June 15, 2021
The arguments for not eating meat should be easy to win. Eating meat is clearly ruthless towards animals: slaughtering billions of living things each year seems cruel for no reason when our nutritional needs can easily be met by other means. It is also proven to be unfair to our fellow human beings and the environment. Meat consumption – especially beef, which is the most wasteful and polluting species – is responsible for most of the CO2 emissions from the food industry.
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But those who eat meat are largely unimpressed by the arguments against it. Why? In most societies, eating meat is still presented as a natural state of affairs, a necessary part of a healthy diet. It doesn’t matter that red and processed meats were linked to cancer and heart disease, or that early humans mainly ate vegetables. For millennia, eating meat has not only been normal, but also worth striving for. History shows that the richer people get, the more they demand meat: when people in poorer countries with traditional plant-based diets get richer, their meat consumption tends to increase. It’s hard to accept that something is morally troubling with so many people around you doing it.
Some thoughtful meat eaters argue that there is no point in going without the drumsticks because the sheer size of the meat industry makes every single action useless. You have a point. I’ve been a vegetarian for over two decades, but pretty much nothing has changed. All the animals that I may have spared have been devoured many times over by other people as global meat consumption continues to rise. For every animal I didn’t eat, some people actually ate three.
Why make an individual sacrifice when the world is barely aware of your good deed?
Why make an individual sacrifice when the world is barely aware of your good deed? One could argue that this only leaves the real villains off the hook. After all, it was the fossil fuel industry that invented the idea of the personal carbon footprint calculator, an idea that gave us a guilty conscience for our actions as consumers, even when oil companies evaded their far greater responsibility.
It is true that various systemic changes could help stop the meat industry from destroying the planet. If the meat packages showed how much rainforest was cut down for grazing each cow, the guilt could put some buyers off. The cut in subsidies for ranchers and the introduction of a carbon tax on meat would increase the price of your sausages or your Sunday roast and thus increase the demand for rationing.
But calling a problem “structural” – even if it is – invites us to wash our hands. Racism is structural too, but individuals still have an obligation not to be racist. The responsibility can lie with both the individual and the system at the same time.
W.Given the importance of what you do, it makes sense to borrow an idea from Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher. He developed a simple principle for doing the right thing: the “categorical imperative”.
According to this principle, you should only do things when it would be good for everyone to do so. If increasing your actions were untenable, those actions are likely immoral. Kant would of course have cast a somber look at those who piled their shopping carts high during the initial lockdown and left the shelves bare for the rest of us.
How does it behave when eating meat? Think of the patterns of global meat consumption the same way you would look at the different types of pandemic supermarket customers. First of all, there are the reluctant buyers – analogous to countries where moderate amounts of meat are eaten, including India, Iran and Thailand. If the whole world followed the diet of these populations, less land would be used for pasture than is currently the case.
You think you are entitled to more than your share of the world’s resources
Second are the storekeepers, the ones who buy extra but don’t clear the shelves. They are like countries where the population eats a lot, but not excessively, meat, like Russia and Spain. If we all followed this menu, we would have to cut down even more rainforests to make room for grazing or growing forage.
Third, come the hoarders, aka the buyers, who bought up all of the loo rolls. The equivalent are countries where so much meat is eaten that there simply isn’t enough land in the world to feed everyone else the same way. America, Australia and France are all culprits.
What kind of consumer do you want to be? If you eat little or no meat, everyone in the world could have similar diets and some existing arable land could be reforested. Or you could eat 150 pounds of meat a year, like the average American, and Kant would call you immoral.
Anything other than eating a very modest amount of meat is essentially a statement that you believe you are entitled to more than your share of the world’s resources (the Lancet medical journal estimates that every week a piece of beef out of 98 g and a piece of chicken a day counts as a fair share).
Whether or not you agree with Kant’s reasoning, putting your needs above those of others, for yourself and for the planet, is a dangerous habit. One way or another, we have to change the way we live if we want the planet to carry us. Isn’t eating fewer wings and more chickpeas a relatively painless way to do your bit? ■
Arianne Shahvisi is Senior Lecturer in Ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School
ILLUSTRATIONS: MATTHEW RICHARDSON
source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/whats-your-beef-an-ethicists-guide-to-giving-up-meat/
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