This is Februrary’s column for The Noise. Obviously, this is unedited.

I was eight years old the first time I was confronted with vegetarianism. My mom had, apparently, just finished reading a book that opened her eyes to factory farms and the inhumane practices of the modern-day slaughterhouse. For a kid who had been eating meat virtually every day for the entirety of his short time on this planet, I was not cool with this arrangement and put up more of a fight than any other member of my family. Though not yet versed in punk rock, looking back, I had the same opinion of vegetarianism that Fat Mike had when he wrote the song “Vegetarian Mumbo Jumbo” (I don’t want to be a vegetarian/ why eat beans when you can have steak instead?). Anyone familiar with NOFX’s more recent albums knows that Mike has turned a 180 on the issue of vegetarianism, and so have I.

Needless to say, my 8-year-old bout with vegetarianism lasted almost 2 weeks. My mom admits today that she went about it all wrong. Many people, especially children, shouldn’t be expected to quit eating meat cold turkey (pun intended!). She also didn’t really know what to cook, and found the lifestyle too expensive. So before I knew it, I was biting into cheeseburgers again.

It wasn’t until the end of my undergrad days that I became more educated on the issue and began to consider a lifestyle change that would better serve my landbase, nonhuman animals, the poverty stricken masses, and the health of my own body. It’s important to mention that I do not have any moral objection against eating meat. I do, however, object to the systematic exploitation of the meat industry and the lies about this industry that I have been fed (literally) all my life. It might be easy for one to distort Darwin’s theory of evolution and claim, as Fat Mike did, “it’s survival of the fittest…and we’re winning,” but to fall into this logic is to avoid the issue all together and, therefore, justify the atrocious behavior of factory farms and the meat industry’s irresponsible use of land.

While biting into a side of beef, believing that humans are “winning” Darwin’s battle of survival is to buy into the story we tell ourselves about where our meat and animal products come from. While it is nice to believe our meat comes from family farms, where animals have acres and acres of grazing land, where livestock have access to sunlight, a variety of foods, and plenty of room to be autonomous creatures, by and large, this reality has become fantasy. Agribusiness is one of the most profitable sectors of the U.S. economy today and industrial meat production has whipped out all but a fraction of these family farms.

Further, if we are in evolutionary competition with nonhuman animals, this must mean that we are engaged in a relationship with these animals, which we are not. Rather, we are engaged in a relationship with Bashes, Safeway, Albertsons, and the fast food industry, which produce only shallow resemblances of a relationship with the food we consume.

Upon investigating the following statistics, I decided to become a vegetarian. Ninety percent of all U.S.-grown soy, 70% of all grain, and 80% of all corn is grown specifically for livestock consumption. I was living in Indiana when I first became versed in these issues. I remember driving back and forth on I-65, from college to my parent’s house, and looking out at what seemed like an endless sea of corn. I remember the fantasies I’ve been told of the noble farmer living off the land and growing vegetables for us to purchase at the grocery store. Upon learning that nearly all the corn I saw was owned by corporations and actually went to support the meat industry, I immediately realized how irresponsible it was to use land this way. This is, of course, nothing new and it is certainly not strictly relevant to the United States. After all, at the height of Ireland’s infamous potato famine 150 years ago, in which 1.5 million people perished, Ireland was actually exporting maize to Britain. More recently, during Somalia’s notorious famine a couple years ago, Somalia was exporting livestock and bananas to first world countries. Famine is a myth; there is plenty of food to go around. There is obviously a strong, and nearly invisible, disconnect between ideology and action when it comes to the food that we eat and how we obtain it.

I recently visited Dr. Doug Brown, an economics professor in Northern Arizona’s University’s School of Business. Though he had plans to ride his bike over to a colleague’s house, he opened his door to me, as well as my questions. I have to admit, I was a little nervous to be walking into a professor of economics office to discuss our cultures exploitation of animals, the unsustainability of the meat industry, and the economic sanity of vegetarianism. After all, I’d been taught that economists, like developers, were one of the driving forces that sought to convert the living into the dead in the name of profits. I was wrong; Dr. Brown “gets it.” He’s written several books on sustainability issues, and is in the process of writing a book on the work of Daniel Quinn. “Of course, I am not a meat eater,” he said before I asked my first question.

Dr. Brown first became a vegetarian in the early 70’s, when his wife was pregnant with their first child. The only doctor in town was a vegetarian, and he introduced Dr. Brown to the idea of eating lower on the food chain, thus promoting a healthy diet for pregnant mothers. From there, Dr. Brown read a few books such as Diet For a Small Planet, which introduced him to the notion that “we need to be concerned with how food is grown and what we eat.”

I asked him about the irresponsible use of land used to support the meat industry. “It is so wasteful that so much vegetable protein is used to feed livestock, when it could, in actuality, feed billions of people,” he said. The West uses a resource-intensive “two-layer” food system, in which food crops are fed to animals, then animals to people. With an average of seven pounds of vegetable protein needed to produce one pound of animal protein, the system requires 600 percent more food crops than plant-centered systems in which people consume vegetable protein directly. In this way, Dr. Brown described, “animals act as extremely inefficient protein converters.” I thought back to the fields of corn I had driven through in Indiana. I thought of all the wasted proteins and realized right away that there is virtually nothing sustainable about the meat industry.

Then we got on the topic of factory farms. Dr. Brown first became aware of factory farms upon taking a more educated look at his hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa, a town literally built on the pork industry, namely Swift Co. Again I thought back to my drive through Indiana and remembered a particular stretch of land where the stench of a nearby pig farm was so intense it makes your eyes water as you drive past (anyone living in Northern Indiana knows exactly the stretch of land I’m talking about). Swift Co., the bread and butter of Marshalltown, slaughters 16,000 hogs per day—that’s 4 million a year, producing 932 million pounds of pork a year for sale in the global economy.

For slaughterhouses world-wide, this is increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception. A slaughterhouse of this size must obtain very large quantities of pork to substantiate an operation of this size. The days of your grandfather’s family farm are nearly over, welcome to the world of factory farms.

Most people are familiar with images of factory farms, whereby animals are packed into barns by the hundreds, sometimes thousands, with no access to sunlight. Most of these animals are packed in so tight that they don’t even have enough room to turn around. Dr. Brown spoke with passion against this exploitation. “It’s a tragedy. Animals being treated this way acts as an appendage of human domination, whereby these animals have no life, and exist for one purpose—food for people.” I thought of something I heard when I was a kid, that just because they’re not human doesn’t mean that their life isn’t as important to them as ours are to us. But this isn’t even accurate, because animals growing up under these conditions don’t know what it is like to have a life, to breath clean air, to eat tasty food, to live as autonomous creatures on this planet. “It’s just an incredible disrespect for the community of life,” said Dr. Brown. I knew right away that he was right; that as long as we have no connection to the food we eat or to the land where it is grown, we too do not know the true meaning of living as autonomous creatures on this planet. That producing meat on this kind of scale numbs us to any sense of connection or responsibility to the land.

If your sense of empathy doesn’t extend to these animals (and why should it if you don’t have to see the suffering…we’re “winning” remember?), than think of the impact this has on the surrounding communities. As I think back to the stench created by the hog farm on I-65 in Indiana, I wondered where all this animal waste went. Industrial scale factory farming produces as much as 12 million pounds of excrement. Modern factory farms have a sophisticated system of waste removal, but to make 12 million pounds of shit disappear would be a feat not even Harry Potter could manage. Invariably the air, water, and local cropland become contaminated. In an age where artificial growth hormones (such as RBGH) and antibiotics are pumped into the veins of livestock, the environmental and local health impacts of this contamination are becoming greater and more severe.

The truth is, it is becoming less and less safe to be a meat eater. Every other week, it seems that another shipment of industrial meat has been contaminated with e coli or Mad Cow or whatever the meat related disease du jour is. Factory farms produce unhealthy conditions, where animals easily fall prey to diseases. Feeding baby cows the blood of their deceased elders, for example, produces Mad Cow disease. The scary Orwellian future we’re all scared of is upon us, and it’s in our food. We might as well be talking about Soylent Green here. Every day we get closer to an epidemic that can’t be stopped. Scary, scary stuff.

Understanding the central role of animal production in global agribusiness, and developing a strategy to transform the Western food system are key challenges for progressives in the United States today. Indeed, the meat industry absolutely must be confronted if we are to face the kind of food, water, and farmable land shortages that are already starting to plague much of the world. We need to support activist efforts to shift consumer habits toward a plant-based diet and we need to be patient with those who haven’t yet made the shift toward vegetarianism. I get really tired of the elitist vegans and vegetarians who cast people off who have not yet accepted the reality of our situation. We need to work together and support local farmers whose practices are not exploitive.

Just as I do not have a moral objection against eating meat per se, Dr. Brown explains that the social and cultural idea that just because we can control and dominate nonhuman animals doesn’t make it right. And it’s degrading our ability to meaningfully interact with the real world.

Darwin, by the way, was a vegetarian.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Column. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.