“Why are you vegetarian?”
I get asked this question a lot. Like many, I am vegetarian for a number of reasons: moral, ethical, political, economical, environmental. However, every time I try to explain my rationale, I often get mixed, and somehow disappointing, reactions. “What about eggplants and carrots? Don’t you care for their suffering?”. Aargh. Many people I talk to think that I am trying to convince them to go vegetarian, which is not the case at all. Becoming vegetarian was the most natural and rewarding decision in my life. Yet, it was a strictly personal decision. I do not preach vegetarianism.
So, what’s the best answer? In the past few days, I have been reading The omnivore’s dilemma by Michael Pollan. In his book, Pollan analyzes the national (American) eating disorder by unpacking the processes of three principal food chains: the industrial, the organic and the hunter-gatherer. He describes in great detail the journeys that foods make to get from the natural world to our dinner tables. These journeys, it turns out, are often quite convoluted. Thinking about the atrocious, denaturing, mechanistic processes operated by the food industry raises an important question: “What are the moral and psychological implications of killing, preparing, and eating a wild animal?”
In our times, this question is conveniently obfuscated by the food industry which obscures “the histories of the foods it produces by processing them to such an extent that they appear as pure products of culture rather than nature”. Mass production of foods has delegated the act of killing to the hands of butchers and machines. This, in turn, has alienated us from the inherently human practice of gathering food, breaking the relationships that link us “to what we eat, to the fertility of the soil and the energy of the sun”. My choice to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle is an attempt to honor these relationships and come to terms with the foods I eat - those foods that I could gather and prepare by myself.
Could you kill a wild animal? Could you stand the blood, the screams, the fear, the suffering? I can’t. This is why I am vegetarian.
