The Carnivore Manifesto

These days, I’m having a difficult time admitting my love for eating meat. Environmentalists continue to raise awareness regarding the high greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, and many of my peers have decided to become vegetarians because of this information. Animal activists, too, argue that slaughtering innocent creatures for food is cruel and inhumane.

It looks like I’m in a lose-lose situation when it comes to justifying my dietary habits. As someone who has consumed countless delicious sea creatures and land-grazing animals including (not lions and tigers, but) bears, I can’t help but feel a little immoral and gluttonous, a commonplace product of industrialization and sexy advertisement. In part to remedy this guilt and discomfort of living among so many ethical environmentalist vegetarians, I turn to philosophy.

I understand that meat, on the surface, implies the grotesque reality that we directly “deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy,” as Plutarch said. And there have been numerous philosophers who have advocated for animal rights and many famous vegetarians, like da Vinci, Kafka, and Hitler, to name a few. Columbia’s Bhakti Club, which hosts vegetarian cooking classes every Tuesday night, lists quotes by some of these vegetarian stars on their website, much to my delight.

“If the whole world adopts vegetarianism,” said Einstein, “it can change the destiny of humankind.” It sure could, but I wonder if we would actually be able to reap the same degree of pleasure or happiness by doing so. Gandhi condemned the practice of sacrificing “fellow creatures” for “our bodily wants,” echoing Plato’s philosophy on restraining the appetitive soul with a rational one. Realistically, though, rationalism is a sly philosophical tool that one can use to get away with almost any argument.

Rationalists like Descartes and Kant argued that if animals are not rational, they don’t deserve our ethical concern. So in that sense, the real question is not whether or not it’s right to eat other living things, but how far you’re willing to go in defending the vulnerable creatures at the bottom of the food chain.

To take a different stance, morality based on compassion and sentiment is one that most of us can relate to more. Just last week, I read a news report that the Chinese government might ban the eating of cats and dogs in order to show that “China has reached a new level of civilization,” in recognition of the increasing number of people who are starting to own them as pets.

While this seems like a big step in becoming a more “civilized” nation for China, I think this is a perfect example of humans defending the weak and vulnerable—in other words, cute—things. Not as many people point out the cruelty of the way cows, pigs, and chickens are slaughtered all over this country, but as soon as we hear about slaughtering lovable puppies—lovable mostly due to the way we breed them—we call that unethical. This is nothing but pure instinct and immediate sentiment based on the way that our particular culture treats certain animals.

Now, what if someone told you that “in America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food”? Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer brings this to our attention in a Wall Street Journal column, suggesting that “if we let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, we would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs that would put even the most efficient grass-based farming to shame.” Who are we to criticize China’s culinary practices? How can environmentalists not agree that this would be a realistic solution to the ridiculously high consumption of methane-producing cows?

If this unquestionable cultural compassion for innocent, vulnerable puppies and kittens does the trick, maybe we should start breeding special cows, even pigs and chickens, that are miniature enough to crawl into mug cups, and we can post YouTube videos of them in order to cultivate a culture that gives rights to these cute things.

You might think my suggestion is absurd, but this is the kind of effort it takes for a meat-eater to defend herself in an institution, a city—a whole culture, even—that is aggressively seducing us into environmentalism because other efforts have failed to stop mass consumption of meat. No doubt, this is laudable—I want my grandkids to live on Earth, too. But the practice of eating meat is not as big of an ethical problem when you look at practices like industrialized farming and people in the world who only care to protect cute animals.

So until I see some adorable cows on my Facebook news feed, I think I’ll continue to embrace a most passionate carnivorous lifestyle.

Yurina Ko is a Barnard College junior majoring in philosophy. She is a senior editor of the Columbia Political Review. 2+2=5 runs alternate Wednesdays.