EARLY IN MY VEGAN YEARS, I MADE almost a conscious point not to identify myself with veganism from an ethical standpoint. I’d leave the ethical stuff to other people, I thought, people who had calendars of baby animals on their bedroom walls, who fostered homeless kittens and took in stray dogs. I’d leave it to the hippies and the “angry vegans.” Me? I wasn’t touching ethics with a 10-foot pole. I’d stick to talking about the health benefits, the glowing skin, and the delicious recipes. Not the animals.
Now that animal rights are the defining feature of my relationship with veganism, I look back on that attitude with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. I’m not sure why it took me so long to consider animals in my food choices. Part of it was the fact that I, like a lot of people, harbored a certain stereotype of “animal rights vegans”—angry, judgy—and didn’t want to be associated with it. Part of it was fear of feeling like an impostor. To jump into the ethical argument after so many years of being uninterested felt odd to me, like trying on a costume.
The final reason, and the most significant one, was that I simply was not accustomed to considering other living beings in my food choices. Eating had always been so fraught with stress and anxiety; these feelings didn’t leave a lot of space for overall conscientiousness about the ethical, humane, and environmental dimensions of the food I ate. Interestingly enough, it was in developing more awareness as a consumer—particularly with regard to animal welfare—that I was able to develop a joyous, meaningful, and lasting relationship with food.
If you’re reading this book primarily because you want to achieve lasting health, great. That’s a wonderful reason to explore vegan food, and my goal is not to force a certain ethical perspective on you (or anyone). But my veganism became richer when I started to consider how my choices as a consumer fit into a larger web, a system of food production that stretches far beyond me and my plate. It would now be impossible for me to talk about the lifestyle without describing this shift, and why it happened.
“It’s Not All About Having a Perfect Bowel Movement”
A few years into my vegan journey, I visited the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, a place where abandoned and abused farm animals are able to live out their lives in peace and safety. I was volunteering at a fund-raising event, but I had some time to walk through the farm, observe the animals as they went about their lives, and appreciate their personalities. For the first time, the strangeness of keeping animals in captivity to produce food we don’t need to eat hit home. It was unsettling.
Later that day, Woodstock FAS’s director, Jenny Brown, gave a keynote speech as her guests dug into piping hot, fragrant plates of food. “At the end of the day,” she said, “it’s not all about having the perfect bowel movement. This is about the animals.” I chuckled. Jenny might as well have been speaking to me directly. Of course, I felt no shame that I had explored veganism for healing. But in almost consciously ignoring animal issues, I’d been keeping my heart blocked off to a kind of awareness that would ultimately enrich my experience of being vegan. Nowadays I like to say that I went vegan for my health, but I stay vegan for animals.
Funnily enough, as soon as I became a little more open to animal rights—or simply a perspective that took animals into account—it started to feel incredibly common sense to me. You don’t have to identify as an animal activist or even an animal lover to believe that animals should be spared pain, suffering, and captivity. Animals have consciousness, the ability to feel pain, and the capacity to form social bonds. Many animals also have a sense of self-awareness, as well as the ability to imagine a future. Anyone who has spent time around animals has witnessed these qualities in action. If you’ve ever had a companion animal (such as a dog or a cat), then you know that animals can suffer just as keenly as we do. You also know that they can rejoice, experience pleasure, and form deep, loyal, and abiding attachments. The pigs, cows, goats, turkeys, and other animals we keep on farms throughout this country are no less conscious than the pets we love so dearly in our homes. So why are we so able to accept that they suffer and die in conditions we’d consider absolutely appalling—and even immoral—for dogs, cats, or horses?
A traditional response to this question would be that we need animal foods to survive. But the fact is that we don’t. Vegan diets have been shown to be completely safe, both short term and long term, so long as one has access to a B12 supplement (which we’ll discuss soon). Given this fact, and because we can see plainly that farming animals for food causes them to suffer incredibly, isn’t it our duty to respect them with our food choices?
Another way of thinking about this question is this: yes, we could eat meat. But given the world in which we live, should we?
Let’s talk about that world. About 58 billion land animals die each year in factory farms and slaughterhouses. The USDA report on animal slaughter for 2012 states that 49.6 billion pounds of red meat were produced in 2012. This includes 33 million cows, 113.2 million hogs, and 2.18 million sheep.1 And these numbers, mind you, are for the United States alone. This is a staggering amount of death for meat, a food that, eaten in excess, can increase one’s likelihood of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. A food that we do not have to eat in order to be healthy.
The idea that animal farming is cruel is hard to accept if you grew up, as I did, with all sorts of idealized visions of what life on a farm is like. I spent my childhood summers in New Hampshire, where my father’s family lived, drinking glasses of cold milk from the dairy farm down the road. I assumed that farm animals were cozy, well fed, and that they grew to a comfortable, advanced age before they somehow, magically, became food. The fantasy, sadly, is nothing like the reality. Here’s a very small glimpse of what life on an average factory farm is like for a number of different farm animals.
Pigs
The average factory farm pig is born and promptly undergoes painful procedures—such as castration or the removal of its tail—without anesthesia. It proceeds to spend life biting at the cage behind which it lives, along with hundreds of others. Pigs that don’t bite at their cages often bite off each others’ tails; depressed and helpless, most pigs allow this to happen. Pregnant pigs are kept in “gestation crates,” with no more than a few millimeters in which to move before and after they give birth. Baby pigs that are sickly or weak are often clubbed to death or slammed into the ground.
Cows
Cows who are destined to be killed for beef spend their lives crowded together, up to their knees in their own excrement. Cows are ruminants, which means that their digestive system is meant to digest grass. And yet these cows are typically given a diet of soy and corn, which makes them sick. These cows typically live to the age of 24 or 36 months, at which point they’re hung on a conveyor belt and then killed with a stun gun.
As grim as the lives of the average steer is, dairy cows are arguably worse off. These cows are continually impregnated so that they can produce milk. After they give birth, they’re forcibly removed from their babies, who are then sold for veal or shipped to neighboring farms, where they will one day be slaughtered. Dairy cows are forced to produce so much milk that their udders frequently become infected and often degenerate early, at which point the cows are killed for leather or meat.
Chickens
Broiler chickens on factory farms are kept in sheds so crowded that the ammonia from their waste often burns the chickens’ eyes. They’re given a diet that helps them to reach a mature weight in one third of their natural growing time. Rapid growth often leads to skeletal deformities, and many broiler chickens struggle to walk. At birth, their beak is seared off to prevent them from pecking at each other; this process, carried out with a hot blade or a laser, leaves the chickens in agony for weeks, and many starve to death afterward because they’re unable to eat.
Egg-laying hens are packed into tiny cages, in which they can die of asphyxiation or dehydration. If they don’t die and rot in their cages, they proceed to produce eggs at a rate so fast that their bones decline rapidly. “Spent hens,” whose bones are breaking from so much egg production, are either transported to be killed, or gassed or composted on site. In one California farm, 30,000 live hens were fed into wood chippers. Egg laying hens die at staggering rates; in 2012, an estimated 8,576,194 chickens were killed for food in the United States.2
Baby male chicks, who are less valuable than female chicks because they can’t produce eggs, are frequently ground up, or “masticated,” after they are hatched.
What About “Certified Humane,” Grass Fed, and Local Animal Foods?
Ten years ago, when I told people I didn’t eat meat, the usual answer was, “Yeah, I wish I could do that, but I just can’t give it up!” Today, what I usually hear is some version of, “Well, my meat is grass fed/local/certified humane, so it’s okay.”
Is it okay? Why don’t we all just boycott factory farms and eat local, organically farmed meats, dairy, and eggs instead?
Well, to start, such labels as “humane” or “grass fed” may not tell us the whole story. Yes, you can establish a nice rapport with a farmer at the farmers’ market, but a number of individuals invariably end up caring for animals on a farm, and it’s hard to know precisely what goes on to make the operation efficient. On many so-called humane egg laying farms, male chicks are still killed or sold as broiler chickens. Additionally, such terms as “free range” are essentially meaningless; many of the eggs labeled this way come from farms where animals are still cramped into tiny spaces. While it’s nice to fantasize about dairy that’s produced without cruelty, we often forget that dairy cows are almost always sold as beef when they stop producing milk. Even if you purchase dairy that is “local and organic,” you still may be supporting slaughter with your dollar.
Beyond all this arguing about how animals die, we often lose sight of the fact that animals die. And if they don’t, they spend their natural lives in captivity, often torn from their offspring. Some farms arrange for animals to have much higher quality of life and more humane deaths than others. This is, of course, better than what happens on a factory farm in the sense that less suffering is involved. But even small farms bring animals into the world and then kill them for unnecessary human consumption. I struggle to justify eating animal food when a simple B12 vitamin ensures that we can have rich, long, healthy lives without them.
Finally, eating animal foods—even those from more humanely oriented farms—serves to validate consumption of animals to the outside world. You may be willing to pay top dollar for grass fed, organic animal products, but that level of concern is not shared universally, and the demand for cheaper options persists. No matter how idyllic it is, the farm-to-table model, with the tiny, idealized farms it presents to our imaginations, may not be adaptable to a planet of over 7 billion people and growing. And so, for as long as we rely on animal products to sustain ourselves, there will be pressure to do it bigger and with more efficiency, which will mean more slaughter and more suffering. I’d personally rather do my part to show the world that life without any animal foods at all can be delicious, abundant, and peaceful.
The Environment
Animal suffering isn’t the only non-health-oriented reason to eschew animal foods. Plant-based diets also have the potential to lessen a lot of the depletion of global resources and the environment that’s so problematic today.
Most of us feel concern about global warming and the environment. We recycle. We use glass instead of plastic. We watch nature documentaries and donate money to organizations that protect endangered species. We ride bikes to work and organize carpools. But there’s arguably one choice you can make that will benefit the environment far more than all of these actions taken together: switching to a plant-based diet. The food you eat is every bit as consequential to the environment as whether or not you choose to bike or drive to work, if not more so. In 2010, the UN commissioned a report on consumption and production, which included an assessment of land use and fossil fuel consumption. One of the study’s conclusions was this: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth, increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike [with] fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”
It’s estimated that agriculture is responsible for over 10 percent of US energy consumption, and about 17 percent of fossil fuel use.3 Globally, it’s responsible for 70 percent of freshwater consumption, 38 percent of total land use, and 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. While plant agriculture represents a part of that figure, a very disproportionate amount of energy consumption is due to the meat, poultry, and dairy industries.4 Why? Because raising animals, keeping them captive, and transporting them uses up land and carbon emissions. But so does growing and transporting all of the grains—soy and other crops—that are grown to feed the animals that are slaughtered. In other words, animal agriculture is doubly expensive in its consumption of resources.
We tend to think about energy consumption in terms of fossil fuels we burn, which then lead to CO2 emissions that destroy our ozone layer. But animal agriculture is also a culprit behind two other kinds of emissions: methane and nitrous oxide. Though they remain in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, they are in many ways more powerful greenhouse gases. Pound for pound, methane has a twenty times greater impact on climate change than carbon dioxide over a hundred-year period,5 and nitrous oxide has a global warming potential that is up to 310 times greater than carbon dioxide’s.
Seventy-four percent of nitrous oxide emissions come from agriculture, mainly from crop fertilizer. Rough estimates suggest that more of these emissions are from animal agriculture than plant.6 If you’re wondering where methane emissions come from, prepare yourself for the unsavory truth: They come from the stomach of ruminants, such as cows, and from animal waste. As cows digest corn, soy, grain, and grass (yes, even grass), they emit methane by belching and passing gas. That methane emissions from agriculture in 2003 totaled 182.8 million tons of CO2 equivalents says a lot about how many cows are held captive in factory farms. Methane and nitrous oxide are also emitted by the manure reservoirs and lagoons that result from mass-scale pork and beef production.
Critics of vegan diets often note that, if we were to phase out animal agriculture, we’d need to increase plant production, which would still consume fossil fuels. But even if we did, we wouldn’t be growing any plant crops to feed to animals on factory farms. And we also wouldn’t be creating enormous amounts of methane from animal waste, or using nitrous oxide to fertilize animal feed. That alone would remove a significant burden on our atmosphere.7 And of course, it’s worth thinking about the implications of feeding billions of pounds of grain and soy to animals, when about 870 million people—one in eight—are suffering from malnourishment. It has been estimated that 2.6 pounds of grain feed are used to produce every pound of beef. How much land and how many crops could be directed toward people, both in developed and developing countries, if they weren’t bound up in animal agriculture?
It’s also been estimated that, if you reduced the animal product intake in your diet to 20 percent (just 7.7 percent less than the national average of 27.7 percent), it would have the same environmental impact as switching from a typical sedan to a hybrid vehicle.8 A few meatless dinners per week alone will reduce your environmental footprint dramatically. Such small changes, when made by many people, will have a tremendous difference when it comes to the environment.