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Go Veg!
Why I’m a Vegan
by Hillary Rettig, www.lifelongactivist.com
©2006-2008 all rights reserved. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this essay in whole or part.
Contents
When I was growing up in the 1960s, we ate steak or chicken or some other meat for dinner every night, and eggs several times a week for breakfast. Also, like most kids I knew, I also drank gallons of milk each week—my parents insisted on it—and ate as much ice cream as I could get my hands on.
Today, most people would consider that diet very unhealthy. Medical study after medical study has shown that meat, dairy and eggs—with their high levels of fat and cholesterol—are intrinsically unhealthy, especially when consumed in large quantities. America’s current obesity crisis
is largely fueled by meat consumption, especially in the form of fast foods such as hamburgers and pizzas. (Note: for rhetorical convenience, I frequently use the term meat
to refer to meat, dairy, eggs, fish and seafood in this essay.)
I never questioned my food choices in a serious way until a few years ago, when I saw a film entitled Peaceable Kingdom that not only showed the horrors of modern industrial farming and slaughterhouses, but also scenes from a sanctuary where farm animals revealed themselves to be every bit as intelligent and loving as the animals we cherish as companions. Immediately after seeing the film, I made the decision to never to eat meat again. In other words, I became a vegan, someone who does not consume animal-derived products including not just food, but also leather, wool, etc.
Going vegan was one of the best decisions I ever made, in part because it enabled me to lose 40 pounds pretty much effortlessly. I also feel (and look) much healthier generally; and am much more energetic than back when I ate meat. But my becoming a vegan wasn’t just good for me, it was also good for society and the planet, for reasons I’ll explain below.
Meat = Bad for You
Unless you are buying organic, the animal your meat, milk or eggs came from was probably repeatedly treated with, or exposed to, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones and other harmful chemicals—traces of which remain in the food you subsequently eat.
Moreover, because of the meat industry’s relentless focus on profit over all other values, including basic humanity and the health of the people consuming their product, animals are often fed the cheapest calories
possible, including, in many cases, feed that contains the processed carcasses of dead animals that were too sick to be legally sold as food for humans. Besides being disgusting and unnatural in its own right, this practice leads to harmful chemicals becoming highly concentrated in the bodies of the animals we eat, since an animal who is fed the chemically-tainted body parts of other animals will be exposed to many more chemicals than one who is simply treated with the chemicals or exposed to them in its environment.
Feeding animals diseased parts of other animals can also lead to disease transmission, including of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a.k.a. mad cow disease
.
Michael Greger, M.D. has written extensively on the chemical and biological contamination of industrial meat, dairy and egg products.
Meat = Bad for Animals
The above abuses exist largely because most of the meat sold in supermarkets and restaurants—including, of course, fast food restaurants—comes from animals raised on so-called factory farms,
or, as the industry refers to them, concentrated animal feeding operations
or CAFO’s. A factory farm is a giant barn housing thousands of cows, pigs, chickens or other animals, and designed with one overriding purpose: to maximize profits by minimizing the labor, food and other costs of raising the animals. In fact, the industry doesn’t treat the animals they raise as living things at all, but as units of production.
This leads to the abuses discussed above, as well as other egregious cruelties such as cramming the animals into inhumanely small cages; forcing them to live out their entire lives indoors without ever experiencing sunlight; and genetically engineering them so that they are intrinsically unhealthy. (The broiler chickens sold for meat are so unnaturally large that they are prone to heart attacks and broken legs.) The huge doses of antibiotics and pesticides that factory farmed animals are treated with are, in fact, needed specifically to offset the unhealthy conditions in the factory farms themselves. Absent those chemicals, too many of the animals would die from the disease and stress inherent in their living conditions for the farm to be profitable.
For more information on the enormous cruelty factory farms inflict on animals, visit these links:
Meat = Bad for Labor
The cruelty that factory farms and slaughterhouses wreak on animals is truly horrific. But the meat industries also treat the people unfortunate enough to work for them very badly. Here are three examples of labor abuse at factory farms and slaughterhouses:
In an article entitled Finger-Lickin’ Bad in the February 21, 2006 issue of the online environmental publication Grist, author Suzi Parker documents the exploitive and antiquated sharecropper-type business model used by poultry agribusinesses to dominate the small farmers who actually raise many of the birds sent to slaughter.
In an article entitled The Chicken Hangers in the February 2, 2004 online publication In the Fray documents not only the horrific working conditions in the poultry industry but management’s hostile (and often unlawful) resistance to unionizing efforts or even basic workers’ rights.
A January 26, 2006, The New York Times article entitled Rights Group Condemns Meatpackers on Job Safety , begins, For the first time, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that working conditions among the nation’s meatpackers and slaughterhouses are so bad that they violate basic human rights.
Meat = Bad for the Environment
Factory farms are also horrific polluters that generate lakes of fetid animal manure that poison the water, earth and air of entire communities. That’s why the environmental movement has fought them so strenuously. The Sierra Club has compiled a good databse of information about factory farms.
Do you want to contribute to the unspeakable suffering of animals, workers and the environment? Probably not, especially given that your consumption of meat is also harming you and your loved ones. You don’t have to give up all meat consumption immediately, but please reduce your consumption steadily at a pace that’s comfortable for you. Here’s how
Follow the Two at a Time
Rule
Choose just two meals or snacks each week and eliminate the meat component. This is often ridiculously easy:
- Use olive oil or
vegan spread
instead of butter. (Butter being one of the most unhealthy foods around, after all…) - Leave the meat out of foods where it’s really not needed. Vegetarian baked beans taste just as good as the non-vegetarian ones. Or, you could leave the cheese off your salad the next time you go to a salad bar. Or, use vegetable or mushroom stock instead of meat stock when making soups or other dishes.
- Order vegetarian entrees instead of meat ones the next time you get take-out Chinese or Indian food.
- Use soy milk instead of cow’s milk in your coffee.
- Order a pizza without the cheese. (Try it! It’s not so bad—and most pizza parlors are used to making cheeseless pizzas for lactose-intolerant people.)
- Have a veggie burger instead of a hamburger—and load it up with all the fixins’ you want! You may find that it’s the fixins’, and not the meat itself, that are the most crucial part of the burger experience.
- Replace ice cream with sorbet or vegan ice cream.
Or, you could reduce your leather consumption either by buying a leather substitute such as cloth or pleather, or by buying leather goods used. (Yes, used
is okay, since no additional animals are harmed when you buy the used item!) That arguably helps the cause of veganism even more than changing your diet because a large fraction of the economic value of a cow is in the leather produced from its skin.
Only after you are entirely comfortable with the above changes should you proceed to swap in two more vegan meals or ingredients. And then two more and then two more until you’ve arrived at the kind of diet that works for you.
About Obnoxious Vegans
I have reluctantly concluded that one of the main obstacles to people’s becoming vegan is obnoxious vegetarians and animal activists. Almost always, when I give a talk, workshop or class, I put in a plug for veganism. And, almost always, someone in the audience tells me how he or she was turned off
veganism by an advocate who was too strident, judgmental, stubborn, or otherwise obnoxious.
To the non-vegans out there: you are right to resent anyone’s attempts to bully you into veganism or anything else. But please be compassionate with the vegans, many of whom are passionate about helping you, the animals, society and the planet. If you are so inclined, let them know how their behavior is affecting you and offer tips on how they can become better advocates. In any case, however, please separate the message from the messenger. Veganism is clearly the right choice.
To the vegan activists: Please be as compassionate, and patient, as possible. Please recognize that, when you ask someone to change their diet, you are asking them to make an intensely personal and profound change—and one that is often in conflict with their upbringing and heritage. Please learn and use the techniques of effective activism and persuasion, and do not operate from instinct or impulse. Please don’t shock or upset people with information (especially about factory farms and slaughterhouses) that they aren’t prepared to handle. (Amnesty International, one of the most effective advocacy organizations around, never includes graphic images of torture in its popular literature.) Don’t bully.
Part IV of The Lifelong Activist discusses the mechanics of effective activism—specifically, that persuasion always begins with a positive bond with one’s audience. Shaming, blaming, guilt-tripping or otherwise offending or insulting someone who doesn’t meet your standard of ethics or behavior is not only not effective advocacy, but will likely influence him or her away from your viewpoint. Remember: when you behave obnoxiously, you are doing the opposition’s work for them.
Please remember that someone who decides to reduce their meat consumption by even 10% (approximately two meals or ingredients a week) is still doing a lot of good, and that their action will save a lot of animals’ lives and reduce a lot of other suffering. Such a person deserves nothing but congratulations and support—actions, by the way, that increase the odds that they will later reduce their meat consumption by another 10%.
For More Information…
One of the best things you can do, in your quest to become more vegan, is to take a walk around your supermarket and acquaint yourself with the many vegetarian and vegan foods that are available. Begin in the produce section, naturally, but also check out:
- The International Foods section—many of the ingredients in Chinese and Indian cooking, for instance, are vegetarian.
- The
diet foods
section, which contains many meat and dairy replacements.
- The frozen foods section, which offers vegan frozen meals, as well as milk, butter and ice-cream replacements.
Also, take another look at the menus from restaurants you frequent—you will probably see that they contain more vegan dishes than you realized. And ask them if they can remove the cheese or other non-vegan ingredients from a dish you want to eat – they often can, and have probably gotten that request before.
Beyond supermarkets and restaurants, there are many books, Websites, clubs and other resources that can help you lead a more vegetarian lifestyle.
Good books on vegetarianism include:
- Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina’s Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet (Book Publishing Co., 2000)
- T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II’s The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health (Dallas, Tex.: Benbella Books, 2005).
- Pamela Rice’s 101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian (New York: Lantern Books, 2004)
- Erik Marcus’s Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating (Ithaca, NY: McBooks Press, 2000)
- Will Tuttle’s The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony (New York: Lantern Books, 2005)
- John Robbins’ The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 2001).
Some good Websites include:
If possible, join up with a local vegan or vegetarian group. You’ll make new friends, get plenty of useful information and recipes, and have plenty of support as you become more vegetarian. SoyStache offers a good list of U.S. and non-U.S. veg groups, although I’m pretty sure that there are lots of groups not included on their list. Do a Google search—and have fun vegging out!