This is supposed to be a blog on finding the meaning of life, and to do that you need to know your values and where they come from. I have a pretty good working framework of how I view values and why I don’t need a god to have them, but I wanted to look into the issue a bit more before writing about it. I also knew a bit about my values: for example, I care about empathy, nurturing others (like my beloved turtle) without expecting anything in return, social justice, and increasing happiness in sentient life around the globe. However, today was the day I began to reconsider adding veganism to the list.
I was watching YouTube videos on philosophy today instead of finding ways to actually promote my blog because, as much as I really would like to meet people this way, I really like writing and researching and it’s hard for me to spend my precious screen time doing anything else. So there I was, planning to write an entry on ethics and morality when I found Crash Course Philosophy. Philosophy produces a joy in me that almost nothing else can (except writing), but I used to be limited to Christian authors. I would have asked where the stuff I was finding had been all my life but it was probably everywhere except my bubble. I was on cloud nine watching video after video, starting with episode #32, and working my way through different approaches to figuring out what’s right and wrong until I came to episode #42:
This brought some points home in ways that I had not allowed myself to think about them before. Now, I’ve tried to be vegan three times before in my life, each time being very serious in my attempt, and they all ended basically with me curled up on the floor crying until somebody ordered me to buy and cook myself some meat. I have enough mental health issues, I reasoned, so I really needed to focus on that first, right? I had a lot of other reasons to not be vegan as well, which I will talk about in more depth below because they are probably more legitimate. For now, suffice it to say that it certainly has bothered me that my protein comes mostly from exploitation of animals, whether by directly eating their flesh or by keeping them alive in inhumane conditions for eggs, dairy, honey, or whatever. We watch a lot of nature documentaries here in the hospital and while I had always thought wild-caught fish was “safe” because the fish had lived otherwise happy lives, I hadn’t realized how much damage commercial fishing does to the ocean. I was also primed by something I saw recently in a video by SkepticShe:
While most of SkepticShe’s video is about responding to commenters’ accusations that she was secretly a Satanist, I came away thinking about the fact that we, as humans, have evolved in a way where we can now exploit other species in ways that no other species has ever been able to do before us. If we were still hunter-gatherers living sustainably, we would be like any other animal except with a larger brain. Instead, we have used our brains to inflict harm on other sentient life. While SkepticShe did not explicitly get into all the points I just mentioned, she started me down a path where I thought about them. So now, I’m going to list some objections I’ve personally made to veganism. Some of them may have been me rationalizing my consumption of animal products in light of the fact that I basically hate most vegan foods, while others I’m still hung up on.
Objection #1: “But what about plant sentience?”
Here in the hospital, there is a very firm “no pets” policy. I begged for sea monkeys and was told that it’s no exceptions. So I have a false Rose of Jericho named Rosa because probably the most intense instinct and character trait that I have is my desperate need to nurture. I got in trouble for trying to nurture my fellow patients, so in my attempts to re-direct my nurturing instinct to a plant, I bought the 1974 version of The Secret Life of Plants on a second-hand website for $3. There’s also a 2018 version but unfortunately I’m poor. Anyway, I haven’t read much of the book yet, but if definitely argues that plants can feel. I’ve been using my vague recollections of studies in which plants grow better when spoken to kindly by attentive caregivers as an excuse to avoid veganism for years, and although that did not influence my decision to buy the book, it did add to my underlying belief that my life was just going to cause harm no matter what I did, so why even try? (Which I’ve further used as an excuse to repeatedly attempt suicide so I could minimize the damage that my life was inevitably going to do, which is a lot of what got me locked up in here.)
Here’s the thing: my fellow humans seem to overwhelmingly agree that my killing myself would be a bad thing. There’s always the jerk here or there who tells me that I’d might as well kill myself if I’m not going to live for Jesus, but overall, there are few issues that my fellow sentient life forms that can talk have been in such agreement on. Besides, I’m on a search for the meaning of life and I have a turtle to get home to eventually so I can’t just go and try to off myself again. Besides there are other reasons but this post wasn’t meant to be on why I should not commit suicide. Rather, given that I’m probably going to exist on this earth for a while, maybe I should just focus on minimizing the harm that I cause and maximizing the good?
I don’t know how I never thought until today when I was preparing to write this about the fact that animals eat plants. I’ve heard that eating animals is more wasteful than eating plants because every time we eat animals, it took more plants to feed the animals and then eat the animals than it would have to just eat the plants in the first place. Either way, a lot depends on what’s possible for me right now. I looked into this and actually bought an article that was really helpful to me, called “An alternative ontology of food: Beyond metaphysics” (Heldke & Philosophy Documentation Center, 2012). Lisa Heldke, the author of that article, explained that “Fruitarians-Jains, for instance, who practice ahimsa—attempt to eliminate all death from their eating, by consuming only fruits—the ovaries of plants. Because plants are not (necessarily) killed in the harvesting of their fruit, when one chooses to eat only fruit, one may eliminate death from one’s diet.” However, she concluded the article with a much more holistic approach to food, after having considered a lot of the other moral concerns that I will mention. As for me, even if I were discharged tomorrow, there’s no way I would be able to go directly from eating factory-farmed meat with every meal to ahimsa, so me staying alive means that some plants are going to get screwed. Screwing over the animals is optional. And given that it’s a lot more clear that animals suffer than that animals suffer, giving up not causing harm as a hopeless cause might be a trip to an unnecessary opposite extreme from the extreme pacifists.
Objection #2: “But we live in an interdependent society that depends on harm to others so it’s hopeless!”
If the above YouTube video doesn’t work, an article that summarizes it is available here:
I watched this clip by Trevor Noah a while back and it stuck with me. Noah makes the argument that if you live in the USA and you try to track where everything you buy comes from, you’ll become paralyzed and go crazy. He was specifically talking about buying products that were produced by companies that claimed to support certain political viewpoints, but I feel that the point can be applied more broadly. I have been through points in my life when I tried to buy nothing unless it was Fair Trade (because free trade is not exactly all it’s cracked up to be, at least for people in countries other than ours). I did this because after having lived briefly in developing countries, I wanted to support companies that treated their workers fairly instead of indulging in cheap products made in sweatshops. The problem was that first of all, I’ve never been rich and for most of my adult life I’ve been extremely poor myself, and it was impossible for me to pay the extra money for Fair Trade products. For example, I wanted sunglasses, and at the time, the only Fair Trade sunglasses I could find online were over $100. I could either buy sweatshop sunglasses or not buy sunglasses, and if I chose to buy neither, who was I really helping? I could have been putting a sweatshop worker out of a job. Some people try to buy products that are made in the USA where we supposedly have laws that protect workers, but I worked in a factory in this country and all the pieces of the products that we were making had originally come from China. All we did was assemble Chinese interchangeable parts together into a final product and repackage them in boxes stamped “Proudly made in America.” So it’s impossible to come away with “clean hands,” as Heldke said several times in her article. I ended up buying the sweatshop sunglasses. Another problem is that most products are simply impossible to buy Fair Trade, even if I were independently wealthy. Ever tried to buy a thermos Fair Trade? I hope you have better luck finding one than I did.
But back to food. Let’s say that I want to be vegan but not fruitarian, because I’ve given up worrying about plant sentience. Who grew and harvested the plants I’m going to eat? Generally, not workers making a living wage and getting full benefits and a 401k. I actually visited a fruit farm when I was on travel study in college in an extremely impoverished country, and they did not get many American visitors so they took the opportunity to tell us what working conditions were like for them. They were required to work so hard that even pregnant women were working through their entire pregnancies, which was problematic because crop dusters constantly sprayed them with chemicals that had been banned in the USA. Coincidentally, their kids had devastating birth defects, and obviously there was no way for the parents to get their children appropriate care to live their best possible lives with special needs. It was a similar situation as with the sunglasses in that if we stopped buying imported fruit, the workers would lose the jobs that they depended on. If we buy domestic fruit, many of those workers are undocumented, so we don’t even know the extent of the injustices they face on the job. The best we can do is try to buy organic fruit when we can afford it and hope that we’re at least contributing to fewer atrocities. As hard as it must be to farm crops, it’s still hard for me to imagine that it could be anywhere near as dehumanizing as working in a slaughterhouse, so veganism, whether organic or not, would be a step in the right direction for the people directly involved with food production.
So say I’m vegan but not fruitarian so I’m trying to buy plant-based protein. You can’t really get that at my local grocery stores, so I’d be shopping at Whole Foods because Whole Foods is the only place you can buy tempeh and seitan except for the even more expensive places, so my money is basically going to Jeff Bezos who is famous for treating workers like machines with no feelings.
I don’t know the right response to this. Some people can solve a few moral problems by being independently wealthy and only supporting less atrocious companies, but I’m definitely not independently wealthy and even if I were, would the right thing be to buy myself the moral high ground with less-guilt food choices that regular people would starve if they tried to subsist off of?
Objection #3: “But if I stop eating meat, will I have to commit to stop killing household vermin?”
This is not a common concern but it became a thought for me when I moved into a building that was infested with mice and multiple species of roaches. The vermin were everywhere. I would come home from grocery shopping and any food not put away immediately would be attacked by mice. All food had to be in sealed air-tight plastic containers because the slightest weakness in any packaging would make the food inside a literal breeding ground for roaches. They took over the microwave to the point where you couldn’t see the light-up numbers on it; you could just see vaguely illuminated roaches crawling around inside. Obviously, I and several other people in the building did everything in our power to kill as many of them as possible. Unfortunately, some occupants were less concerned and no amount of vermin-killing could even make a dent in the problem. The first time I heard a snap trap go off, I found out that they don’t actually kill mice instantly; the poor creature broke into a justified panic as their amygdala must have blown up, and they started scritch-scratching frantically for several seconds before the scratching slowed and the poor wretch finally died. Here I had a fellow mammal that experienced emotions that couldn’t be that different from mine, and I had killed them because they were a nuisance to me. I mean, they were honestly more of a health hazard than a nuisance. But why did I deserve to live more than them?
Given that I couldn’t afford to move out of the building, and I couldn’t live with vermin everywhere, I threw up my hands in all-or-nothing thinking. If I killed vermin at every chance I got, then surely I was a monster of a species and a monster certainly wouldn’t mind buying meat that had already been slaughtered by someone else and would have been slaughtered even if I were vegan.
Objection #4: “But animals that we don’t eat just go on to eat other animals!”
This is an objection that actually got me to end one of my vegan endeavors. I was going crazy trying to be vegan but my best friend, the turtle, still got to be mostly carnivorous. It would be impossible for his species to survive without eating meat, just as it would be impossible for a cat, and many other species. So if I say that all animals have the right not to be slaughtered, aren’t I assigning them rights without corresponding responsibility to behave humanely themselves?
No. Because non-human animals have always hunted sustainably if they were in their appropriate habitats. They exist in balanced ecosystems and have no ability to actually exploit one another the way humans can. We have higher intelligence, which is why we have more responsibility. But even with our higher intelligence, we have been more destructive than any other species.
Objection #5: “But even if we’re vegan, don’t humans just ruin the world anyway?”
This is similar to objection #2. All indigenous cultures I have ever heard of have lived in cultures where literally everything they consumed was biodegradable. But now, my culture produces enough waste to actually pollute entire oceans. How big is an ocean? Pretty frickin’ big. And yet, we have managed to fill them with non-biodegradable waste. I don’t know how much trash I’m going to be personally responsible for by the end of my life, but I assume quite a bit. In the hospital, every single individual pill is packaged in plastic. Every. Pill. Not every category of pills, as would be the case on the outside, where a 30-day-supply comes in an orange bottle. In here, every one pill comes in its own blister pack, which is used once and thrown away. If I’m unable to move and go live in an indigenous culture and live sustatainably without the pollution that is produced by being a human in the mainstream globalized world, aren’t I doomed to be part of the downfall of the planet?
Maybe. But another thing that I just learned in Crash Course Philosophy is that “ought implies can.” It was never part of my upbringing in the Total Depravity movement that I could live free of guilt and shame simply by doing my best. Now, I can embrace that philosophy. It may be impossible for me to perfectly do no harm ever, but I can do what I can where I can. I can do my best and call it good enough.
Objection #6: “But what about practical limitations?”
This objection has come up a lot. As I have mentioned, I do not have the financial privilege to make extravagant ethical choices. Normally, I am severely limited by what foods I can afford. Vegan choices, and less-atrocity choices in general, are outside of my reach. Meanwhile, right now I’m just hanging out in a local General Hospital. There are lots of medical units and there is a psych unit. I can change my diet to vegan, but this place was never intended for people to be living in for months at a time and the menu is limited accordingly. I’m more than fortunate to have any options, but there’s definitely no tofu in here, let alone jackfruit. Obviously, this would be a tricky time to become fully vegan. So do I wait until discharge, when I’ll be back to my regular limitations? Am I going to discharge and jump right in to finding plant-based protein on sale and cooking it myself with whatever kitchen space I have? It’s the classic question of “If not now, when?”
Objection #7: ”If I can’t do everything, I should do nothing”
You have probably noticed that this has been the overarching theme here. My diagnosis may be C-PTSD but I suspect I could have a secondary diagnosis of OCD. I’m not talking about the cute OCD that is cool in pop culture. My uncle (my mother’s brother) was in a state hospital for several years in the 1970s for clinical OCD. So, everybody else in the family, afraid of a similar unpleasant experience, has adopted the claim that nothing is at all wrong with them, ever. You’ve never met a bunch of people as “clinically normal with zero mental health issues here” as my mom’s side of the family. But they totally have untreated OCD. I brought it up with my doctor and he said that my traits are probably really manifestations of the C-PTSD but either way, I do tend toward all-or-nothing thinking. I reason that since I’m “evil” and there’s nothing I can do about that, I had better either kill myself or live in denial. As Heldke puts it:
If Derrida is correct, and our ethical demands always far outstrip our capacity to meet them, then our own clean hands are impossible, and choosing to focus on them either will require us to deceive ourselves about our chances of success (by simplifying our moral choices, perhaps), or will lead us to focus, obsessively and hopelessly, on our own inadequacy. Derrida’s assessment demands that I abandon my self-absorbed moral quest or plunge into despair or denial. The alternative I propose sees foods not primarily as substances belonging to various (biological or quasi-biological) categories, but rather as collections of relations.
(Heldke & Philosophy Documentation Center, 2012, pp. 83-84)
When my younger brother and I were little, he had a toy alligator who he loved more than any other stuffed animal and brought with him everywhere. He and I used to play make believe with the toy alligator, imagining various comedic companions for him. One of them was “The Lady That Likes Nature.” This character ate nothing but salt and continually went into conniptions whenever anyone else in our imagination games harmed a piece of nature. This was remedied by putting her somewhere where she was surrounded by plants, as she was unable to trample the plants, so she was trapped and rendered harmless. As much fun as we had inventing such a funny neurotic character with an unsustainable diet, it’s hard to know where to draw lines. Most of the world is gray areas, but we have to make decisions every single day. How much harm is it “acceptable” to cause?
A (Seemingly Appealing) Alternative
As a last ditch effort to avoid the dreaded veganism, many have turned to local farmers. I know someone who will only eat meat if she can shake the hand of the farmer who raised it. Aside from the obvious issue that the animal is still slaughtered, it seems to me that there are other problems with this alternative. First, it’s incredibly expensive, and if it’s not possible for the average person to do it, is it really that helpful? Wouldn’t it be better to pump that money into AIDS research? It also seems to me that this type of farming might be even less sustainable than factory farming. If we’re going to treat farm animals humanely, they need a whole lot more space than a factory farm gives them. But if we’re going to keep eating the same amount of meat, we’re going to need the same number of farm animals. There’s only so much land in our country, but we’ve made do by cutting down most of the forests that were here when the Pilgrims arrived and squeezing in enough factory farms to mass produce meat. Then Brazil tries to do the same thing with slash and burn farming and we cry foul. They can’t destroy their forests and indigenous people’s homes and whatever because we already did the same thing here and it would be a sad world without at least some forests. I don’t know the solution to this, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t dedicating even more space to meat production (both the actual land that animals need to live on, and also the land dedicated to growing plants to feed the animals). From an environmental sustainability standpoint, being able to shake the hand of your trusted local farmer may be counter-productive.
Is Veganism Really the Best Way to Do No Harm?
I don’t know. I do know that when we try to do no harm, we’re attempting to do something that we know we won’t be able to do perfectly, potentially opening the door to do other things imperfectly. And even if nothing else in my life changed and I didn’t put more energy into recycling and all the things that responsible global citizens are supposed to do, wouldn’t eating less animal products still be a single step in the right direction? If I could do as Heldke advises and deemphasize strict moral rules in favor of a holistic attempt to make the best choices available to me? I read an article once entitled “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Halfway.” Even if it isn’t perfect, it’s an improvement, and progress is all we can ever hope for in life.
Does Veganism Increase Happiness?
This is the big question, since I don’t focus as much as some people on reducing suffering, and I choose instead to emphasize the maximization of happiness. Some of my professors when I was on my semester abroad indicated that veganism maximizes productivity of land and reduces waste, which would in turn reduce global hunger. A quick internet search of “veganism to reduce global hunger” shows that all the top results, some of which are from this year, agree with this. Whenever I’ve been especially destitute, I was not thinking about how to improve my mental health and self-actualize. I wrote about Maslow recently and how the research he kicked off explains that people cannot focus on things like overall happiness when they’re starving. Any lifestyle that would decrease world hunger would help people reach their innate potential. If I could be responsible for just one person somewhere emerging from hunger and climbing one step on the hierarchy of needs, wouldn’t it be worth a vegan diet?
People cannot be happy when they’re hungry and meanwhile, domestic animals cannot be happy when they’re being raised for slaughter on a factory farm. Wild animals cannot be happy when being ravaged by climate change. Moving toward veganism is the next logical step on the life trajectory that I want: one that unlocks the potential of sentient life to be happy.
References
CrashCourse. (2017, January 16). Non-Human Animals: Crash Course Philosophy #42 [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/y3-BX-jN_Ac
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. (2018, September 5). Nike’s Kaepernick Ad – Between the Scenes [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/nma4GJ2rfwU
Heldke, L., & Philosophy Documentation Center. (2012). An alternative ontology of food: Beyond metaphysics. Radical Philosophy Review, 15(1), 67–88.
Kilkenny, K. (2018, September 5). Trevor Noah cautions viewers: Nike is profiting off of politics. Retrieved August 10, 2021, from Hollywoodreporter.com website: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/trevor-noah-colin-kaepernicks-nike-ad-company-is-trying-make-money-1140117/
SkepticShe. (2021, January 29). We Need to Talk About My “Satan” Worship [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/-gPlGhbnZzk
Tompkins, P., & Bird, C. (1974). The secret life of plants. Bristol, England: Avon Books.
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