No! No, wait. I'm supposed to be thinking about ethics, morals, evolution, human nature, and symbiosis. Shit. It's never that easy, is it?
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First of all, it's true. Animals are delicious. I love to eat them, just like pretty much every other human. Humans eat all kinds of animals! Cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, lambs, and fish, but also crustaceans, buffaloes, rabbits, goats, yaks, camels, horses, frogs, insects, pheasants, quail, grouse, pigeons, monkeys, dogs, boars, deer, crocodiles, snakes, and the occasional large rodent. Apparently, humans will eat almost anything. We happen to live in America, where only a handful of these species are eaten with any regularity, and those species have been bred down to just a trickle of the biggest and most productive varieties. You're eating a steak? Most likely, that used to be a Holstein steer. Chicken for dinner? Mmm, Rhode Island Red.
Old people and embroidered items tell us "Variety is the spice of life." Fine, fine. I try to look at it a different way. Variety, I'll someday repeat over and over to my bored children, is the essence of life. We humans are so intricate in our design that we literally have to eat many different things in order to stay healthy. If one ecosystem gets overrun by a single species, that ecosystem enters into crisis mode. Let's pretend we're looking at a little meadow. How nice! There are birds and bugs and grass and foxes and bunnies. What happens if you take away one of the meadow creatures? Say the birds disappear. Happy day for the bugs! They get to run wild, tearing up all the grass and eating all the vegetation and soon enough, our poor bunnies have no place to make their homes. (Do bunnies live in grass? Whatever, you get it.) Now the bunnies get eaten by the foxes and when there are no more bunnies, the foxes bite it too.
A classic example of how an interfering element-- in this case, the birds' sudden disappearance due to, I don't know, deforestation-- can disrupt the delicate balance of a whole little world. I'm not an environmentalist per se, and this isn't about Save The Trees. My point is the necessary co-existence of creatures that seem to be at odds with one another. The bunnies hate the foxes, or would if bunnies could hate, but without the foxes they'd breed like... you know... and suddenly gone is the grass and gone are the bunnies! You need all the species to maintain the health of the system.
Just like a habitat for wild creatures (which is in fact what we are: bacterial paradise!) our bodies need so many different elements, it's stunning. We can survive without one or the other of these elements for a while, like Vitamin C, but not without consequence, like scurvy. Doesn't it make sense to eat as wide a variety of foods as you can, if only to keep your bases covered? If you're reading this, you're probably within walking distance of a supermarket, so it's not like you're forced to live on yucca root and water. Of course, you can survive without eating other animals as a source of protein... but why deny yourself the taste of bacon? Why?!
#1. Animals are not ours to eat!
--Uhh, sure they are. We're at the tippy top of the food chain. We were blessed with big brains. That means we figured out that we like eating animals and we figured out how to do it. What else?
#2. We've evolved past that! We're smart enough to figure out how to survive without hunting, butchering, and eating the flesh of animals!
--I'm not going to trot out that gem about Vitamin B12, the essential nutrient primarily available in meat, because you should have gotten it into your big human brain by now that we can get B12 from other places. So you're right! We can totally survive without eating animals. But they're delicious. Classical cuisine resists change for a reason: It is so good the way it is.
#3. Animals raised for food are abused, degraded, tortured, and killed. Explain!
--Here's where it gets sticky. I love animals. Even big dumb cows and little dumb chickens. I want them to be happy. I also want to eat them. While perplexing in its implications about human emotion, namely our soft fuzzy feelings for animals we want to kill and devour, the flaw is in the system, not in our thinking. Cows live in their own shit, eating corn and antibiotics, shoulder to shoulder with their fellows, getting outrageously fat, until they're trotted up to be stunned, bled, and cut into pieces. Not what I want to think about when I look at a burger. And totally unnecessary to boot-- the only reason we mass-produce animals is for the sake of a $.99 burger and a helping of meat at every meal. I could enumerate the reasons this is totally backwards and awful and destructive, and I probably will, but not at this moment.
Once we learn what life is like for the animals we eat, many of us get spooked and decide to become vegetarians. I didn't. I am what magazines now call a "flexitarian." I eat mostly plant foods but throw in some animal when I feel like it. Because it really does make me sick to think about what antibiotics were sprayed all over this meat, or how this chicken breast came from a sickly, dying chicken with legs broken from trying to carry its own engorged body. It happened very suddenly and very unexpectedly. I never envisioned flexitarianism for myself, not least because that's a nonsense word.
I eat meat if I can get some glimpse into where it came from and what I see doesn't deeply disturb me. Simple as that. And because variety is the spice of life, I don't want to eat the same breeds of animal all the time. That's why eating the offspring of cloned beef seems not only creepy, but dangerous. What happens to all the variety? Why keep old stock and heirloom breeds, when the sons of Bull #2938720 all taste consistently good? Because, dears, our bodies are the meadow. Our market is the meadow. Flood your body with the same thing all the time, and it dies. Flood the market with genetically identical cows, and watch what happens when some bacterium adapts to that cow. Mix it up, people! All these different beautiful colors and sizes of birds, the wildly varied genetic background of ancient breeds that are now dying out... I beg you, save an animal. Serve it for dinner.
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