Food Ethics

Our relationship with animals is one of the deepest ethical challenges for people with empathy. When we befriend animals and come to know their intelligence, affection, and individuality, it becomes difficult to see any fundamental difference between them and us. In these relationships, we love them, and they love us. We empathize with them, and they with us.


HUMAN-ANIMAL LOVE
Man, Donkey and Dog
A young elephant interrupt interview after hearing his name


ANIMALS EVEN GRIEVE
Stolen bird returned to owner
Koala mourning its female friend who has passed


THE VEGAN AND VEGETARIAN ESCAPE
Vegetarianism and veganism arise from the conviction that taking animal life is morally equivalent to taking human life. Such sensitivity to life deserves respect.

However, this ethical argument presumes that plants are insentient and, therefore, of lesser moral worth than animals.

But "plant" and "animal" are merely human labels for different forms of living systems.


ARE PLANTS SENTIENT?
Plants have been shown to sense, respond, and communicate. They react to touch, light, sound, and even the emotions or intentions of nearby life. They flourish under loving care, and their electrical activity spikes when they perceive a threat.


NATURE IS NOT NONVIOLENCE
Even plants are not always peaceful. The Venus fly trap kills and eats insects. The Nepenthes rajah, the largest carnivorous plant, kills and eats birds and mammals.

Plants also kill other plants by robbing them of nutrients, smothering and strangling them, and secreting lethal chemicals.

WHAT TO EAT SHOULD NOT BE A CALCULATION
Careful planning to obtain sufficient calcium, iron, vitamin B12, and essential amino acids is important in vegan diets. For those who do not understand how a vegan/vegetarian diet must be carefully orchestrated, disaster awaits. For example, a young couple fed their infant a diet of soy milk and apple juice. At six weeks of age it weighed only three and a half pounds and died of malnutrition. The parents were sentenced to life in prison.

In a natural state, precise nutritional planning would be impossible. Instinct, not ideology, would determine what to eat.


THE DEBATE OVER WHAT HUMANS ARE "DESIGNED" TO EAT
Topics in the carnivore-vegan debate include stomach size, intestinal length, dental structure, food transit time, vitamin synthesis, and eye position.

A vegetarian diet of rice, bread, granola, and the like would never be possible in the wild, absent fire and cooking technology. No other creature on the planet cooks their food. Humans not only do this, but then argue that it is the natural and healthy way to eat, as if Mother Nature has it all wrong.


EXPERTS ARE WHO HAVE IT WRONG
Doctors, nutritionists, and governmental agencies promote unnatural foods. Influenced by food industry and agribusiness lobbyists, they create nutrition pyramids for people to follow.

The results of the illogic of eating mostly grains and cereals are manifest everywhere in rampant obesity and every imaginable degenerative disease condition.

Following this advice ensures a population both fed and malnourished.

Government food stamps even allow for sodas, candy, cookies, desserts, and other starch and sugar-based products. This contributes to the majority of food stamp recipients being overweight or obese and headed for other chronic degenerative diseases.


FOOD REALITY
Humans, in their wild natural state, survived primarily by hunting. Cave art across continents depicts hunting, not harvesting grain.

The bones from ancient sites show cut marks from tools.

Today, in survivor competitions, the participants usually focus on hunting, and the winners are usually those successful at it.

In our early history, we were opportunists. We would hunt as well as scavenge animal remains killed by carnivores. No ancient civilization was absent animal foods.

Even primates, formerly believed to be strict vegetarians, occasionally engage in carnivorism and cannibalism.

Humans lost in the wild, surrounded by vegetation, hunt.

Of 226 hunter-gatherer societies analyzed in the Ethnographic Atlas, none were dependent upon gathered plant foods. Even after fire, cooked cereal grains were only eaten as a last resort if in a state of starvation. Strictly vegan diets (no meat, eggs, or dairy) have only been possible with the invention of the plow, stone mill, and bake oven.

Our present Agricultural/Industrial Age represents only a blink in time compared to our vast history. Agriculture arose not from health wisdom, but from necessity: swelling populations depleted natural prey and forced the cultivation of plants.


HUNGER SOLVES THE QUESTION OF WHAT
WE SHOULD EAT. With a family to feed and with the energy demands of an in-the-wild existence, humans would not focus on lettuce, seeds, or seasonal berries while ignoring concentrated food sources such as rabbits, fish, and deer.


HEALTH MATTERS
Health for any creature depends on it eating what it was designed to eat.

Humans were designed to eat primarily animals. Health is best served by that diet or one as close to it as possible.

DEATH IS THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE
Taking lives in order to eat is also justified by the necessity of death.

Death is what makes life possible. Death feeds the next generation. It clears space, recycles matter, and keeps the balance that allows the living to go on.


CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
From a practical standpoint, if nothing ever died, Earth would quickly choke on itself and drown in life. In just a few generations, the biomass of plants and animals would form a suffocating layer over the planet, blocking sunlight and exhausting every nutrient.

For example, the bacterium, E. coli, is a ubiquitous living organism in nature that populates our gut. It learns, remembers, can evaluate 20 different chemicals at the same time, swims to the area where food concentration is increasing the fastest, reevaluates the environment every 4 seconds, and communicates with one another.

It's not just a simple organism for which death does not matter to it and other organisms that depend on it, including us. Its complexity is incomprehensible. For example, here's the machinery in just one of its parts, the flagellum that moves it about.

How does the flagellum of a one-celled organism, disprove atheism, abiogenesis, and evolution and prove intelligent causation--not to be confused with man-made religions and their gods?

The point being, even a one-celled organism deserves to live just like us and every other living thing.

Let's say we got our wish that no life would die.

If just E. coli reproduced at their natural rate, in a single day, they would form a layer trillions of times deeper than the claimed Earth-Sun distance. After one week, the bacterial mass on Earth would exceed the scale of the observable universe.


THE BALANCE OF ETHICS AND HEALTH
If killing is immoral, taking any life should be deemed immoral. But taking life for food clearly cannot be immoral. That would make life itself immoral.

Although humaneness and consideration for all life is important, so too is the ethic of health. If we don't eat the natural food we were designed to eat, and health fails, that would be unethical.

Both compassion and biology should be honored.

A reasonable compromise:

• Favor animal products that don’t require death, such as dairy and eggs.
• Choose organic, free-range, or wild sources to reduce suffering.
• Eat more fruits, vegetables, and nuts to lessen the need for slaughter.

MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
Despite all the above facts and logic, killing animals for food is still troublesome for many, including me. It's as though our bodies, our biology, are of this world, but our ethical sensibilities are from somewhere higher.

And that is evidently the case. Earth, and the difficult life and death challenges it presents, is a decision we make before coming here to grow into better beings. (Ask, if interested in other evidence of this.)

The choice of what to eat requires balancing conscience, ethics, emotion, empathy, love, and reason--not beliefs. The better we can do that, the better beings we become.