Vegetarianism
Good Eating: Questions and Answers About Being Vegetarian
Contents
Why do people give up meat and become vegetarians?
But isn't meat-eating necessary for good health?
How do vegetarians meet their needs for protein?
What about vitamins and minerals? Does a vegetarian diet provide all essential nutrients?
Are there health advantages to vegetarianism?
How many animals are killed each year to provide meat for the dinner table?
What's a slaughterhouse like? How are the animals killed?
Don't farm animals have decent lives prior to being slaughtered?
What is the moral argument against meat-eating?
But why care about animals? Don't they lack any feelings?
But don't plants have feelings too?
If everyone suddenly became vegetarian, what would happen to all the animals, and the meat industry?
Is it hard to become a vegetarian? Where do I begin?
Vegetarianism is the practice of not eating meat. People whose diet does not include eating animals for food are known as vegetarians. In addition to not eating "red meat" (beef, pork, lamb), vegetarians also don’t eat seafood or poultry. Some vegetarians avoid animal by-products. Both kinds, however, do not eat animals.
The vegetarian diet has become much more popular in recent years. It is now estimated that over one million Americans are reported to limit his/her consumption of meat for health reasons.
Why do people give up meat and become vegetarians?
A vegetarian diet may be chosen for a variety of reasons. Some people choose vegetarianism because they belief a meat-centered diet is expensive, wasteful, or unhealthy. Others adopt it for reasons of conscience: they consider it wrong and unnecessary to kill animals for food, or to cause them the needless suffering of being raised for slaughter.
But isn't meat-eating necessary for good health?
No, it is not. The simple fact is that we don’t need to eat meat in order to live long, healthy, active lives. Consumer Reports magazine has stated that a vegetarian diet is nutritionally safe and sound. Most vegetarians find it easy to obtain proper, balanced nutrition. Everything needed for a complete vegetarian diet is available in most supermarkets, all across the country in the US.
How do vegetarians meet their needs for protein?
Many meatless alternatives to animal sources of protein exist, including grains and cereals, wheat-gluten, beans, peas and lentils, nut, seeds, avocados, seaweeds and vegetables. Especially useful are soybeans and foods made from soybean such as tofu (beancurd), tempeh (soycake), and soymilk.
While some vegetable proteins are low in certain amino acids, these deficiencies are easily compensated for when eating two meatless protein – alternatives together. Combining proteins is more difficult than eating beans and rice together, or putting peanut butter between two slices of wheat bread. But combining vegetable proteins is not even necessary for meeting protein needs since human protein needs are not, in face, that high in the first place.
What about vitamins and minerals? Does a vegetarian diet provide all essential nutrients?
Vegetarians with a varied diet have little trouble meeting their nutrition needs. Non-animal sources of vitamins and minerals are readily available in foods. In fact, vitamins B12 and D are the only two nutrients which may have to be supplemented by eating such special cultured (fermented) food as miso, saurkraut, soysauce, and nutritional (brewer’s) yeast. Black mushrooms, brown rice, sprouts, spirulina, barley and wheat grass juice, and some seaweeds are also suppliers of these nutrients.
Are there health advantages to vegetarianism?
Of course! In fact, it’s the only healthy way to eat! A meatless diet is higher in roughage and lower in saturated fats than an animal-based diet. Thus vegetarians are less likely to suffer from heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity, arthritis, and many forms of cancer.
A vegetarian enjoys better health by his/her avoidance of the various drugs, chemicals, pesticides and dyes commonly found in meat. Half the nation’s supply of antibiotics is now fed to food-animals. Drugs like penicillin and tetracycline are becoming routinely ingested by factory-farmed animals on a daily basis. Some scientists believe this practice undermining the effectiveness of these drugs to treat human illness.
The vegetarian diet also offers a health advantage to the many people in our world who suffer from hunger and malnutrition. It takes ten or more pounds of plant protein to produce one pound of meat protein in grain-fed livestock. By our adopting a vegetarian diet and eating plant protein directly, the world’s food supplies can be extended further to feed a much large population. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know there were no starving children anywhere in the world? This can be accomplished with vegetarianism.
This consideration for other human being has led some people to adopt a vegetarian diet, although most ethical arguments for vegetarianism focus on the treatment of animal.
How many animals are killed each year to provide meat for the dinner table?
The animal death toll is extremely high. Each year in the United States, over one hundred million cows, pigs and sheep are killed in slaughterhouses. An additional four billion birds, primarily chickens, are also slaughtered annually. Altogether, these figures represent a line of animals stretching over 750,000 miles long – far greater than the distance to the moon and back.
What's a slaughterhouse like? How are the animals killed?
In and around a typical slaughterhouse, thousands of animals suffer pain and lose their lives everyday. Cattle, for instance, may arrive after travelling by truck for two or three days standing up without food or water, any restlessness controlled by the use of electric cattle prod. After unloading, they’re herded into pens to wait their turn at death. Some animals panic and risk mistreatment. Stockyard workers again use electric prods and wooded canes to drive these creatures through a network of chutes and runways into the slaughterhouse to die.
Livestock animals are generally rendered unconscious prior to being bled and butchered in federally inspected slaughterhouses. Approved techniques include carbon dioxide gassing, electroshock, gunshot, and the use of captive bolt stunners which cause brain destruction by driving a metal bolt through the animal’s skull. Smaller meat-packing plants may still use sledgehammers and poleaxes; it can take two or three blows with these weapons to knock out a larger animal. In contrast, kosher slaughter requires that cows, calves, sheep and lambs be fully conscious when their throats are cut. Who can say they have no feelings?
But whatever the method used, the end result is the same: pain and death to other creatures. The slaughtering in "meat-processing" takes just a moment to transform a living, sentient being into just a lifeless hunk of flesh and bone. Increased and unnecessary violence is the unseen price of meat-eating.
Don't farm animals have decent lives prior to being slaughtered?
NO, on the contrary. Today most food-animals are raised on "factory farms," where mass production techniques are used to maximize efficiency and profit. These pitiful animals are denied freedom of movement, and their physical, emotional and social need are completely denies and ignored. They suffer extreme boredom, stress, and self-destructive behaviour.
In what ways are factory-farmed animals, denied freedom? How severe is their confinement? For example, egg-laying chickens are kept in 12 by 18 inch "battery cages". Each cage contains four to five chickens. Veal calves are removed at birth from their mothers and kept standing in dark stalls so small that turning around or even laying down comfortably is an impossibility.
Because the chickens react to confinement by fighting or self-mutilation, part of their beaks are cut off with either a hot knife or a guillotine-like device, which also slices through sensitive tissues. While chickens living under more normal conditions can live many years, chicken raised intensively for maximum egg-production reach old age in fourteen months. Once their ability to produce eggs is diminished, they are sent to the slaughterhouse to be made into "chicken soup" and processed food.
The lifespan of a veal calf, on the other hand, is just 16 weeks. These animals are sent to the slaughterhouse never having had the opportunity to move about or exercise, since these activities would product a less tender cut of meat (Veal calves are a by-product of the dairy industry. In order to keep dairy cows lactating, they must be periodically impregnated and allowed to give birth. The unwanted male offspring become veal calves.)
Ocean fish generally live their lives under natural conditions, and in this respect their lot is better than that of farmed animals. Fish do, however, appear to suffer when they are caught and hauled onto the decks of fishing boats. There they flop about in distress, and since they cannot breath out of water, they die slowly from suffocation.
Of ecological concern is the fact that extensive commercial fishing is depleting the ocean of fish. Moreover, modern tuna fishing techniques are not only efficient in catching tuna but also resulting in the accidental killing of thousands of dolphins every year.
What is the moral argument against meat-eating?
The moral argument is straightforward, simple and compelling. Meat-eating causes suffering and death to innocent living creatures, and for this reason it is wrong. If it were the case that we had to eat meat in order to survive, then the practice of meat-eating could be excused as a "necessary evil." But the fact is the meat-eating is not at all necessary for most people in the world today. An alternative plant-based diet is readily available all over the globe.
People in our society often eat meat out of habit, because they have developed a taste for it, and for the lack of information about its ill effects. But these factors do not represent moral justification. Meat-eating is immoral because it involves the inhumane treatment of animals. It violates a basic moral principle of heaven and earth: namely, that it is wrong to kill, wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering and death upon other creatures.
But why care about animals? Don't they lack any feelings?
That animals have feelings is undeniable. An injured animal, such as a pet dog or cat, reacts much the same as we might when we are hurt. It screeches, yelps, or cries. This is not surprising since animals have nervous systems similar to ours with respect to feeling physical pain.
No doubt some animals can suffer emotionally and psychologically as well. Since the capacity for suffering is well-developed in animals as it is in humans, both equally deserve to be treated with kindness.
But don't plants have feelings too?
It is a matter of a very great degree of difference. Plants do react to various stimuli, but they do not have the nervous systems that animal do. If plants have "feelings" at all, these sensitivities are very primitive and quite different from those experienced by humans and other animals. The vegetarian recognizes that plants have a lifeforce; however, most plants are harvested at the end of their short lifespans, or else only the fruits are picked, leaving the plants intact. Since we, as natural creatures, must eat to survive, eating "low on the food chain" causes less suffering. Therefore it is more humane.
If everyone suddenly became vegetarian, what would happen to all the animals, and the meat industry?
It is important to realize that the vegetarian diet is not likely to be adopted by everyone overnight. At best, it will be a gradual process. As more people become vegetarians, there will be less demand for meat. This lower demand will cause the meat industry to raise and kill fewer animals. There is evidence that this trend had already begun. There will always be a need for food, so the meat or dairy farmers can turn their expertise to be more healthful, life-giving food production and still earn a living.
Is it hard to become a vegetarian? Where do I begin?
Becoming a vegetarian can be so easy, once you’ve decided to try it. You can re-orient your cooking with the help of a vegetarian cookbook (there are many at the bookstores now), a vegetarian cooking class, or a friend with a few good recipes. There are even vegetarian recipes and discussion-groups on-line, for those with a computer modem. It helps, of course, if those closest to you respect and support your decision, but if not, there are millions of other vegetarians who certainly do.
You may choose the gradual route, not becoming vegetarian all at once. You might want to think of it as a goal and take steps toward it over time, giving up "red meat" for a start. Then, after a period of adjustment, you could drop the seafood and poultry. Some people continue to eat dairy products and eggs, while others prefer to minimize the consumption of these and eventually give them up entirely.
Thus, vegetarianism encompasses different styled, depending on personal choice and conscience. Years from now, factory farms and slaughterhouse may be outlawed as barbaric, and people may wonder how their ancestors could have ever eaten the dead bodies of animals. But today meat-eating is the norm, and at the very least, a vegetarian must be willing to be a bit different. But be assured that a non-violent diet has its own plentiful rewards. For those who care, vegetarianism is the very best way to achieve good, healthful eating and a long, happy life, in more ways than one!
"Formerly, vegetable proteins were classified as second-class, and regarded as inferior to first-class proteins of animal origin, but this distinction has now been generally discarded"
Editorial, The Lancet (A medical Journal), London, 2:956, 1959
"Until recently, many eyebrows would have been raised by suggesting that an imbalance of normal dietary components could lead to cancer and cardiovascular disease…Today, the accumulation of…evidence…makes this notion not only possible but certain…(The) dietary factors responsible (are) principally meat and fat intake."
-Dr. Gori, G. quoted in Robbin J., Diet For A New America, 1987.
"Animals being ritually slaughtered in the United States are shackled around a rear leg, hoisted into the air, and then hang, fully conscious, upside down on the conveyer belt for between two and five minutes - and occasionally much longer if something goes wrong on the 'killing line' - before the slaughterer makes his cut."
-Singer, P., Animal Liberation, AvonBooks, 1975, pg153
"The time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."
-Leonardo Da Vinci, quoted in Robbins J. Diet For A New America, 1987
"It is difficult for us to imagine what this combination of fear, travel sickness, thirst, near-starvation, exhaustion, and (in winter)…severe chill feels like to the cattle. In the case of young calves, which may have gone through the stress of weaning and castration only a few days earlier, the effect is still worse."
-Singer, P., Animal Liberation, Avon Books, 1975
"Purifying thoughts, words, and deeds at the outset, the spiritual pilgrim tries to purify his livelihood by refraining from five kinds of trade which are forbidden to a lay-disciple. They are trading of arms, human beings, flesh, i.e. breeding animals for slaughter, intoxication drinks, and poison.
-Narada Maha Thera, The Buddha and His Teachings, B.M.S. Publication, 1977.
