Meat is Murder is a 1985 album by The Smiths, inspired by a song of the punk band Conflict.
Although occasionally news of people living on light emerge in the press, most of us are not yet able to do that. Whether we would want do away with our favorite treats is another question. But if we wish to live, we have to consume other creatures. A quick reminder: plants, even though they possess a different body structure and slower life processes, are also sentient beings. They perceive, communicate with each other, even care for their offspring. More about that another time. Thus, in every culture the question arises: where do we draw the line in gobbling up our fellow beings? Who can go into the pot and who can't?
Some tribes weren’t overly picky, happily roasting people from neighboring villagers, although in human cannibalism ritual is usually more important than protein intake (see communion at church). Few advocate that this custom be revived, although cynical observers have suggested that cannibalism would remedy not only world hunger but also overpopulation. Most of us would probably feel uncomfortable consuming monkey meat, albeit some tribes find it a delicacy. Many people refuse to eat warm-blooded animals, but are fine with munching on fish. The concept that the latter are somehow less alive seems somewhat fishy to me. But fish come in all sizes and shapes. The Vatican once proclaimed the capybara, a giant aquatic rodent, to be a fish. This came at the request of Venezuelans wanting to dine on tasty capybara meat at times of fasting. Carl von Linné, the father of taxonomy, would disagree with this classification, but let's not be too rigid.
Source: Felippe Lopes, Unsplash
An increasingly large part of the population in our parts disapproves of eating any cute creature. By ’cute creatures’ they mean animals. Mushrooms, flowers (broccoli), even eggs are not cute and are OK to be devoured. Vegans will not consume anything of animal origin, with the hardliners including honey in their taboo. Workers’ rights! Some of the strictest moralists are Jainists, who, in the spirit of ahimsa (non-harming), also exclude root vegetables, as consuming those would kill the plant, not to mention the little creatures that live in the soil.
Jain monks. Source: Sanjeev Bothra, Unsplash
In Arab countries, if you want a meal with no meat, they may get surprised: "But this is chicken!" They have heard of vegetarianism, but chickens are just birds. Would birds also be animals? Strange. Stranger still is meat produced by cell culture, which, in my opinion, is an extremely questionable manipulation of the tissue of life. Yet it is welcomed by some because it does not require the killing of an animal. According to this view an animal cell cluster is something else. But what? It reminds me a bit of artificial Christmas trees, which fortunately few people consume.
So far we have been talking about the morality of eating or not eating meat. As far as the nutritional side is concerned, some militant vegetarians stake the claim that meat is poisonous. Indeed, meat from stressed out animals kept on artificial feed, hormones and antibiotics, is probably not ambrosia. But couldn’t we say the same of plants grown under industrial conditions? Coming back to morality, Shaun Monson's 2005 documentary Earthlings is, in my opinion, one of the few horror films that, in spite of the hardship it involves, have to be watched to the end. The film itself is quite nice – how the meat and dairy industry treats animals is not.
Source: Suvrajit 💭 S, Unsplash
When I was a child we were taught that certain kinds of necessary amino acids are only found in meat. Well, in India, many vegetarian religious groups have apparently done well without them for centuries. While other societies, such as the Inuit, were traditionally on an almost complete meat diet. Such a wide nutritional base is quite rare among animals. Especially among insects can one find species that consume nothing but a single host plant throughout their lives. For certain mammals, the boundary between herbivory and carnivory is somewhat blurred, with foxes favoring ripe grapes and reindeer reportedly snatching up mice. The diet of a species is indicated by its teeth. There are some truly omnivorous species like most species of pigs or bears, the latter of which have predatory ancestry. Now for a terrible revelation: the dentition of the species that modestly calls itself Homo sapiens is omnivorous. Of course, if we have religious beliefs and are just looking for evidence for a pre-ordained outcome, we can keep denying this. Humans were originally mostly fruit eaters, then, descending from trees to savanna they began to hunt. Unfortunately, all too successfully.
The amount of meat consumed by an individual makes quite a bit of a difference. In the past, in Europe and many other parts of the world, only the wealthy were on a regular meat diet. Most of the population rarely had access to this commodity. For countries entering consumer society this may at least partly explain the steep rise in meat consumption. We don't live like the poor! Your typical mainstream consumer eats meat virtually every day, with some eating meat with every meal. They don’t feel full without it.
Now we should draw a conclusion about the true healthy diet. The heap of meat fattened on artificial feed that you get in a restaurant is definitely not it. And here’s a riddle for you: why do most Hungarians consume so much pork?1 No, it's not because they're pigs.
Source: Kenneth Schipper Vera, Unsplash
In my opinion it’s really up to each individual to know what kind of food is good for them and when. For this, of course, you need to be in touch with your body. I suspect that if you really tune in to your inner feelings, you know what your body needs. Humans must possess the intelligence of a koala bear who can sense whether the age of a leaf of a particular species of eucalyptus is right for its digestion. This inner perception goes far beyond taste, beyond the momentary desire of your belly; it’s like being guided by the craving of your cells. It’s as if you feel your entire being as a unit and you know what’s good for your body in the long run. I’d venture that you can trust these intuitions more than systems of ideas created by others, however logical they may seem. If only because every person's metabolism, gut flora and lifestyle is different. Punching on your keyboard will produce less of an urge to grab some ham than laboring with a scythe all day long.
If we look at the bigger picture, there is another important issue. The torture chambers of industrial livestock breeding produce relatively little food using a lot of resources. If you want to eat animals, you’ll need to produce wast amounts of crops for them compared to eating the plants yourself. Today, one of the major causes of environmental destruction is habitat loss: there’s simply no space left for other creatures to live as our sterile agricultural fields are encroaching on nature everywhere.
An oil palm plantation replacing native rain forest in Thailand. It has hardly any undergrowth or animal species.
For permaculture these calculations are not quite the same. A well-designed permaculture farm is a unit resembling a natural ecosystem where domestic animals can have a useful place. Having a small herd of grazers or free ranging poultry to keep grass or insects at bay can still allow for a rich flora and fauna.
Then, of course, there's the gourmet side. The meat-and-potatoes diet of my childhood in Eastern block can hardly be described as a culinary delicacy. This is not the only respect in which the restaurant culture in Hungary leaves something to be desired. While, apart from a few breaded vegetables, it’s hard to find vegetarian food in your average Hungarian restaurant, my grandmother could prepare well over a hundred different kinds of food with no meat. People used to cook cheap, vegetarian meals at home only going to a restaurant on special occasions when it was proper to order meat. This led to uniformized, uncreative restaurant menus. And it is often the vegetarians who have broken away from drab culinary habits and became gourmet cooks being attent to the intricacies of taste.
ADVERTISEMENT
Creative Food Adventures In Transsylvania! A week long vegetarian cooking course.
In consumer society, vegetarianism also has an ascetic streak. I refuse to participate in at least one form of obligatory gobbling! There is no shortage of people in the subculture who thrive on mind-altering drugs, coffee, sugar and more serious stuff, but will not eat meat. In this era of maniacal self-actualization, I think it's important to have some principles of what we are not willing to do — or eat. Abstinence can then take increasingly strict forms: plants only, raw food, fruits and nuts, gradually arriving to living on light. The idea is trying to replace more and more nutrients with spiritual energy, forcing ourselves to make up for the missing proteins from within. Here we're veering towards the mystical, which, even if not always consciously, is a part of more extreme diets. How far can I bend reality?
Source: Kaffeesüchtig, Pixabay
So really — should we eat animals or not? I think that's up to each person’s body-mind to decide. As for other people's diets, I recommend tolerance for everyone. If you do choose to eat meat, however, consider what kind of life that creature had. Are you an earthling? Watch the film about us.
Possibly because of Turkish occupation in the XVI-XVII. century. Pigs were the only animals the Muslim Turks would not take away.