Why vegetarian?

When I was a kid, my Mom (aka Mamma) swore that she thought I wouldnt even care if she didnt make any meat. Little did she know that I'd swear off of it just 6 months after she died. She would have croaked, to reference my Mom's lexicon, if I had gone fully vegetarian when she was alive. I didnt tell her, but I gave up red meat in general, shrimp, and fish well before she passed away. My only violations of this choice was at her dinner table. And when she did pass away, I had no more excuses. So, I had my last chicken tenders dinner from Bojangles, and swore off of it.

Seven years later, I'm still resolutely vegetarian, probably the first ever from Chocowinity, NC.

For me, the seed for vegetarianism was planted years before I took the leap. I read an essay by Moby in the album cover for Play (you know, back when we all used to actually purchase and hold CDs) about why he went vegan, and every single argument, shy of animal welfare, appealed to me. Here are the usual reasons why people go vegetarian, and I'll arrange them in order of importance to me:

1. Environment: The single best thing you can do as an individual for the planet is to have less kids. The second is to eat less meat. Forget biking the 5 miles to work instead of driving. Forget eating organic. Eat less meat, and you're saving habitat for and animals and you're supporting the release of far less CO2. I have never pushed anybody to go full-out vegetarian; but I have certainly tried to convince people that beef aint what's for breakfast. Some brilliant rancher discovered years ago that when it's light outside, a cow will eat. I learned this a few years ago after my friend Phil had his sleep disrupted all night long at a state park in west Texas by the stadium lights alighting a field full of cattle feeding at troughs. The average lifespan of a beef cow has decreased from 3 years to 2 years in the past century, and this is one of the methods that has been developed to maximize efficiency. How much CO2 release is this practice responsible for?

2. Human Welfare: Another important part of my development into a vegetarian was reading Fast Food Nation. A major point of the book is just how inhumane beef "factories" are for the employees. In general, the people working there are illegal immigrants, and have no rights or health care. So here you have a 100 human automatons making the same cuts over and over again all day long for breadcrumbs essentially--because we want McDonald's to offer 79 cent hamburgers--and doing so with blades sharpened to an extent that one foul move sends somebody to the hospital. And when you're whacking away all day long with the same motion, slip-ups happen. Good luck finding health care in the United States, Mr. Mexican/Guatemalan/El Salvadorean immigrant, we'd rather you pick up that left arm and mosey back home.

Yeah, I didnt really want to support that industry any more.

3. Personal Health: I've got a father who had a couple of open-heart surgeries in his 30s and early 40s. Then there's the uncle who died of a stroke, a grandmother of a blood clot, and plenty of other indications that my genetics will not be providing a clean bill of cardiovascular health for life. I've never been interested in smoking anything, really, so that part of staying healthy is covered. The other source of cardiovascular disease is high-cholesterol and high-NACl meat. It just makes sense to cut it out with my family history.

4. Assimilation Energy: When I was a freshman in high school, even at Chocowinity High School we learned that only 10% of the plant matter that a cow eats is available as energy to the next trophic level (you). So, that means that for every pound of cow that a person consumes, 10 pounds of food had to be served up to that cow. This could have easily been a subheader beneath "Environment," but it stands alone for several reason. Number 1, we are looking at a planet today with 7 billion people, only 1 billion or so of which is supported by a regular, farmed meat diet. If we really want to feed the planet and not have starving people all over it, we should probably dedicate our croplands to feeding them and not a bunch of freaking cows. Number 2--and this is where the redundancy with point 1 comes into play--that means 10 Xs more natural habitat gets reduced into monoculture if you're feeding the crops to cows rather than directly to humans. So, yeah, it's good that your beef is from a grass-fed cow. It's good that it's organic and local and "green." But you're still not eating in the most efficient manner for the planet.

5. Animal Welfare: For the reasons discussed below, this is at the bottom of the list. The point is not trivial, however. I've never been interested in veal, for instance, because of the terrible treatment that a calf must experience in their short, horrific lives for me to enjoy the delicacy. Chickens stuffed into a tiny barn, barely able to move around, and often bred to have breast muscles so large so as to prevent movement anyway is also an unsettling thought. Humans are omnivores though, and there're theories that adding high-calorie meat to our diets helped Homo sapiens develop especially large brains (our brains after all being very energy-hungry). I just think the way we go about using animals for your dietary "needs" now-a-days is way out of hand.

I realized a long time ago that when I pay for something, I'm casting a vote for that something to exist. Go to McDonald's, and you're absolutely supporting the destruction of habitat, humans, and animals. There're no two ways about it.

But I do eat meat. I still call myself vegetarian for brevity's sake; but if my friends go out and shoot a white tailed deer (an animal who's populations have exploded in the absence of predators and hence threatens the habitat of other species), I'll thoroughly enjoy some venison. If a fish is sustainable and caught in the right way, I'll certainly have some tacos with it. And I'm just waiting for the day that somebody goes out and takes a wild pig for bbq'ing up NC style. I do still love meat. I just dont want to support the industrialization of it.