This is so great. Thanks for always helping remind me that the proper follow-up to any essay or "TED talk" is to ask what people's experiences are and why they agree or disagree -- I am trying to get better at this myself, and in fact I have finally started working on some opinion essays that I'm excited to get feedback on when they're ready to see the light.
I've always eaten meat. Mostly thoughtlessly while growing up (despite being in a secular hippie homeschool group in which there were many vegetarian/vegan families and some of them ridiculed/lectured those of us who ate meat), but in college I read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma," and "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price (a lot of his current followers subscribe to wacky theories unrelated to his research, but his adventures were interesting and timely to undertake as globalization started to make ancient food traditions harder to study firsthand), and all of these convinced me that eating meat is optimal for the human body.
Animals eat other animals without a second thought; our curse as the most intelligent, most empathetic animal on the planet is that we do think about and care about the feelings of other animals, and that sometimes makes it emotionally harder for us to eat the way we evolved to, namely omnivorously. Some animals are more repulsive to imagine eating than others, but this is probably because dogs and cats are not prey animals (they're snuggly, relationship-based hunters, like us), and very few cultures are okay with eating carnivores. Judeo-Christian- and Muslim-descended cultures tend to have more prohibitions against it because of conventions that originally came from religious texts, but there are people in Asian and African cultures that still eat dogs as readily as Westerners eat beef and chicken (you can research this yourself, but you will probably find it grim), so our tendency to find it abhorrent is honestly a cultural bias descended from historical religious convention.
Meat can be cultivated in a sustainable way (there's a whole farming approach that rotates cattle and chickens through pastures to restore nutrients to the soil, and even natural fertilizers come from animal waste -- a vegan world would not be able to accomplish this without tremendous amounts of manufactured chemicals), and animals can be slaughtered/processed in a more ethical way (see Temple Grandin's work if you haven't already). After reading the aforementioned books, I challenged myself to participate in animal processing (shooting a deer, slaughtering a chicken) so that I wouldn't be a hypocrite to continue eating meat; I did it, and I didn't enjoy it, but I think it was important. My thoughts about this are complicated, because I also think that humans should be working on becoming less numb to violence, so having everyone kill and eat animals to experience the process doesn't really help with that goal. I'm still trying to figure out the ideal strategy, but I think that raising sustainable, ethical meat and making it more affordable and accessible is the best way to restore soil, provide nutrient-dense food for the most people, and fend off the health problems that come from malnutrition and overindulgence in carbs/fat. As usual, I walk a moderate line on this and piss off the extremists on all sides (vegans and vegetarians think I'm a monster for advocating meat-eating, while paleo and carnivore people think that eating small servings of meat is unhealthy and giving in to The Man, and ethical purists don't like that as a working mom I indulge in a non-zero number of Taco Bell tacos and drive-through burgers every year).
I know people my parents' age who were vegetarians for decades and recently had to go paleo/carnivore due to health problems, and I know vegans who had to start consuming animal products because their nutrient deficiencies made them sick...probably all of us know people like this, who took up eating meat because thyroid issues or autoimmune conditions necessitated it, or they were horribly sick during an attempted vegan pregnancy, etc. Lab-grown "meat" has ended up being an expensive and environmentally-disastrous failure, so we have to figure out how to make peace with being omnivorous animals, even though it is hard to handle sometimes.
Just remember that our beloved pets don't care one iota about eating dead animals -- where they came from, how they suffered, any of it -- and that's okay. Life is a cycle, and we all survive by eating other living things. Humans are the only ones who struggle with accepting this truth; we could probably stand to learn some humility and existentialism from the rest of the animal kingdom...
Meredith! I have missed your comments. I think of you most weeks as I’m composing my offering, wondering what you’ll have to say. This week especially I thought of you—maybe we talked about meat consumption before?
I know you’re busy so of course no pressure to reply every time. But I want you to know how much—how VERY MUCH—your way of being and conversing and explaining has helped me grow as a human. Honestly, conversations with you are a big reason I am able to sometimes remember to ask people to tell me about their experience, vs getting all holier than thou. I don’t love how holier than thou I’ve been in my life (sometimes I keep the judgement in my head and don’t let it leak out my mouth, but it’s still there). So thank you for once again clearly and calmly explaining something in a way I can understand.
As ever, I don’t have time to respond fully, in the way I’d like, but a few things popped in as I read your thoughts. It occurred to me that I think nothing of feeding my dogs chicken meat every day, and who the heck knows what kind of lives those chickens lived (probably not good). Also, I know some people put their carnivore pets on vegetarian diets and that is one area where I strongly feel—THAT IS SO WRONG.
I thought about how, when Henry was a baby, I raised him vegetarian. One day, one of his uncles wanted to take him for a bite. I said the uncle could feed him whatever he wanted. Henry wound up eating a hamburger and announced to me, “I LOVE MEAT.” It was so odd. Then at some point, perhaps when he was a teenager, he decided on his own to resume vegetarianism. We both agreed that we greatly regretted having ever put any meat into our bodies.
I also often take into consideration that vegetarians, like atheists, are very much in the minority in the US. So while I personally think it is so bizarre to eat meat and believe in god, I recognize I am wildly outnumbered, which doesn’t make “them” right and “me” wrong, but helps me to understand that there are many, many people who think/act differently, and that is entirely their right.
I wonder if some folks are pre-disposed to turn their noses up at eating meat? I recall some book suggesting a certain blood type is more apt to go vegetarian and I happen to have that blood type (A+). Now I’m going to have to go google that to see if the theory falls under the same shady umbrella as astrology (which I also love but, you know, am I a *true believer*? Probably not.)
Thank you so much for making the time to leave another thoughtful response. Hello to your whole family. ❤️
Thank you so much -- that means a lot, since your writing is so inspiring to me and your journeys and wisdom have such a great impact on my own. ❤️❤️❤️ As a fellow recovering holier-than-thou-a-holic, I'm grateful that we can help each other stay on the rhetorical straight and narrow, haha.
I gotta come visit the ranch sometime soon so we can nerd out about these things over tea. Miss you.
I still eat meat, but as a born and raised farm kid, it was hard to avoid. We bred meat cattle, and a couple of times when my sisters and I were in elementary school, bottle fed a few orphans (one mama died, one rejected, and the 3rd was the 'small twin' which is usually a death sentence) Unironically, once they were old enough to graze and eventually, sold as yearlings, we DID wonder as we ate our hamburgers if we were consuming our bottle babies, and refused beef for awhile...
I guess growing up where everything on the farm plays a role and everything is considered part of the food chain played a large part of how I, personally, see my place in it. I don't eat a lot of meat, but at the same time, I have a train wreck of a digestive system (thanks to a medical condition I was born with and was aggressively treated for as a toddler) and all but black,red and organic soy beans are off limits, as well as wheat, most corn products (I will die before I give up corn tortillas), and ALL dairy. I do thank the vegans for their vegan 'cheese' and alternative milks, although one could argue that they are HIGHLY processed which diminishes both they nutritional and environmental value)
Cattle would most likely NOT EXIST at all if we didn't use them for food, even though beef is the most environmentally damaging as an industry, cattle (or their wild cousins we slaughtered for no GOOD reason) do/did/can provide a link in the perpetuation of the environment in which they exist, unfortunately, they take up too much room for us humans and DOG FORBID we allow their natural predators to live among us and handle the population...(they literally 'till the earth with their hooves' and fertilize it with their poop, but only if they eat nothing but grass, which modern meat cattle don't)
That said, I don't judge anyone for their choices to feed themselves, although most overprocessed garbage is just that, and as Joan Cusak's character said to her brother in Better Off Dead, "How can you eat that crap? There's no food in your food!"
I think it would be so cool and so life-changing if all humans had to/got to live on farms for a spell to understand the true source of REAL food. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but people are so far removed from the realities of what happens to produce what they eat (so much of it crap, as you know) they just don’t get it. When I sent my cows to live at a real ranch, because as a hobbyist I knew it was only a matter of time before I got injured whilst treating a 1500 steer like a chihuahua, I also understood I was likely condemning some of them to become hamburgers. It made me really sick to think about BUT this was mitigated by knowing that unlock stockyard cows, my cows would have spent their entire lives grazing freely. In fact, my real rancher friend has asked me at times about leasing my back acreage for beef cattle. I’m still not there yet but I do think it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. Because I know people aren’t going to stop eating beef, so perhaps being part of a system, being a part that allows the cattle true freedom while they’re alive, might actually be a contribution to… something.
This is so great. Thanks for always helping remind me that the proper follow-up to any essay or "TED talk" is to ask what people's experiences are and why they agree or disagree -- I am trying to get better at this myself, and in fact I have finally started working on some opinion essays that I'm excited to get feedback on when they're ready to see the light.
I've always eaten meat. Mostly thoughtlessly while growing up (despite being in a secular hippie homeschool group in which there were many vegetarian/vegan families and some of them ridiculed/lectured those of us who ate meat), but in college I read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma," and "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price (a lot of his current followers subscribe to wacky theories unrelated to his research, but his adventures were interesting and timely to undertake as globalization started to make ancient food traditions harder to study firsthand), and all of these convinced me that eating meat is optimal for the human body.
Animals eat other animals without a second thought; our curse as the most intelligent, most empathetic animal on the planet is that we do think about and care about the feelings of other animals, and that sometimes makes it emotionally harder for us to eat the way we evolved to, namely omnivorously. Some animals are more repulsive to imagine eating than others, but this is probably because dogs and cats are not prey animals (they're snuggly, relationship-based hunters, like us), and very few cultures are okay with eating carnivores. Judeo-Christian- and Muslim-descended cultures tend to have more prohibitions against it because of conventions that originally came from religious texts, but there are people in Asian and African cultures that still eat dogs as readily as Westerners eat beef and chicken (you can research this yourself, but you will probably find it grim), so our tendency to find it abhorrent is honestly a cultural bias descended from historical religious convention.
Meat can be cultivated in a sustainable way (there's a whole farming approach that rotates cattle and chickens through pastures to restore nutrients to the soil, and even natural fertilizers come from animal waste -- a vegan world would not be able to accomplish this without tremendous amounts of manufactured chemicals), and animals can be slaughtered/processed in a more ethical way (see Temple Grandin's work if you haven't already). After reading the aforementioned books, I challenged myself to participate in animal processing (shooting a deer, slaughtering a chicken) so that I wouldn't be a hypocrite to continue eating meat; I did it, and I didn't enjoy it, but I think it was important. My thoughts about this are complicated, because I also think that humans should be working on becoming less numb to violence, so having everyone kill and eat animals to experience the process doesn't really help with that goal. I'm still trying to figure out the ideal strategy, but I think that raising sustainable, ethical meat and making it more affordable and accessible is the best way to restore soil, provide nutrient-dense food for the most people, and fend off the health problems that come from malnutrition and overindulgence in carbs/fat. As usual, I walk a moderate line on this and piss off the extremists on all sides (vegans and vegetarians think I'm a monster for advocating meat-eating, while paleo and carnivore people think that eating small servings of meat is unhealthy and giving in to The Man, and ethical purists don't like that as a working mom I indulge in a non-zero number of Taco Bell tacos and drive-through burgers every year).
I know people my parents' age who were vegetarians for decades and recently had to go paleo/carnivore due to health problems, and I know vegans who had to start consuming animal products because their nutrient deficiencies made them sick...probably all of us know people like this, who took up eating meat because thyroid issues or autoimmune conditions necessitated it, or they were horribly sick during an attempted vegan pregnancy, etc. Lab-grown "meat" has ended up being an expensive and environmentally-disastrous failure, so we have to figure out how to make peace with being omnivorous animals, even though it is hard to handle sometimes.
Just remember that our beloved pets don't care one iota about eating dead animals -- where they came from, how they suffered, any of it -- and that's okay. Life is a cycle, and we all survive by eating other living things. Humans are the only ones who struggle with accepting this truth; we could probably stand to learn some humility and existentialism from the rest of the animal kingdom...
Meredith! I have missed your comments. I think of you most weeks as I’m composing my offering, wondering what you’ll have to say. This week especially I thought of you—maybe we talked about meat consumption before?
I know you’re busy so of course no pressure to reply every time. But I want you to know how much—how VERY MUCH—your way of being and conversing and explaining has helped me grow as a human. Honestly, conversations with you are a big reason I am able to sometimes remember to ask people to tell me about their experience, vs getting all holier than thou. I don’t love how holier than thou I’ve been in my life (sometimes I keep the judgement in my head and don’t let it leak out my mouth, but it’s still there). So thank you for once again clearly and calmly explaining something in a way I can understand.
As ever, I don’t have time to respond fully, in the way I’d like, but a few things popped in as I read your thoughts. It occurred to me that I think nothing of feeding my dogs chicken meat every day, and who the heck knows what kind of lives those chickens lived (probably not good). Also, I know some people put their carnivore pets on vegetarian diets and that is one area where I strongly feel—THAT IS SO WRONG.
I thought about how, when Henry was a baby, I raised him vegetarian. One day, one of his uncles wanted to take him for a bite. I said the uncle could feed him whatever he wanted. Henry wound up eating a hamburger and announced to me, “I LOVE MEAT.” It was so odd. Then at some point, perhaps when he was a teenager, he decided on his own to resume vegetarianism. We both agreed that we greatly regretted having ever put any meat into our bodies.
I also often take into consideration that vegetarians, like atheists, are very much in the minority in the US. So while I personally think it is so bizarre to eat meat and believe in god, I recognize I am wildly outnumbered, which doesn’t make “them” right and “me” wrong, but helps me to understand that there are many, many people who think/act differently, and that is entirely their right.
I wonder if some folks are pre-disposed to turn their noses up at eating meat? I recall some book suggesting a certain blood type is more apt to go vegetarian and I happen to have that blood type (A+). Now I’m going to have to go google that to see if the theory falls under the same shady umbrella as astrology (which I also love but, you know, am I a *true believer*? Probably not.)
Thank you so much for making the time to leave another thoughtful response. Hello to your whole family. ❤️
Thank you so much -- that means a lot, since your writing is so inspiring to me and your journeys and wisdom have such a great impact on my own. ❤️❤️❤️ As a fellow recovering holier-than-thou-a-holic, I'm grateful that we can help each other stay on the rhetorical straight and narrow, haha.
I gotta come visit the ranch sometime soon so we can nerd out about these things over tea. Miss you.
I still eat meat, but as a born and raised farm kid, it was hard to avoid. We bred meat cattle, and a couple of times when my sisters and I were in elementary school, bottle fed a few orphans (one mama died, one rejected, and the 3rd was the 'small twin' which is usually a death sentence) Unironically, once they were old enough to graze and eventually, sold as yearlings, we DID wonder as we ate our hamburgers if we were consuming our bottle babies, and refused beef for awhile...
I guess growing up where everything on the farm plays a role and everything is considered part of the food chain played a large part of how I, personally, see my place in it. I don't eat a lot of meat, but at the same time, I have a train wreck of a digestive system (thanks to a medical condition I was born with and was aggressively treated for as a toddler) and all but black,red and organic soy beans are off limits, as well as wheat, most corn products (I will die before I give up corn tortillas), and ALL dairy. I do thank the vegans for their vegan 'cheese' and alternative milks, although one could argue that they are HIGHLY processed which diminishes both they nutritional and environmental value)
Cattle would most likely NOT EXIST at all if we didn't use them for food, even though beef is the most environmentally damaging as an industry, cattle (or their wild cousins we slaughtered for no GOOD reason) do/did/can provide a link in the perpetuation of the environment in which they exist, unfortunately, they take up too much room for us humans and DOG FORBID we allow their natural predators to live among us and handle the population...(they literally 'till the earth with their hooves' and fertilize it with their poop, but only if they eat nothing but grass, which modern meat cattle don't)
That said, I don't judge anyone for their choices to feed themselves, although most overprocessed garbage is just that, and as Joan Cusak's character said to her brother in Better Off Dead, "How can you eat that crap? There's no food in your food!"
Indeed.
I think it would be so cool and so life-changing if all humans had to/got to live on farms for a spell to understand the true source of REAL food. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but people are so far removed from the realities of what happens to produce what they eat (so much of it crap, as you know) they just don’t get it. When I sent my cows to live at a real ranch, because as a hobbyist I knew it was only a matter of time before I got injured whilst treating a 1500 steer like a chihuahua, I also understood I was likely condemning some of them to become hamburgers. It made me really sick to think about BUT this was mitigated by knowing that unlock stockyard cows, my cows would have spent their entire lives grazing freely. In fact, my real rancher friend has asked me at times about leasing my back acreage for beef cattle. I’m still not there yet but I do think it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. Because I know people aren’t going to stop eating beef, so perhaps being part of a system, being a part that allows the cattle true freedom while they’re alive, might actually be a contribution to… something.