On Vegetarianism

I eat meat most days, but I can understand the appeal of the vegetarian lifestyle.  It’s kinder to animals, it can be healthier (not necessarily, though; after all, Twinkies and potato chips are vegetarian), and it can be frugal (again, not necessarily, though).

And just so you know, for many years I myself was a vegetarian.  It happened like this.  One time my family and I celebrated one of my husband’s birthday’s at one of those Brazilian barbecue places.  The waiters just keep bringing meat, meat, and more meat.  This experience affected me so deeply that a lick of meat never crossed my lips for five years.

However, after a few years the memories of that exceedingly painful experience apparently faded away, and I once again re-joined those of the meat-eating persuasion. But during those five years, I learned a lot about vegetarians and vegetarianism.  And I have to say, with all due respect, no, I don’t agree with you.

Here’s the main reason why.  I think most vegetarians adopt the lifestyle because they wish to have no part of the suffering of animals.  That’s a noble sentiment, and I don’t think anyone in their right minds can disagree with that.  I love animals, too, and it makes me sad that a good many animals have to die and suffer to keep me alive. And I also think, that no matter how “humanely” it is done, there is just no pretty, “kind” way to slaughter an animal.

But that’s exactly it, you see.  How do we know that a tomato plant doesn’t suffer by being ripped from it’s vine?  It’s alive after all.  Life is life.  When I was a vegetarian, I guess I must have subconsciously rated the life of a happy tomato growing on its vine much lower than that of fish, fowl, or mammal. But was that really fair of me?  When that tomato was growing on its vine, it was bursting with just as much life as the happy cow grazing in the field.  When I picked it for my salad it was just as dead as the hamburger on my husband’s plate.  Does the fact that I was salivating over the dead corpse of a delicious (dead) juicy tomato make me a kinder, gentler person than my husband who was salivating over his charred dead cow meat?  And was the tomato’s sudden death as traumatic for it as the cow’s was?  Maybe it was.  I don’t really know.  I’m not a philosopher or a theologian.  I’m just a Texas housewife.   But even Texas housewives wonder about these things.

This leads me to my other idea on the matter.  And it is this - there is just absolutely no getting away from the fact that Life can only continue because something else has died.  It just boils down to that.  I will die if I don’t eat that tomato or that hamburger.  As much as I love living creatures, I guess I must love myself more.  I want to live.  So I will eat that helpless tomato and/or hamburger. My unthinking body could care less whether I give it a tomato or a hamburger to keep it living.  It just wants something dead and masticated inside of it so it can keep on going.

Maybe today’s post isn’t strictly Frugal.  But sometimes I read things on other blogs, that are well, a bit critical of, as vegetarians like to say,  “carnivores”.  They like to use that word a lot, because it kind of has a vicious ring to it.  I mean, I’m a carnivore, and I have to admit it sounds pretty grunt-grunt caveman, myself.

But really, the whole issue is not so black-and-white.  So we meat-eaters should refrain from calling vegetarians pasty-faced tree-huggers, and vegetarians should refrain from calling meat-eaters ignorant serial killers.  Because the truth is we all - vegetarian and meat-eater - have something in common.  We are all alive because something else died. That is certainly undeniable.  Other than that, though, I’m not really sure who’s right or wrong here.

I will leave you with the words of one my favorite all-around rascals, Mr. Benjamin Franklin.  In his Autobiography he relates this incident (he’s telling the story of his first voyage from Boston to Philadelphia as a young man):

“‘Til then I had stuck to my resolution to eat nothing that had had life, and on this occasion, I considered…the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any injury that might justify this massacre.  All this seemed very reasonable.  But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and when this came hot out of the frying pan, it smelled admirably well.  I balanced some time between principle and inclination till I recollected that when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out their stomachs.  “Then,” thought I, “if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.”  So I dined upon cod very heartily and have since continued to eat as other people….So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

Yep.  I love that ‘ol Ben.