guns, housing surrounded by manmade obstacles.....the discovery or invention of each moved man higher and higher up the food chain, and it's clear this is not a matter of morality but survival.
Today modern man could, certainly choose to eat a diet of fruits and vegetables and grains and find a way to subsist without meat. But why, exactly, are we supposed to do this? Why are we burdened, today, with seeing our food through a moral lens instead of a *optimum* survival lens, just because there is plenty?
The question of morality in food seems to be one of 'how' vs. 'why'. I eat meat because I was designed to eat meat. This is inarguable and not in the least immoral. But is it fair, right and just to the animal that I (representing mankind) kill and package far more meat than is needed to stay above subsistence levels?
I have to roll my eyes a bit at some of the posters claims about farms. I'm sorry - get your facts straight. I was raised on one and many of my relatives are still farmers by trade. There isn't one chicken in a cage, not one hog or cow lving in fear or pain. Not all the meat at your Safeway or Whole Foods was 'factory farmed'. Certainly factory farming practices are reprehnsible and should be punished and stopped. But because SOME meat is factory farmed does not mean that eating ANY meat is eveil.
And please, enough with the anthropomorphizing animals. Pigs are pretty smart - but if you get in their pen near feeding time or near their young, they'll kill you. And if your body were left laying in the pen, they'd eat you too - and be really matter-of-fact about it. Are they immoral for not using their intelligence to the good of humans? No. Ttheir greater intlligence than the cow and chicken to not place their actions in a sterner moral framework.
As for chickens, sorry, they are NOT 'sharp' - they are dumb as rocks, as the tiny size of their heads and brain pans would suggest. Stick them in a sack in the middle of the day and they think it's night. That doesn't mean they should be crammed into cages too small to alllow them to move. But it also doesn't meant that when my grandmother matter of factly rings a chicken's neck and cooks it for Sunday dinner (which she still does regularly) that she is 'immoral'. My grandmother probably could have switched to being a vegetarian, but I could just hear her scoff at the notion. Where would she get the strength to run the farm on a diet of fruits and vegetables? Why is she obligated to undertake this experiment?
This argument that we can live on peas and carrots and fruit and soy means we should live on same - it's not really very logical. I mean - we can live on jello and peanuts and tomato soup, too. We can limit our diets quite severely in terms of variety as well as quantity and remain relatively healthy. Just because this is true doesn't make it 'immoral' not do it.
Man has evolved as a meat-eating predator. So have wolves, bears, lions, crocodiles and even dogs. A dog killing and eating a cat because it's hungry even though there is a head of lettuce sitting a foot away isn't any more immoral than a man eschewing the lentils and picking up a roasted chicken at Whole Foods on his way home from work. Both are simply eating what they are designed to eat. Man's greater intelligence places a greater obligation on him regarding the way in which he predates, true. But he's not immoral for choosing not to predate, any more than someone who chooses to eat just carrots and peas and apples can claim a greater morality.
For that matter, fruits, nuts, legumes, grains and vegetables are all living beings too - I'm a little unclear on how the vegetarian justifies putting these categories of food at the bottom of the food chain, as somehow more moral to eat. Is it because they don't bleed red blood? Is it because they can't vocalize pain? Why do vegetarians feel that taking the life of an ear of corn is somehow irrelevant, while taking the life of a chicken is murder? Certainly corn is a victim of factory farming as much as any animal. Why is this OK?
I'm truly not clear why we don't condemn the lion for eating it's prey while it's still kicking and screaming, but my Uncle Larry butchering a couple hundred hogs a year is somehow evil personified. Certainly Uncle Larry's hogs are suffering less than if they were set free to go hog wild and get hunted and killed by coyotes, dogs and wolves.
Until some vegan can explain to me how morality comes into play with one predator, but not the other...well, I'll keep choosing, guilt-free, food from local small farms, organic and free range, hormone free etc. etc. because a better more natural life for the animal means a better, more natural food source for me.