This is my attempt to have a rational discussion with a friend who wanted me to be vegan.
You may think i am simply trying to rationalize eating the flesh and secretions of animals. That's a hypothesis, how will you test it? Each of us are caught in web. i am attempting to describe and understand that web within the arguments included below. i am not interested in belief, except to study it and it's effects objectively within myself and others. My ultimate value in being is to understand, which makes it impossible for me to take up an absolutist ideological stance on any issue. I do not believe things. I either understand the causes and conditions that result in some phenomena i've turned my mind towards, or i do not. The belief, "If you can not do harm, you must not do harm" is an ethical presumption, unprovable and unobservable by its very nature. And a belief that veganism is absolutely the lifestyle choice doing the least harm on the planet when compared to any other lifestyle is demonstrably false, as can be seen if one compares the environmental impact of an indigenous plainsmen, or modern permaculturalist like Geoff Lawton for example to a modern vegan.
I don't know if i can physically be vegan. I may be able to. And i've been considering such issues since before you and i met. But it is a fact that when i eat grains and legumes that i experience several symptoms: my gums bleed, my bones itch, i get head fog as if i'm cognitively cut off from the world, and i get little itchy bumps, that i suspect to be inflammed hystamine receptors, or producers, on my skin. Just yesterday i had a burrito bowl from Qdoba with rice and beans and within minutes had an itchy bump on the right side of my neck, and one below my pectorals on my chest. Those facts are not subject to debate. Any concept you may have regarding the truth or falsity of those claims is by it's nature a hypothesis, since you are not experiencing my symptoms. It is not possible for you to test that hypothesis via the reading of pro-vegan articles and arguments. As i've said before "vegan science, is not science. Nor is carnivore science for that matter." You will, however, be able to find data if you take a look, apart from arguments for or against a vegan diet, showing that itchy hystamine bumps are a real phenomena, bone itching is a thing, gums bleeding is a thing etc. That last symptom, as i understand it thus far, is the result of bacteria in the mouth which feed on carbohydrates and sugars and produce lactic acid as a wasteproduct, which lends me a greater understanding as to why dairy causes me much the same problem. There's also something about phytic acid in grains and legumes preventing the absorption of minerals, but i don't understand that quite as well. Experientially, what happens to me is this: i eat grains and beans for a few days and notice an increase in plaque (that white shit on the teeth that can be scraped off with a fingernail) built up on my teeth when i wake up in the morning, and, correlated with that increase, my gums bleed when i brush my teeth. When i stop eating grains and beans there is less plaque, and my gums do not bleed when i brush them (i have used the same tooth brush in either case). That is an experiment you can easily perform for yourself if you were to just eat salads for a few days, and no grains and legumes (and i should add perhaps, no very starchy or sugary vegetables like potatoes and carrots), then scrape one tooth with a fingernail, then do the same after returning to your normal diet to see which foods quantitatively produce more plaque. I found this out quite apart from having any conversation with you about these matters, and i did not go to "pro-meat" websites to discover this information. Though it is not a valid justification for eating meat, since i could try being a raw vegan, it does make it more difficult to not eat meat. A clever person could argue that the salad is cleaning my teeth of the plaque so the experiment is not valid, but actually my diet consists of mostly salad, and has for some time. I was shopping and eating mostly vegetarian at home when we met. Apart from eating 2 or 3 eggs a day, i would eat salad with organic cornchips and blackbeans as my usual dinner, then i switched to salad and beef or chicken instead after figuring out what was going on with my health. I have admitted back at the beginning of our discussion that the factory farming of animals is atrocious and needs to end, and i continue to recognize that. In fact, i became vegetarian in high school after visiting a slaughterhouse on a field trip with my "Natural Resources" vocational class. I do care about these issues, and have been considering them for half my life.
But their are many problems with taking any way of living and holding it conceptually as an absolute truth for others, or for oneself. The first is "cognitive bias" which causes one to unconsciously favor and believe "facts" which seem to support ones existing beliefs, and doubt "facts" which seem to contradict ones beliefs. Which is something i've been studying in myself and others, also, for half my life. The next problem, related to the first, is that an absolute stance takes something that is radically relative to the context in which it arises, and removes it from that context, elevating it to the status of being an absolute truth. That is inherently problematic, because meaning literally comes from context. There is no meaning apart from context. Make no mistake, your demand that i not eat animals as a price for your friendship is a demand in the context of my own health problems, my own values, as well is in the context of the ecological and socio-political-economic factors i attempt to outline in the texts i am still including below. When we think we know something already, as an absolute truth, we stop finding out. We turn off our senses, and we turn off systematic thought. The third problem with an absolutist stance is that it creates an "Us" and a "Them", which obviously increases the probability of violence between groups, and makes us easier to manipulate as is explained is this quote "Originally a Latin saying, "divide et impera" ("divide and rule"), the saying has been in common use since "M. Hurault's Discourse upon the Present state of France" (1588) ...The Dictionary also cites its use by Machiavelli. Also, the "Oxford English Dictionary" gives a definition: a statement of the policy of not allowing subject peoples or factions to make common cause. Says that "divide et impera" is sometimes translated as "divide and govern." It lists several usages beginning with 1602. It also lists a dictionary usage in 1870 from Brewer "Dictionay of Phrases and Fables": "Divide and govern. Divide a nation into parties, or set your enemies at loggerheads, and you can have your own way. A maxim of Machiavelli.""
Fourthly, reducing a multiplicity of ways of surviving, first in ones own conceptual universe then actualizing it within the lifeworld we all share, is evolutionarily unwise, because a diversity of ways of living has more collective potential of survival than one single way of living, and because an evolutionarily stable way of living evolves only within the biome in which it evolved, that biome is its actual concrete context wherein the meaning "this is a way to survive" comes to be, and is the only context in which that meaning is certain to be valid. When that way of living is transported to another biome, another context, it's meaning changes, since meaning comes from context.
A way to survive in one ecosystem or context when taken into a very different ecosystem or context may have the meaning "this is a way to destroy biodiversity" like in the case of invasive species, or "this is a way to die" like perhaps in the case of a diabetic eating a vegan diet (though i have not researched the last example) etc. Increasing the numbers of people who survive in a single way must destroy other ways of living, and ultimately must reduce biodiversity, cultural diversity, and survival value. This is what economic globalization is doing.
Personally, I'd like to stop contributing to that globalization, to whatever extent my actions and ideas will allow me to, and start committing myself to the health and wellbeing of the biome i'll be engaging with soon. One thing i'd like to do is to restore a habitat called "canebrakes", made up of a native continental bamboo, which is almost extinct due to suppression of fire combined with being wiped out by cattle eating it. Some of the animals that relied on that habitat have, or are of course, also going extinct. Cattle, wherever they evolved, had to have lived in relative homeostasis with their ecosystem, since they couldn't have evolved otherwise, but when moved to another ecosystem or context the meaning "this is a way to survive" becomes "this is a way to decrease biodiversity". As a related aside, apparently American bison have a behavior where they make holes in the ground with their horns, then those holes fill up with water, then birds and prairie dogs have water to use. I haven't cross referenced that to be certain it's true (The first video below talks about that turns out), but such ecological inter-species dependencies most certainly exist, because that's what life is: a web of species relationships existing within, and being the fundamental constituents of habitat, biome, and ecosystem.
There are people working on grassland restoration, encouraging farmers to raise buffalo instead of crops or cow's. That restoration is, i suspect, in part being funded by the high price of buffalo meat, and would result in saving certain species of birds and prairie dogs (if done correctly), since buffalo and said species evolved together to be interdependent, and it would (and is) increasing buffalo numbers.
Here's a couple of examples:
The thing is, i want to understand what i turn my head towards, and what other people point my attention to, and i can't do that if my mind is saddled with an ideological belief structure. That's a big part of what infuriated me about growing up, and school; the assumption that i'm to agree with and regurgitate what is presented to me apart from any personal intellectual understanding, let alone experiential understanding. That's one of my biggest frustrations in the peopled world. We see it all over, in most of politics, and in so much human interaction. Sloganizing issues like "Immigrants are taking our jobs!" well, why in the hell is their no mention of the outsourcing of jobs to other countries for profit being a factor that is "taking our jobs" in such bullshit "debates"? Why no mention of the increased mechanization of the workforce making human labor less necessary, while simultaneously not being used to benefit that work force, "taking our jobs"? Why no elucidation or analysis of the supposed causation of job loss by immigrants "taking jobs"? I mean, these are not matters of opinion. They are hypotheses about the causation of job loss. Either factual, or false. But almost none of us see issues in those terms, because we're living in the intra- and inter-contradictory conceptual universes of our decontextualized, and thus absolutist, ideologies. We believe what we think, or are told to think, and then believe our belief makes the content of the belief a fact. Well, it doesn't, and no opinion can change that it doesn't. That is my primary mode of thought. Does that mode become less valuable when turned toward veganism as an absolute that i must adhere to? Or does it still have the same value?
Let me be clear, i am not against veganism, and i believe the factory farming of animals is atrocious. But a world in which everyone is vegan where we collectively plow under habitats turning it into cropland to continue fueling population growth and the extinction of 200 species of plant and animal life a day is also atrocious to me. Now, i understand the argument of the inefficient conversion of grain to animal flesh, so i understand that grain raised to feed animals is a huge driver of those extinctions. But here are those two causal chains as best as I can depict them with my current understanding:
1st, habitat is plowed under killing species creating cropland, staple crops are planted to feed an increased population that has outstripped the human carrying capacity of the immediate habitat, people eat those crops, have more babies, creating a need for more habitat to be plowed under causing the extinction of even more species.
2nd, habitat is plowed under killing species creating cropland, staple crops are planted to feed an artificial population of meat animals that the habitat cannot naturally support, those animals also need land so it is cleared or overgrazed killing more species, fewer people eat those animals (because of the inefficient conversion of grain to animal flesh), have more babies (but less of them than the grain eating scenario), creating a need for more habitat to be plowed under causing the extinction of even more species.
Such "debate" would seem to come down to whether we "should" use less of the lifeworld to create more humans who then need more of the lifeworld to create more humans, or whether we "should" use more of the lifeworld to create more farm animals to create more humans (but less than grains) who then need more of the lifeworld to create more humans. And it is obviously open to question whether or not we “should” be efficiently converting any of the lifeworld into more humans at this point in human history. Once again, we're caught in a web, but those options aren't the only two options, and I would argue that neither is an effective option given the exigencies inherent in lifeworld destruction. So i'm not interested in having that debate with anyone.
It seems to me that a large part of the solution to such a destructive globalizing web we're in has to do with economic de-globalization. We very much need independent pockets of bioregional sustainability. That is "independent" of global trade for survival, but complete dependence on regional biomes for survival. Then perhaps we could have some other kind of “globalization” which might reinvigorate the lifeworld rather than depleting it.
Here are my texts:
According to an article published by Rocky mountain bird observatory entitled "Sharing Your Land with Prairie Wildlife" greater prairie chicken populations are threatened "primarily through extensive conversion of native grassland to cropland, but also through overgrazing"
According to humanesociety.org "The biggest threat to Mexican prairie dogs is the loss of habitat to agriculture, including plantations of maguay (an agave plant), nopal (a cactus), and potato farms."
Here are some links to videos showing monocropped fields:
And here’s one showing a more native grassland, and highlighting prairie dogs as a keystone species:
The monocropping of cereal grains requires the destruction of habitat, and the animals that rely on that habitat, because you take a grassland with hundreds of species of plants and reduce it to a crop of one plant, chop down a forest of hundreds or thousands of species, and again replace it with one, or two, or twenty. That's an extreme loss in biodiversity, directly causing the extinction of multiple species. Historically speaking, as well as it's continuance today, this allows for more humans in the same area, leads to surpluses and population growth. Then arises coercive state power, unequal divisions between people, and sexes, slavery, and wars on the fridge of expansion.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea! (Yay, more people!)
If I go to a piece of land and turn a cow pond into a fish pond with a thousand fish, and geese come where there were no geese, and ducks, turtles, muskrats come, where there were none, and I eat one hundred fish in a
year. There are 900 more fish in the world, more geese, more ducks etc. As well as more animals who eat those animals. I am an animal, but I have the capacity to be a student and steward of the natural world, and can leave it in better shape than when I arrived by being interdependent with it, instead of imagining that I am separate from it. Can you see the value of that, the ethics?
You and I would be less dependent on globalization and money, if we ate say pigeon, rabbit, goose, duck, dandelion, and wild currant stew than if we eat quinoa from the Andes, and tofu from Japan, or even California. And we'd be more free and experience greater wellbeing, as would the Andeans, since we'd have greater autonomy and wouldn't be forced to work in jobs that are dehumanizing. We'd be in relationship with our immediate environment of plants and animals, instead of with an increasingly hegemonic and destructive monoculture. Not being able to live for oneself in ones own immediate bioregion is one of the things keeping us infantile dependents of a system we both despise. That is, having no survival value as an individual apart from the economic systems that are in place is what drives our dependence on that system.
According to a University of Denver magazine article entitled "The People Problem" published June 1st 2008, elk populations exceed Rocky Mountain National Park's carrying capacity due to a lack of predators. The excessive number of elk for that biome is negatively impacting songbird and beaver habitat. Is it still morally wrong for a human to eat those elk, even if said human has no biological need for meat? Which is a statement itself that is quite open to debate…
An expert, however studied, can't convince me that my gums don't bleed and my bones don't itch when I eat grains and beans, since I've performed the experiment dozens of times, dairy causes the same problem. Meat does not, most other vegetables do not. Most fruits do. It's been said that humans are not evolved to eat meat, but Australopithicus ate meat 4 million years ago, Homo Habilis ate meat 2.4 million years ago, Homo Erectus ate meat 1.8 million years ago etc. I've read one figure that said a change in conditions takes 25,000 years to be reflected in biology, another that said it's more like 1 million years. Human kind on a large scale have been eating cereal grains as the bulk of our diet for 14,000 years at the earliest. Bones and teeth compared between hunter gatherers, and coexistent populations of Neolithic farmers have been found and compared showing pelvic deformations and tooth decay in the farmers, and no corresponding deformities in the hunters. But again, I don't need an expert to tell me this in my own case.
(Addendum: turns out that even those figures about how long it takes natural selection to stabilize changes in an average population’s genome based on environmental changes, or changes in survival conditions i.e. diet, are false as according to this article - https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an-evolutionary-whodunit-how-did-humans-develop-lactose-tolerance – the gene responsible for the production of lactase “...may be between 2,000 and 20,000 years old; estimates vary.”
The University of Denver magazine article "The People Problem" goes on to describe the effect of increased human population on wildlife habitat and thus on wildlife populations, and I would add on biodiversity. It seems to me that that problem can be traced to long since outstripping the natural human carrying capacity of the Rocky mountain biome by artificially increasing carrying capacity through bringing in resources from beyond that biome. That is, Denver must rob it's own and other ecosystems to pay for it's increasing population. Such theft can be traced to being students, stewards, and dependents of ideologies of human exceptionalism in various forms (progress, development, interest-bearing debt-based currency, "human birth good. Human death bad. Etc"), rather than being students, stewards, and dependents of our immediate Rocky mountain biome. Does this biome lend itself, apart from outside inputs, to a vegan diet? That is, can a vegan forage for all the sustenance she needs in this ecosystem, or does this ecosystem require the eating of meat for ecological balance?
Wouldn't the population problem eventually correct itself if humans reengaged their biomes as students, stewards, and dependents? Or, to ask the reverse correlate of that question, isn't exponential population growth in fact caused fundamentally by engaging primarily human made systems, rather than the more inclusive natural systems of which humans are a part? And doesn't engaging such natural systems lend itself to diverse sets of diets and lifestyles with their own logically consistent ethics: the ethics of mutually beneficial homeostasis with ones own immediate natural environment where one is vegan where that's supported, one hunts the buffalo where that's supported, or a whaler, or reindeer herder, permaculturist, inventer of hydroponic food skyscrapers perhaps for cities, various pockets of bioregional sustainability, which would ensure human survivability, as well as protection of regional ecosystems, and would be a rather humanizing, and reenculturing vision, in stark contrast to being dehumanized, disenfranchised, and decultured due to working a meaningless job which contributes to increasing globalization, homogeneity, and destruction? (Apologies for the run on sentence; i’m stoned. But hopefully you get me drift.) Is there a single right way to make a living (survive), or is there the fact of whether we are students, stewards, and dependents of ideological power structures, or stewards, students, and dependents of our immediate biomes?
Using figures from the Huffington Post (and a cursory glance from other sources, so as to check the Huffington Post’s “facts”) to compare and contrast protein sources, it takes 122 gallons of water to produce a pound of milk. 302 gallons/lb for tofu. 381 gallons/lb for cheese. 395 gallons/lb for eggs. 462 gallons/lb at the low end for mixed corn and beans. 501.5 gallons of water to grow a pound of mixed rice and lentils. 518 gal/lb for chicken. 704 gal/lb for lentils alone. 718 gal/lb for pork. 1704 gal/lb for cashews. 1847 gal/ lb for beef. 1929 gal/lb for almonds. This is to produce these foods, not to consume them: as Lbs/gal would increase if measured at the point of consumption. That is, one would have to take account of production of transportation infra structure, and consumption incurred in the process of transportation, as well as in the water required to deliver each of these foods to the dinner table to get accurate water costs. Given these complexities, it's difficult to know the total water consumed at the point of dinner table... Let's call it "imbibance" ("allow myself to introduce... myself"). (And yes, the ordered hierarchy of water use figures changes if measured in grams of protein per gallon of water used, but I don’t eat grams of protein, I eat ounces of food. And, I suspect, you do as well. So...) Leaving all that aside, and calling the numbers at least proportionally accurate, what I'm thinking about is how many fish, beavers, crawdads, and cormorants does it kill to remove 500 gal/lb from a river or other watershed. How many species go extinct in lbs/gal of removal from a watershed, and how many gal of water per lb. of protein does it take to eat a deer or rabbit that one kills in ones own backyard? The answer to the last part of my question would seem to be 0 gallons or -N gallons since the urine of a deer or rabbit is contained within the biome in which it came to be, and no water was redirected to raise such creatures, being that they weren't "raised".
So what can we learn from these statistics? A few couples of important things: If you must have protein, and you care about dying fish, drink milk. If you're lactose intolerant, and care about fish, eat tofu. If tofu makes you itch and mimics estrogen in your body (i'm sure there will be objections), and you care about dying fish, and are lactose intolerant, eat eggs. If you want to waste a bunch of water and don't care about fish, eat either beef or almonds. And if you care about fish, and don't want to waste water, catch a pigeon from the 16th Street Mall, kill it, degut it, strip its feathers, dismantle any handy wooden items you happen to find at your local Wells Fargo, craft a spit, light a fire, and roast that pigeon (being sure to invite your neighbors to the bounty that mother nature, as well as your own ingenuity has provided.)
It's been said that there is no meat that can be raised sustainably given statistics about the methane produced by cows, the amount of water it takes to raise livestock, the inefficient conversion of grain to animal flesh and the washing of animal manures ultimately out to sea. According to Cornell, there were 92 million cattle in the US in 2016. But there were between 30 and 75 million buffalo (to use conservative statistics taken from a 1995 paper by James H. Shaw) in what became the US prior to colonialism. Did their manure wash out to sea and cause damage to aquatic biomes? Why is there no mention of chemical nitrogen etc washing out to sea from grain production? Did the buffalos methane cause global warming? How much water does a buffalo remove from it's biome? Did a buffalo in the 1500's eat grain? Can humans eat grass? Can we use historic buffalo habitat to grow grains if there
are 30 million buffalo stampeding through those fields? Did wolf eat buffalo? Can wolves reinhabit fields of grain if there are no buffalo in them? Will there be more or less buffalo and wolves if we revive grassland habitat vs grow grain on that land? How many more buffalo are there if we eat them vs eat grain? Do some humans eat cattle? How many cattle were there in the US in 2016? If we eat grains and beans instead of animals, are there more animals in the world or less? Historically, did the advent of the Agricultural Revolution increase biodiversity or decrease it? Are cattle and wheat in any danger of going extinct? What causes that to be the case?
Is there a single right way to make a living (survive), or is there the fact of whether we are students, stewards, and dependents of ideological power structures, or stewards, students, and dependents of our immediate biomes?