The case for being a conscientious omnivore

I love animals.

That probably seems like a strange way to begin an essay about why I eat them, but it is essential to understanding how I think about the subject.

Growing up, we had the same family dog from the time I was two until I was nineteen. She slept beside me at night, kept me company when I was sick, and was present through virtually my entire childhood. I didn't simply grow up with a dog. In a sense, I grew up alongside another animal.

When she died, I decided to become a vegetarian.

I stuck with it for about a year.

My family wasn't particularly supportive. I was repeatedly told that vegetarianism simply wasn't in our DNA, and meat had a funny way of continuing to appear in front of me.

Then I moved to Boston and started working in restaurants.

There is only so much moral resolve you can summon while standing in a restaurant kitchen watching freshly cooked burgers appear in the window and smelling them all night. I missed meat. I missed the flavor.

Eventually, after about a year, I gave in.

But the questions that caused me to become vegetarian never really disappeared.

Nature Is Not Particularly Gentle

Years later, I found myself on safari in the Serengeti, where I got a dramatically different perspective on animals, death and suffering.

Nature documentaries have a tendency to clean things up for us.

The Serengeti does not.

I watched predators pursue zebras and wildebeest. Some hunts ended brutally. Others ended with exhausted predators and prey escaping by inches.

What became obvious was that neither side had an easy existence.

Prey animals live with hunger, disease, injury and the persistent possibility of being eaten. Predators live with starvation and the possibility that the next meal simply won't materialize.

Nature is magnificent.

It is also violent.

And watching it unfold in front of me complicated the way I thought about livestock.

If an animal has a reasonably good life—with room to move, adequate food, social interaction and freedom from unnecessary suffering—followed by a rapid death, I'm not convinced that existence is inherently worse than what many animals experience in the wild.

In some ways, the more interesting ethical question isn't whether we should raise animals for food at all.

It's what kind of life we owe them if we're going to.

I would like to see livestock raised in ways that place more value on the animal's life itself, rather than viewing it exclusively as a biological machine whose purpose is reaching market weight as quickly and cheaply as possible.

If we're going to eat animals, then how those animals live should matter.

Our Pets Complicate the Argument

There is another uncomfortable contradiction hiding in many conversations about eating meat.

Our pets.

Cats, in particular, are obligate carnivores. Their biology evolved around consuming other animals. Dogs are more flexible omnivores, although much of what we traditionally feed them still contains chicken, beef, turkey, lamb or fish.

So someone can sit down to a completely plant-based dinner, finish eating, walk over to the cupboard and open a can of chicken pâté for the cat.

I'm not pointing this out as some sort of vegetarian "gotcha."

A person can reasonably argue that humans have choices a cat doesn't.

But it does make claims of moral superiority considerably harder to maintain.

If you love your cat and believe it deserves to be healthy and well fed, then other animals are probably dying to sustain the animal sleeping at the foot of your bed.

And almost nobody looks at their cat and thinks it's evil for eating meat.

We accept that the cat is participating in the biological system it evolved to inhabit.

Humans obviously have considerably more capacity to think about our choices, but we're still inside that system too.

There isn't a clean division between people who participate in animal consumption and people who exist outside of it.

The reality is much messier.

Nobody Wants a Lecture With Their Burger

Food has somehow become another battlefield where people feel obligated to divide themselves into camps.

Carnivore.

Vegan.

Keto.

Paleo.

Plant-based.

Pick your flag and prepare to defend it.

But there may be no less effective method of changing someone's mind than staring disapprovingly across the table while they're trying to enjoy a hamburger.

If you genuinely think someone should eat less meat, buy them a thoughtful book. Send them an interesting article. Better yet, cook them an incredible vegetarian meal.

Just don't turn dinner into a courtroom.

I don't think eating meat should be a religion.

I don't think avoiding meat should be one either.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to eat less of it.

Meat Doesn't Have to Mean Meat at Every Meal

I have no interest in eating a giant steak three times a day.

Beef, in particular, comes with legitimate environmental costs. Cattle produce methane as part of their digestive process—something people often reduce to jokes about cow flatulence when, amusingly enough, much of it actually comes out through belching.

Researchers and farmers are experimenting with ways to reduce those emissions, while anaerobic digesters can capture methane from manure and other organic waste and turn it into usable energy.

I find that fascinating.

We've spent thousands of years using manure to return nutrients to farmland. Modern technology gives us the possibility of pulling energy out of that waste along the way.

Food scraps, manure, grass clippings and other biological material can become part of another cycle instead of simply becoming waste.

That's the kind of thinking I find much more compelling than declaring cows inherently good or inherently bad.

Build a better system.

Personally, moderation makes the most sense to me.

I might eat beef once or twice a month. During a normal week I'd rather rotate among fish, chicken, pork, eggs, dairy, soy, beans and other plant proteins. Sometimes I'll go stretches eating almost entirely vegetarian food. Other times I may eat more fish or animal protein depending on what I'm doing and what my body seems to need.

There doesn't have to be an ideological commitment attached to every meal.

Even Plants Complicate the Picture

Plants don't have brains or nervous systems like animals, and I don't think we currently have good reason to claim that a carrot experiences suffering the way a cow does.

But plants aren't passive objects either.

They respond to injury and environmental threats. They communicate chemically. Their roots participate in extraordinarily complex relationships with fungi, bacteria and other plants.

The more we learn about biology, the harder it becomes to see the living world as a collection of isolated organisms.

Everything is interacting with everything else.

Something consumes something.

Something decomposes something.

Nutrients move from one organism into another and eventually back into the soil.

None of that proves that eating lettuce is morally equivalent to eating a cow.

It simply reminds me that there is no diet that allows us to step completely outside the biological system.

Something living ultimately sustains something else.

Sometimes Killing Animals Is Part of Protecting Them

Wildlife makes the moral picture even more complicated.

Consider deer.

Throughout much of North America, humans drastically reduced or eliminated many of the large predators that historically helped control deer populations.

Then we built roads, subdivisions, farms and gardens that often created excellent habitat for deer.

The result shouldn't be surprising.

In many places, humans removed the creatures that managed deer populations naturally and then discovered that the job hadn't disappeared.

We had inherited it.

That becomes particularly troubling when disease enters the picture.

Chronic wasting disease is a fatal prion disease affecting deer, elk and related species. Prions are abnormal, misfolded proteins that can trigger other proteins to misfold. As the disease progresses, infected animals can lose weight, stumble, drool, behave abnormally and eventually die.

Even worse, infected animals can shed prions into their environment through saliva, urine, feces and other bodily fluids. Those prions can persist in contaminated environments for years.

This makes practices that artificially congregate deer—such as feeding them in the same location—particularly concerning.

There is something almost surreal about chronic wasting disease.

Anyone who has played enough fantasy games knows the mission: some corruption has begun spreading through the forest, animals are becoming sick, and you're sent out to eliminate the infected creatures before the blight spreads.

Except this one is real.

And controlling wildlife disease or severe overpopulation can lead to an uncomfortable conclusion:

Sometimes protecting an ecosystem requires killing animals.

Hunting and population reduction can be part of wildlife management. Restoring predators can be part of the solution too.

Neither option is emotionally simple.

But neither is walking away.

When humans radically alter an ecosystem, we don't magically become morally neutral by refusing to manage the consequences.

There Is No Harmless Lunch

That's really where I've landed.

I don't think animals are merely products.

I don't think their suffering is irrelevant.

And I don't think the existence of suffering in nature gives humans permission to inflict whatever suffering is convenient for us.

Quite the opposite.

Our ability to understand suffering gives us a responsibility to reduce unnecessary suffering where we can.

But I also don't believe morality requires pretending that humans somehow exist apart from nature.

We are omnivorous animals living inside an ecological system built around consumption, competition, cooperation, reproduction, death, decomposition and renewal.

Agriculture has made much of that system invisible to us.

The supermarket especially has.

A plastic-wrapped steak doesn't look much like a cow.

A bag of kibble doesn't look much like the animals that became dinner for your dog.

A carton of eggs doesn't show you the farm.

A soybean field doesn't show you the land that was cleared, the animals displaced, the insects killed or the machinery required to harvest it.

Modern life places layers of abstraction between us and the biological consequences of staying alive.

Maybe the answer isn't pretending those consequences don't exist.

Maybe it's becoming more conscious of them.

Eat less meat if that makes sense for you.

Buy meat from farmers who treat their animals well when you can.

Eat fish.

Eat vegetables.

Eat tofu.

Eat eggs.

Grow something.

Waste less food.

Support better agriculture.

Let someone enjoy a hamburger without demanding that they defend their moral character between bites.

There is no perfectly harmless lunch.

There are only better and worse choices within an enormously complicated living system.

For better or worse, human beings now possess extraordinary influence over that system. We've altered landscapes, removed predators, domesticated species, redirected rivers, cultivated billions of acres and changed the composition of the atmosphere.

We've inherited tremendous power over the living world.

That doesn't make us its masters.

It makes us responsible for what we do with it.

The question isn't whether we participate in nature.

We already do.

The question is whether we can learn to participate in it consciously.