In the last post I talked about health as a reason to adopt a plant based diet.  After I hit publish I realized I hadn’t even touched two other huge reasons to adopt a plant based diet: animal welfare and the environment.

Animal Welfare

I think we can all agree that suffering is bad and that animal suffering is suffering.  And if you don’t – well, you’re a bad person, please excuse yourself from my blog.  Our current industrial meat production system does not value or even consider the subjective experience of the animals, and as a result generates an unfathomable amount of suffering.  I don’t need to go into the details, if this is news to you, you can go watch a documentary on Netflix.

I will say, it’s easy to slip into moral absolutism and see this issue in black in white.  Instead, I think reducing suffering by reducing and avoiding meat consumption is a good thing to do. Seeking out more ethically produced meat is also better than not doing that.  I also have doubts about the power of individual, consumer actions in changing the system.  Really this is a societal issue which means it is a political issue and you can make a bigger difference by getting involved in the politics, even if you still eat those tasty, tasty animals.  I think a politically engaged meat eater is probably making more of a difference in reducing suffering than an overly zealous vegan who is politically disengaged.  If you want to know where to get started try googling “the farm bill.”

The Environment

In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a climate emergency and unless we want to cook the planet, cause catastrophic, civilization ending flooding, storms, fires, and who-the-fuck-knows-what-else we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases into the air.  Reducing meat consumption is obviously better for the environment.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that growing plants and then eating them is less resource intensive than growing plants, feeding them to cows, and then eating the cows.  Also there’s the issue of methane cow burps, which I thought couldn’t possibly be that big of a deal – I mean how many cows are there and how much are they burping – but apparently this is a real issue for climate change.  Then there’s the whole using up all the water, polluting chemicals in our waterways, and habitat devastation to worry about.  I get that there may be some edge cases where the land is only suitable for grazing, or the animals are embedded in some kind of regenerative farming scheme, but that’s not what we’re talking about. All in all, things would be better if we just stopped eating animals.

Similarly to animal suffering this is an issue where I am skeptical about the ability to make systemic changes in our role as consumers.  I think being a citizen and getting politically engaged is the way to go if you want to make changes.  For this reason, I think health is by far the most compelling reason to center plants in your diet.  It’s not like individual actions have no effect though, so I think it’s good to think through these issues.  Plus you can rub it in your friends’ faces how superior you are, which is something I hear people love about us vegans and plant based folks.

Photo by Patrick Baum on Unsplash