On Meat

My friends and I have argued about meat, that it's a part of natural human diet, that it's unnecessary, that there are morale implications to eating it. Timothy Morton mentioned that he had never heard a successful defense for eating meat. Polan skirts around meat suggesting it as flavoring to a dish, and even then to not eat it often. My first impulse, first idea when discussing the morality of meat is to contrast/compare vegetation to animals. Animals are conscious, able to feel pain (a characteristic found in many plants), scream, yelp, howl, and thrash during processing, effecting our senses and morality beyond the crunch of vegetables. Accepting recent research that plants too feel pain implies we accept a certain level of death and pain in our food. Here is a line, a fickle line like that of a pile of sand metaphor: you have a pile of sand and take a single grain, then another, then another, until one grain is left and you wonder at what point it stopped being a pile. At what point is there too much blood and death on your plate? What creature between carrots and chimpanzees is the highest up the evolutionary ladder that we are willing to consume? The lowest? Bugs seem degrading to eat and elephants are too noble.

Do plants feel pain?

My distaste for imagining an animal's excruciating agony doesn't eclipse my craving for a salty meat, medium-rare meat, dried meat, blackened meat, greasy meat, bloody meat. Realizing this is compelling, something that has an impact on my sense of my own morality, my own sense of compassion, and my own black/white, good/evil, selfish/generous balance.