No, this is not about the year 2012, when, because of the Mayan calendar, either the world is going to undergo numerous gigantoid natural disasters OR humans will undergo a radical change in consciousness. Depends who you ask (ooh, that could start an argument: I've decided to stop trying to use the word "whom").
Nor is this about the fact that some grammarians insist that English only has two tenses: the present and the past. What we normally consider the future tense they consider a sort of mood, with the word "will" indicating our feeling about the action, much like we use "might" to assess probability, "can" to assess possibility, or "should" to assess propriety or duty. ("Will," then, indicates that we are nearly certain about the event, since knowledge of the future is technically impossible.)
It is about my predicted employment status, which is: employed. Here's the rundown:
Actually, it's way too complicated for a good rundown. Let's just say I prepped the docs last year in April when I was applying for jobs, had to use some for a summer camp visa, had to get them replaced, had to drive around and wait around a lot, then took them to Korea, got a few job offers, accepted one, the school had some legal troubles (they were found innocent), my position got postponed, I left my docs with Chris when I went to India, they were turned in to immigration the day before they expired, they were all processed, I received a visa application number in my email, I took the number to Mumbai, got the visa after 1.5 days waiting and minimal hassle, and now have it in my possession.
About the job:
Decent pay, plus nice apartment very close to where I used to live.
Class 9-11 and, 1-3, and sometimes also 4-5.
No Fridays.
Several (3-5) months off. Paid.
Can't beat that, eh?
So I've been making some plans for my return. Here are a few things I'd like to do next year:
-Host vegan (or maybe just vegetarian) potlucks/movie nights.
-Start bicycling all over the country on the sweet bike Chris will hopefully sell me (so that I can be prepared for a future massive bike trip).
-Learn to play the harmonica, and maybe the guitar.
-Join political protests relating to stuff I'm not happy about.
-Learn some Chinese calligraphy (already have a teacher and a classmate lined up, along with knowledge of about 300 or 400 characters).
-Get a Chinese conversation partner to help me study (see above re: bike trip).
-Join some teaching organization and try to figure out how to run awesome, useful, conflict/stress-free lessons.
-Use tests for only 10% of the grading in my classes.
-Finish becoming fluent in Korean.
-Take a Vipassana meditation class and do some temple stays.
-Read a lot of stuff about linguistics, politics, and food from Kyungpook Univ's massive English library, which I am assuming exists but might not.
Anything else to add?
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Mike and Dave's First "Date"
I have been awarded the dubious honour of being allowed to write a guest post for my long-time friend David's blog, Undeployed (see link at left.)
I originally was going to try to copy David's style somehow, but I realized after less than a paragraph that I was really just using the exercise as an excuse to let myself get a bit raunchier than usual.
Enjoy the article and the value-adding footnotes!
I originally was going to try to copy David's style somehow, but I realized after less than a paragraph that I was really just using the exercise as an excuse to let myself get a bit raunchier than usual.
Enjoy the article and the value-adding footnotes!
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
SPEE GMO Avoider
Jefe posted the following comment, in response to a response I had made to Dave's comment on my previous post:
"Please tell me you haven't jumped onto the anti-GMO train...I will grant that financially what some companies do with GMO's in terms of driving out local seeds/farmers isn't laudable, but that's as far as I'll go. It's just another type of business-for-profit. Which isn't to condone it, but if you want to be vehemently anti-GMO for that reason, you need to be vehemently anti-IBM, anti-Wall Street, anti-phone companies, anti-etc. Which is fine. But crazy and rather idiotic thinking.
To speak of GM crops as something "repulsive" is overboard. There's nothing inherently repulsive about modifying a plant to suit your needs. Are medicines and vaccines repulsive? Should we all just eat herbs instead, and hope our kids don't develop polio?
Shades of a larger argument here...which we can have if you want..."
I started writing a response in comment form, but it was kind of long, so I figured I might as well post it here. Please note that I have read neither deeply nor widely about this stuff. Most of what I know, I know from watching "Food, Inc." That said, I think some wariness re: GM food is justified. Because...
Jefe,
I haven't devoted a lot of thought to the GMO thing, but I'm pretty sure I'm against it. One reason, which you mention, is that companies copyright seeds and use money and the threat of litigation to force small farmers into submission, which decreases the variety of food on the market (bad for consumers) and may violate the freedom of the farmers to grow and sell what they want (bad for the farmers). I do also deplore it when Wal-mart, IBM, and other corporations use financial leverage as a tactic to undermine other companies and competitors. (The alternative is simply to provide a better service and let consumers and the market do the rest). You're right to point out that many businesses employ such methods and that that doesn't legitimize the act at all - to me, rather, it shows how powerful corporations have become and how willing we are to accept their often heinous behavior. I can see why opposing this kind of corporate behavior and dominance could be called idealistic, but it's certainly not "idiotic."
(Interlude: I don't actually understand what you mean by saying "It's just another type of business-for-profit." Prima facie, this looks like it's meant to legitimize the practice, but you immediately point out that the search for profits doesn't legitimize anything.)
I think this alone is grounds enough to avoid GM food, given that there is plenty of other stuff to eat. But I'll mention a few other possible qualms.
Genetics is hard, so nobody really knows how healthy GM food products are. Their safety is vouched for by the companies that create them, but few truly independent bodies exist to verify the claims. Not to mention that it may take years for results to show up. On the other hand, non-GM crops have co-evolved with humans (and other animals) over thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, over which time our bodies have evolved to make use of the plants and the plants have evolved to make use of our bodies (see Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" for more on this). So we have a pretty good idea of what in the "natural world"' is good for us and what isn't.
Of course, people should be free to accept the risk and eat GM food if they want. But the companies that produce GM food often fight governmental requests and laws making it mandatory to label the food as modified, on the grounds that maybe people will think it's dangerous (which may indeed be the case). If you don't like the thought of having unannounced and untested chemicals in your drinking water, then you should also be opposed to GM foods being masqueraded as natural ones.
There is no argument from necessity, either. We don't need GM food to save us from disease or starvation. As Michael Pollan says in In Defense of Food, "Eat Food. Not So Much. Mostly Plants." In other words, a whole-food diet with lots of plants matter and low in meat, dairy, sugar, and refined and processed food, will keep you healthy. As a bonus, it will leave enough food left over for the other 6 billion people on the planet. Nice, eh?
This is not even getting into the international politics of GM food and the effects it's having and going to have on third world countries, where I'm under the impression that it's portrayed as some sort of miracle cure, which it certainly isn't. Even if it is safe, increased food yields themselves often drive up birth rates, so that families are bigger, meaning that the number of calories per capita doesn't increase. So the GM food, under the guise of being a solution, may actually postpone more useful demographic and societal changes which could improve the lot of 3rd worlders more quickly. (Admission: this paragraph is pure speculation on my part.)
Another question is that of the motivations of the companies making GM products. As far as I know, many of them [the products] are not designed to make better crops for people, but rather to increase yield per acre on crops like corn and soy in order to increase the amount/lower the price of feed available for cattle and pigs in CAFOs. In addition to the health uncertainties, and the negative effects that high-yield monocoltural agriculture has on our topsoil, as a SPEEVegan, I would be remiss if I didn't mention my opposition to technologies that serve to push down the price of meat, thereby encouraging its consumption and perpetuating lots of needless animal suffering and contributing to other E n E problems.
None of these amount to an in-principle "it's wrong to modify nature" statement. But I don't think this sort of absolutist critique is really necessary. Judging from your comment, it seems to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) that your attitude is "if there's no metaphysical reason not to do it, we should go ahead and do it." But my feeling is more like, "when there's no need, and some danger, why bother?"
Again, because I am getting the impression that you think I am some sort of Nazi who wants to ban everything he doesn't think is good enough, I will make it clear that if someone wants, he should be free to continue the research [as long as it doesn't hurt animals!], and he can go ahead and market the product, disclosing all the relevant info, once independent, not-for-profit organizations verify that it's safe. (Just like the official, if underenforced, policy for other food additives and for medicines would have it.) But don't force it on people and don't trick them into consuming it.
To recap: pros of GM food include possibly being able to feed more people, and possibly being able to feed them healthier food. As I've already mentioned, though, I think there are easier and safer and more certain ways to achieve both of these goals, as well as several costs and additional problems that give me pause.
Note 1) Phrase parsing: the adjective "repulsive" was being applied to several things. Admittedly, GM stuff isn't viscerally repulsive the way shit-brooding and chick-grinding are (to me). But just because one part of the process is somewhat clean doesn't mean the process as a whole can't be disgusting.
Note 2) Ad-homey attack: I don't see why it's ok to denigrate any anti-status-quo position by calling it a "train," as if its (supposed/imagined) popularity is supposed to mean it's wrong. Because the GMO stuff is not terribly close to my heart, I don't take it personally, but if you were to say that about my veganism or my love of travel or something, I'd be quite insulted and upset.
Note 3) Aside: And just a quick nod to what you wrote about medicines - I do actually think that many of them are misguided, though not repulsive, attempts at regaining health. Fair enough, polio might require some serious scientific intervention (note that I am conceding the straw man argument that you stuck in my proverbial mouth, one which was based around a conclusion that could not have been drawn from anything I wrote). But far more deaths and far more physical and psychological misery are/is due to easily avoidable or modifiable behavior, like dietary habits, drinking, smoking, speeding, and working too much. It seems to me that most of our medicine (again, I mean stuff at the supermarket and in the pharmacy, not at the hospital) is like the cortizone injections that football players get- intended to make us feel like things are alright, without addressing the causes of the problems. Which makes enough sense if all you need is to play through the 4th quarter, but certainly doesn't seem like a path to a healthy life.
"Please tell me you haven't jumped onto the anti-GMO train...I will grant that financially what some companies do with GMO's in terms of driving out local seeds/farmers isn't laudable, but that's as far as I'll go. It's just another type of business-for-profit. Which isn't to condone it, but if you want to be vehemently anti-GMO for that reason, you need to be vehemently anti-IBM, anti-Wall Street, anti-phone companies, anti-etc. Which is fine. But crazy and rather idiotic thinking.
To speak of GM crops as something "repulsive" is overboard. There's nothing inherently repulsive about modifying a plant to suit your needs. Are medicines and vaccines repulsive? Should we all just eat herbs instead, and hope our kids don't develop polio?
Shades of a larger argument here...which we can have if you want..."
I started writing a response in comment form, but it was kind of long, so I figured I might as well post it here. Please note that I have read neither deeply nor widely about this stuff. Most of what I know, I know from watching "Food, Inc." That said, I think some wariness re: GM food is justified. Because...
Jefe,
I haven't devoted a lot of thought to the GMO thing, but I'm pretty sure I'm against it. One reason, which you mention, is that companies copyright seeds and use money and the threat of litigation to force small farmers into submission, which decreases the variety of food on the market (bad for consumers) and may violate the freedom of the farmers to grow and sell what they want (bad for the farmers). I do also deplore it when Wal-mart, IBM, and other corporations use financial leverage as a tactic to undermine other companies and competitors. (The alternative is simply to provide a better service and let consumers and the market do the rest). You're right to point out that many businesses employ such methods and that that doesn't legitimize the act at all - to me, rather, it shows how powerful corporations have become and how willing we are to accept their often heinous behavior. I can see why opposing this kind of corporate behavior and dominance could be called idealistic, but it's certainly not "idiotic."
(Interlude: I don't actually understand what you mean by saying "It's just another type of business-for-profit." Prima facie, this looks like it's meant to legitimize the practice, but you immediately point out that the search for profits doesn't legitimize anything.)
I think this alone is grounds enough to avoid GM food, given that there is plenty of other stuff to eat. But I'll mention a few other possible qualms.
Genetics is hard, so nobody really knows how healthy GM food products are. Their safety is vouched for by the companies that create them, but few truly independent bodies exist to verify the claims. Not to mention that it may take years for results to show up. On the other hand, non-GM crops have co-evolved with humans (and other animals) over thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, over which time our bodies have evolved to make use of the plants and the plants have evolved to make use of our bodies (see Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" for more on this). So we have a pretty good idea of what in the "natural world"' is good for us and what isn't.
Of course, people should be free to accept the risk and eat GM food if they want. But the companies that produce GM food often fight governmental requests and laws making it mandatory to label the food as modified, on the grounds that maybe people will think it's dangerous (which may indeed be the case). If you don't like the thought of having unannounced and untested chemicals in your drinking water, then you should also be opposed to GM foods being masqueraded as natural ones.
There is no argument from necessity, either. We don't need GM food to save us from disease or starvation. As Michael Pollan says in In Defense of Food, "Eat Food. Not So Much. Mostly Plants." In other words, a whole-food diet with lots of plants matter and low in meat, dairy, sugar, and refined and processed food, will keep you healthy. As a bonus, it will leave enough food left over for the other 6 billion people on the planet. Nice, eh?
This is not even getting into the international politics of GM food and the effects it's having and going to have on third world countries, where I'm under the impression that it's portrayed as some sort of miracle cure, which it certainly isn't. Even if it is safe, increased food yields themselves often drive up birth rates, so that families are bigger, meaning that the number of calories per capita doesn't increase. So the GM food, under the guise of being a solution, may actually postpone more useful demographic and societal changes which could improve the lot of 3rd worlders more quickly. (Admission: this paragraph is pure speculation on my part.)
Another question is that of the motivations of the companies making GM products. As far as I know, many of them [the products] are not designed to make better crops for people, but rather to increase yield per acre on crops like corn and soy in order to increase the amount/lower the price of feed available for cattle and pigs in CAFOs. In addition to the health uncertainties, and the negative effects that high-yield monocoltural agriculture has on our topsoil, as a SPEEVegan, I would be remiss if I didn't mention my opposition to technologies that serve to push down the price of meat, thereby encouraging its consumption and perpetuating lots of needless animal suffering and contributing to other E n E problems.
None of these amount to an in-principle "it's wrong to modify nature" statement. But I don't think this sort of absolutist critique is really necessary. Judging from your comment, it seems to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) that your attitude is "if there's no metaphysical reason not to do it, we should go ahead and do it." But my feeling is more like, "when there's no need, and some danger, why bother?"
Again, because I am getting the impression that you think I am some sort of Nazi who wants to ban everything he doesn't think is good enough, I will make it clear that if someone wants, he should be free to continue the research [as long as it doesn't hurt animals!], and he can go ahead and market the product, disclosing all the relevant info, once independent, not-for-profit organizations verify that it's safe. (Just like the official, if underenforced, policy for other food additives and for medicines would have it.) But don't force it on people and don't trick them into consuming it.
To recap: pros of GM food include possibly being able to feed more people, and possibly being able to feed them healthier food. As I've already mentioned, though, I think there are easier and safer and more certain ways to achieve both of these goals, as well as several costs and additional problems that give me pause.
Note 1) Phrase parsing: the adjective "repulsive" was being applied to several things. Admittedly, GM stuff isn't viscerally repulsive the way shit-brooding and chick-grinding are (to me). But just because one part of the process is somewhat clean doesn't mean the process as a whole can't be disgusting.
Note 2) Ad-homey attack: I don't see why it's ok to denigrate any anti-status-quo position by calling it a "train," as if its (supposed/imagined) popularity is supposed to mean it's wrong. Because the GMO stuff is not terribly close to my heart, I don't take it personally, but if you were to say that about my veganism or my love of travel or something, I'd be quite insulted and upset.
Note 3) Aside: And just a quick nod to what you wrote about medicines - I do actually think that many of them are misguided, though not repulsive, attempts at regaining health. Fair enough, polio might require some serious scientific intervention (note that I am conceding the straw man argument that you stuck in my proverbial mouth, one which was based around a conclusion that could not have been drawn from anything I wrote). But far more deaths and far more physical and psychological misery are/is due to easily avoidable or modifiable behavior, like dietary habits, drinking, smoking, speeding, and working too much. It seems to me that most of our medicine (again, I mean stuff at the supermarket and in the pharmacy, not at the hospital) is like the cortizone injections that football players get- intended to make us feel like things are alright, without addressing the causes of the problems. Which makes enough sense if all you need is to play through the 4th quarter, but certainly doesn't seem like a path to a healthy life.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
On Plants
Here's something I wrote about 2 weeks ago. I postponed posting in order to get some of the travel stuff up. It's somewhat in response to a NYT article, which several friends informed me of, directly and indirectly.
I'd promise not to post any entries related to veganism for a while, but this meta-post is sort of incomplete and needs a partner-post looking at the article itself. So just one more. For now. Bear with me.
----------------
There's a question that people often ask me and, I'm sure, others who profess to be vegetarians or vegans or lacto-ovo-pescetarians for ethical reasons. The question is: what about plants? Don't they feel pain and have a right to live, too? Though it's easy to brush the question aside - indeed, I usually feel like the people who ask it to me take it far less seriously than I do - I believe it does merit some attention, and that the way we answer the question ought to bear heavily on our daily food choices.
Before we get to the evidence, a word first about the question-asker, or better, the question-act. In my experience, the question is rarely asked honestly. What I mean by this is that the question is asked as a quick way to justify one's current meat-eating habits, and the asker rarely acknowledges that other conclusions that might have ramifications taking them away from their current habits are actually more logical.
The underlying argument is as follows (I'll call this argument "A" for future reference):
Premise 1) Animals feel pain and have an interest in living.
Premise 2) Plants also feel pain and also have an interest in living.
Premise 3) Humans have to eat.
Sub-conclusion: The process of eating necessarily causes pain to some kind of being and disrespects its interest in living.
Conclusion: There's no point worrying about what we eat. We're just assholes and there's nothing we can do about it. Eating meat is as OK as anything can be.
In practical terms: there's no need to change my habit of eating (industrialized) meat.
There are a couple problems with this argument. The first is
*Hidden premise 1) Everything we eat or can eat is either a living plant or an animal, capable of feeling pain and having interests.
While this is mostly true - aside from salt and water and maybe one or two other things, all of our sustenance comes from other life forms or products of those life forms - it would be possible live off fruit and nuts (which drop off plants naturally) and fungi (of course, whether or not fungi feel pain and have interests is also a question worth asking.) One could also eat dead animals (as our ancestors almost certainly did). These are admittidely difficult and unrealistic options, but it's possible to live by them, and so they ought not go forgotten in any discussion of right and wrong as regards eating.
The second, more significant issue is
*Hidden Premise 2) Animal pain and interests and plant pain and interests are identical.
Whether or not this is so can only be determined by honest, disinterested observation, but I'll go ahead and say that, prima facie, I'm not sure why we'd make that assumption, given how differently plants and animals react to stimuli. (Later, I'll refer to an NYT article about scientists who have investigated this in detail.) This is significant because, unless one can prove that all pain and interesets are identical, one is/may be justified in worrying about the pain of one species more than the pain of another, even if it's impossible to reduce that suffering to zero. The solution in this case would be to subsist on plants rather than animals - though of course, one could also discriminate among plants, eating primarily algae and other low-level life forms that most likely feel little pain.
The question-asker, in my experience, is rarely willing to accept that his/her premises, when all made explicit, lead more naturally to fruitarianism or consumption from the bottom of the food chain than they do to the indiscriminant consumption of any form of life. The reason, it seems to me, that people don't acknowledge this is because the argument is not about what, at the surface level, it purports to be about. It's not about whether or not plants feel pain or whether that matters. It's about whether or not the self-professed ethical vegetarian (hereafter, "SPEV") is a hypocrite and/or an asshole. First the implicit argument, from the POV of the non-SPEV, then some discussion:
Fact: This SPEV claims to be living according to the following Central Principles of SPEVism.
CP 1) It's wrong to cause other beings to suffer needlessly.
CP 2) It's wrong to ignore the interests of other beings in favor of our own interests.
Premise 1) (Acknowledged) Consuming meat is wrong according to CP1 and CP2.
Sub-conclusion 1) The SPEV thinks I am a (bad) person who does things that are wrong.
Premise 2) (Assuming that "A" is sound and valid) Consuming plant matter is also wrong according to CP1 and CP2.
Sub-conclusion 2) The SPEV, according to his own logic, is also a person who does things that are wrong.
Super-conclusion) the SPEV is a judgmental hypocrite and can't even follow the precepts of his own ethical system, which he won't stop talking about and pushing onto others. If he can't follow them, why should I? And what right does he have to criticize or look down on my preferences?
I understand completely why it may be nice to consider even benevolent and mild-mannered SPEVs like myself hypocrites and/or arses. The fact is, choosing to live as a SPEV requires condemnation, implicit if not explicit, of the act of eating meat, just as choosing to live as a teetotaler generally requires condemnation, implicit if not explicit, of the consumption of alcohol. Of course, implicit in almost every refusal, banal or not, is a condemnation of the act being refused; refusing to kill another human implicitly condemns those who do, as does refusing to pick your nose in public. Few get upset over the nose-picking issue, but nobody is surprised when soldiers don't appreciate pacifists. When the condemnation hits close to home - and what's closer to home than what you put on your plate and in your mouth at brekkie, lunch, and dinner? - it's easy to take it personally.
This is something that, as a newbie SPEEVegan (No typo! 5 points to whoever figures out what that means!), I take seriously. I feel deeply that CP1 and CP2 are right and want to live in a world where others do too, which means that I want to proselytize and convert. But I also want to maintain relationships with all my non-SPEV and non-SPEEV peeps, who have all sorts of other great qualities and who do other great things and who remember the days before I was a SPEEVegan. If we go way back, you may even remember when I was a non-SPEEV. Wow.
So, though none of my pals have ever really clashed with me about this stuff and I am preaching to people who don't need to be preached at, please consider this a plea to:
1) Refrain from asking the "what about plants?" question unless you
a) would consider becoming a fruitarian; or,
b) want to disagree with SPEV CP1 and/or CP2 (I haven't forgotten about you, Chris, formidable foe that you are); or,
c) think I'm wrong in my analysis of Argument A
2) Consider the plight of the SPEVs.
3) Let me know how I'm doing at being a non-threatening, friendly, non-arsey SPEEVegan. Give me tips from the non-SPEV perspective, which I abandoned nearly 8 months ago and may have somewhat forgotten. Really, it's important. To me and to SPEVs and SPEVegans and and SPEEVs and SPEEVegans and other permutations all over the world.
Alright, now that that joke is sufficiently played out, I'll sign off, leaving the original question (and article) unscathed. I intend to take it/them on later. Maybe on the 24 hour train ride to Mumbai tonight. For now, I'm going to try to beat the lunch rush at that restaurant I couldn't get into yesterday. Cheap pure veg food, here I come.
I'd promise not to post any entries related to veganism for a while, but this meta-post is sort of incomplete and needs a partner-post looking at the article itself. So just one more. For now. Bear with me.
----------------
There's a question that people often ask me and, I'm sure, others who profess to be vegetarians or vegans or lacto-ovo-pescetarians for ethical reasons. The question is: what about plants? Don't they feel pain and have a right to live, too? Though it's easy to brush the question aside - indeed, I usually feel like the people who ask it to me take it far less seriously than I do - I believe it does merit some attention, and that the way we answer the question ought to bear heavily on our daily food choices.
Before we get to the evidence, a word first about the question-asker, or better, the question-act. In my experience, the question is rarely asked honestly. What I mean by this is that the question is asked as a quick way to justify one's current meat-eating habits, and the asker rarely acknowledges that other conclusions that might have ramifications taking them away from their current habits are actually more logical.
The underlying argument is as follows (I'll call this argument "A" for future reference):
Premise 1) Animals feel pain and have an interest in living.
Premise 2) Plants also feel pain and also have an interest in living.
Premise 3) Humans have to eat.
Sub-conclusion: The process of eating necessarily causes pain to some kind of being and disrespects its interest in living.
Conclusion: There's no point worrying about what we eat. We're just assholes and there's nothing we can do about it. Eating meat is as OK as anything can be.
In practical terms: there's no need to change my habit of eating (industrialized) meat.
There are a couple problems with this argument. The first is
*Hidden premise 1) Everything we eat or can eat is either a living plant or an animal, capable of feeling pain and having interests.
While this is mostly true - aside from salt and water and maybe one or two other things, all of our sustenance comes from other life forms or products of those life forms - it would be possible live off fruit and nuts (which drop off plants naturally) and fungi (of course, whether or not fungi feel pain and have interests is also a question worth asking.) One could also eat dead animals (as our ancestors almost certainly did). These are admittidely difficult and unrealistic options, but it's possible to live by them, and so they ought not go forgotten in any discussion of right and wrong as regards eating.
The second, more significant issue is
*Hidden Premise 2) Animal pain and interests and plant pain and interests are identical.
Whether or not this is so can only be determined by honest, disinterested observation, but I'll go ahead and say that, prima facie, I'm not sure why we'd make that assumption, given how differently plants and animals react to stimuli. (Later, I'll refer to an NYT article about scientists who have investigated this in detail.) This is significant because, unless one can prove that all pain and interesets are identical, one is/may be justified in worrying about the pain of one species more than the pain of another, even if it's impossible to reduce that suffering to zero. The solution in this case would be to subsist on plants rather than animals - though of course, one could also discriminate among plants, eating primarily algae and other low-level life forms that most likely feel little pain.
The question-asker, in my experience, is rarely willing to accept that his/her premises, when all made explicit, lead more naturally to fruitarianism or consumption from the bottom of the food chain than they do to the indiscriminant consumption of any form of life. The reason, it seems to me, that people don't acknowledge this is because the argument is not about what, at the surface level, it purports to be about. It's not about whether or not plants feel pain or whether that matters. It's about whether or not the self-professed ethical vegetarian (hereafter, "SPEV") is a hypocrite and/or an asshole. First the implicit argument, from the POV of the non-SPEV, then some discussion:
Fact: This SPEV claims to be living according to the following Central Principles of SPEVism.
CP 1) It's wrong to cause other beings to suffer needlessly.
CP 2) It's wrong to ignore the interests of other beings in favor of our own interests.
Premise 1) (Acknowledged) Consuming meat is wrong according to CP1 and CP2.
Sub-conclusion 1) The SPEV thinks I am a (bad) person who does things that are wrong.
Premise 2) (Assuming that "A" is sound and valid) Consuming plant matter is also wrong according to CP1 and CP2.
Sub-conclusion 2) The SPEV, according to his own logic, is also a person who does things that are wrong.
Super-conclusion) the SPEV is a judgmental hypocrite and can't even follow the precepts of his own ethical system, which he won't stop talking about and pushing onto others. If he can't follow them, why should I? And what right does he have to criticize or look down on my preferences?
I understand completely why it may be nice to consider even benevolent and mild-mannered SPEVs like myself hypocrites and/or arses. The fact is, choosing to live as a SPEV requires condemnation, implicit if not explicit, of the act of eating meat, just as choosing to live as a teetotaler generally requires condemnation, implicit if not explicit, of the consumption of alcohol. Of course, implicit in almost every refusal, banal or not, is a condemnation of the act being refused; refusing to kill another human implicitly condemns those who do, as does refusing to pick your nose in public. Few get upset over the nose-picking issue, but nobody is surprised when soldiers don't appreciate pacifists. When the condemnation hits close to home - and what's closer to home than what you put on your plate and in your mouth at brekkie, lunch, and dinner? - it's easy to take it personally.
This is something that, as a newbie SPEEVegan (No typo! 5 points to whoever figures out what that means!), I take seriously. I feel deeply that CP1 and CP2 are right and want to live in a world where others do too, which means that I want to proselytize and convert. But I also want to maintain relationships with all my non-SPEV and non-SPEEV peeps, who have all sorts of other great qualities and who do other great things and who remember the days before I was a SPEEVegan. If we go way back, you may even remember when I was a non-SPEEV. Wow.
So, though none of my pals have ever really clashed with me about this stuff and I am preaching to people who don't need to be preached at, please consider this a plea to:
1) Refrain from asking the "what about plants?" question unless you
a) would consider becoming a fruitarian; or,
b) want to disagree with SPEV CP1 and/or CP2 (I haven't forgotten about you, Chris, formidable foe that you are); or,
c) think I'm wrong in my analysis of Argument A
2) Consider the plight of the SPEVs.
3) Let me know how I'm doing at being a non-threatening, friendly, non-arsey SPEEVegan. Give me tips from the non-SPEV perspective, which I abandoned nearly 8 months ago and may have somewhat forgotten. Really, it's important. To me and to SPEVs and SPEVegans and and SPEEVs and SPEEVegans and other permutations all over the world.
Alright, now that that joke is sufficiently played out, I'll sign off, leaving the original question (and article) unscathed. I intend to take it/them on later. Maybe on the 24 hour train ride to Mumbai tonight. For now, I'm going to try to beat the lunch rush at that restaurant I couldn't get into yesterday. Cheap pure veg food, here I come.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Why?
Note: This is one of those purgatorial posts which has been lurking in my "drafts" box for a few months now. I am aware that I am probably talking too much about veganism nowadays, so feel free to skip the post. But if you want to read about it, here it is. Also, it's almost 3 months old, and as I consider myself a different person, I hereby disavow any responsibility for what's written below.
----------------------------
If you want an explanation of the possible rationales for vegetarianism and veganism, there are probably much better things to read than this post. Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" outlines the basic philosophical argument and exposes the conditions on factory farms (in the 1970's) and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" gives a few statistics about the costs and logistics of factory-farmed livestock and also some examples of more humane and environmentally sound methods. There are also the hundreds or thousands or millions of books I haven't read, and of course there's wikipedia. I've also noticed or been linked to a number of good articles on the New York Times site, which has a vegetarian section.
The reason that Stepper had some trouble isolating my motives is because there are indeed several of them, most of which he touched on. One is the argument regarding suffering. We generally agree that it's wrong to cause another person to suffer, particularly if it's only to satisfy one of our non-essential desires. In theory, this is true regardless of sex, race, nationality, etc, though in practice we don't do to well at extending our sympathies to people we perceive as different or distant. We also agree that it's wrong to cause certain animals (dogs, cats, horses) to suffer, and have even given them some types of rights within our legal system. But, out of sheer selfishness and prejudice (generally speaking , anyway - there are also some philosophical arguments that can be raised, and I hope Chris will deign to do so) [EDIT: Chris, don't do it now, there's a more relevant post coming], we don't extend the same courtesy to animals that are delicious. I believe this distinction is arbitrary and self-serving and is perpetuated only because we're (happily, even intentionally) unaware of the amount of suffering our habits cause.
It's true that this argument doesn't concern animals raised in the wild. But, I'm willing to bet that, out of all the meat we've consumed in our life, less than a tenth of a percent was caught wild. I'm also willing to bet that most of the meat and animal products advertised as having been raised organically, naturally, conscientiously, etc, are not half of what they're cracked up to be. So, to be safe, I'd avoid most of it anyway.
I'm not sure how willing I would be to eat meat that I know for sure has been caught wild or raised sustainably and kindly, but it's mostly a moot point anyway, since that kind of meat is so incredibly rare and expensive. Even killing the animal quickly may cause some sort of suffering to the animal's "family," and the process of tracking it down may be destructive or inefficient in other ways. This is all, of course, dependent on which type of animal we're talking about, with the "lower order" ones which are less likely to have developed emotions or pleasure and pain systems similar to ours meriting less attention.
There are also some health risks to consider, due to meat going bad or being contaminated or being pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and what not. To be honest, I don't think much about that stuff. [EDIT: The more I look into this sort of stuff, the more I hear about the problems with a meat-and-dairy based diet, but that's also a topic for another time and place.]
I agree with both you (Stepper) and your beloved Nietzsche when you say that eating animals isn't intrinsically wrong. It would be ridiculous to criticize a bird of prey for eating a mouse. The bird doesn't have the physical capacity to survive on anything else, nor does it have the ingenuity to find a different way of living, and it may not even have the ability to sympathize with another creature. That's just the way nature works. So I'm not passing any judgments on Neanderthals who speared mammoths or Eskimos who hunt seals or others who eat animals out of necessity. It may be unfortunate, but when it comes down to it, humans are like all the other animals in that they'd rather kill than starve.
But not one single instance of eating meat in our entire life has had any relation at all to starving or biological necessity. We (this is as true in India as in the West) can easily (and deliciously) feed ourselves without killing animals. We torture and then consume just to satisfy our taste buds, which we could satisfy equally well in any number of other ways. We have the physical capacity to survive and thrive without eating meat, and we have the mental capacity to choose to do so. We just don't, because we think that they taste good and that we need them. The former may be trivially true, but the latter isn't true at all.
Plus the environmental costs of contemporary meat production are insane. Most of the water consumed in the US is consumed by animals. It takes 100 times more water to produce a pound of beef than a pound of grain, and 750 gallons of water go into a gallon of milk. It also takes something like 22 pounds of grain to get a pound of beef. To get animals to fatten up quickly, they need to be fed corn. To make enough corn, we need to use fertilizer. To make fertilizer, we need to use oil, which could otherwise be used for much better and important things. Even with massive amounts of fertilizer, corn yield is still too low to feed all our cows and pigs, which means that we need to pay South Americans to clear the Amazon forest to make space for crops, which means there are fewer trees to sequester the carbon released by whatever else we do. Not to mention the thousands of tons of poo that nobody knows what to do with, and which most likely will somehow get into our rivers, lakes, oceans, or drinking water. The focus on fertilized corn also leads to problems with pests and pesticides and pesticide-resistant pests and the disappearance of our topsoil.
There are other ideas there too, about living in harmony with the earth and changing our attitudes toward our environment and removing all traces of violence from our lives and working on Karma and who knows what else. I'm down with some of these things, skeptical about some others, and outright reject the rest. But there are enough other reasons that those aren't terribly important for me.
There's also the fact that, having been slowly stopping eating meat for nearly the last 3 years, and having been just about completely meat free for the past 5 months, and almost vegan for the past 3 weeks, I just don't miss it that much. There's no temptation left, just like most people don't feel particularly tempted to eat snails or horses or rabbits or whatever. Better than that - free of thoughts of factory farms and waste and selfishness and destruction, eating is actually more pleasant for me nowadays than it has been in a long time.
----------------------------
If you want an explanation of the possible rationales for vegetarianism and veganism, there are probably much better things to read than this post. Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" outlines the basic philosophical argument and exposes the conditions on factory farms (in the 1970's) and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" gives a few statistics about the costs and logistics of factory-farmed livestock and also some examples of more humane and environmentally sound methods. There are also the hundreds or thousands or millions of books I haven't read, and of course there's wikipedia. I've also noticed or been linked to a number of good articles on the New York Times site, which has a vegetarian section.
The reason that Stepper had some trouble isolating my motives is because there are indeed several of them, most of which he touched on. One is the argument regarding suffering. We generally agree that it's wrong to cause another person to suffer, particularly if it's only to satisfy one of our non-essential desires. In theory, this is true regardless of sex, race, nationality, etc, though in practice we don't do to well at extending our sympathies to people we perceive as different or distant. We also agree that it's wrong to cause certain animals (dogs, cats, horses) to suffer, and have even given them some types of rights within our legal system. But, out of sheer selfishness and prejudice (generally speaking , anyway - there are also some philosophical arguments that can be raised, and I hope Chris will deign to do so) [EDIT: Chris, don't do it now, there's a more relevant post coming], we don't extend the same courtesy to animals that are delicious. I believe this distinction is arbitrary and self-serving and is perpetuated only because we're (happily, even intentionally) unaware of the amount of suffering our habits cause.
It's true that this argument doesn't concern animals raised in the wild. But, I'm willing to bet that, out of all the meat we've consumed in our life, less than a tenth of a percent was caught wild. I'm also willing to bet that most of the meat and animal products advertised as having been raised organically, naturally, conscientiously, etc, are not half of what they're cracked up to be. So, to be safe, I'd avoid most of it anyway.
I'm not sure how willing I would be to eat meat that I know for sure has been caught wild or raised sustainably and kindly, but it's mostly a moot point anyway, since that kind of meat is so incredibly rare and expensive. Even killing the animal quickly may cause some sort of suffering to the animal's "family," and the process of tracking it down may be destructive or inefficient in other ways. This is all, of course, dependent on which type of animal we're talking about, with the "lower order" ones which are less likely to have developed emotions or pleasure and pain systems similar to ours meriting less attention.
There are also some health risks to consider, due to meat going bad or being contaminated or being pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and what not. To be honest, I don't think much about that stuff. [EDIT: The more I look into this sort of stuff, the more I hear about the problems with a meat-and-dairy based diet, but that's also a topic for another time and place.]
I agree with both you (Stepper) and your beloved Nietzsche when you say that eating animals isn't intrinsically wrong. It would be ridiculous to criticize a bird of prey for eating a mouse. The bird doesn't have the physical capacity to survive on anything else, nor does it have the ingenuity to find a different way of living, and it may not even have the ability to sympathize with another creature. That's just the way nature works. So I'm not passing any judgments on Neanderthals who speared mammoths or Eskimos who hunt seals or others who eat animals out of necessity. It may be unfortunate, but when it comes down to it, humans are like all the other animals in that they'd rather kill than starve.
But not one single instance of eating meat in our entire life has had any relation at all to starving or biological necessity. We (this is as true in India as in the West) can easily (and deliciously) feed ourselves without killing animals. We torture and then consume just to satisfy our taste buds, which we could satisfy equally well in any number of other ways. We have the physical capacity to survive and thrive without eating meat, and we have the mental capacity to choose to do so. We just don't, because we think that they taste good and that we need them. The former may be trivially true, but the latter isn't true at all.
Plus the environmental costs of contemporary meat production are insane. Most of the water consumed in the US is consumed by animals. It takes 100 times more water to produce a pound of beef than a pound of grain, and 750 gallons of water go into a gallon of milk. It also takes something like 22 pounds of grain to get a pound of beef. To get animals to fatten up quickly, they need to be fed corn. To make enough corn, we need to use fertilizer. To make fertilizer, we need to use oil, which could otherwise be used for much better and important things. Even with massive amounts of fertilizer, corn yield is still too low to feed all our cows and pigs, which means that we need to pay South Americans to clear the Amazon forest to make space for crops, which means there are fewer trees to sequester the carbon released by whatever else we do. Not to mention the thousands of tons of poo that nobody knows what to do with, and which most likely will somehow get into our rivers, lakes, oceans, or drinking water. The focus on fertilized corn also leads to problems with pests and pesticides and pesticide-resistant pests and the disappearance of our topsoil.
There are other ideas there too, about living in harmony with the earth and changing our attitudes toward our environment and removing all traces of violence from our lives and working on Karma and who knows what else. I'm down with some of these things, skeptical about some others, and outright reject the rest. But there are enough other reasons that those aren't terribly important for me.
There's also the fact that, having been slowly stopping eating meat for nearly the last 3 years, and having been just about completely meat free for the past 5 months, and almost vegan for the past 3 weeks, I just don't miss it that much. There's no temptation left, just like most people don't feel particularly tempted to eat snails or horses or rabbits or whatever. Better than that - free of thoughts of factory farms and waste and selfishness and destruction, eating is actually more pleasant for me nowadays than it has been in a long time.
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