“NAZIS!” shouted the PETA protesters outside my tiny environmental college in middle-of-nowhere Vermont.
Our sustainable organic farm had two oxen named Bill and Lou. They were used to plow our humble piece of land, so that we didn’t need to use an environmentally-unfriendly tractor.
We loved Bill and Lou. Many students had deep, intimate connections with these beautiful beasts. They were our friends, and they were vital to helping us grow hundreds of pounds of vegetables that we ate in our dining hall, reducing our need for getting trucks to carry in pesticide-laden veggies from far-away states.
But one day, Lou fell and broke his leg. His condition was getting worse each day. Administrators, faculty, and students came together as a community to debate what should be done. Lou was suffering greatly. It was his time to die. We could either euthanize him and let his meat go to waste, or we could use the hundreds of pounds of food in our dining hall and survive off his bounty for months — months that we didn’t have to bring in factory-farmed beef that came from tortured, unhealthy cows.
Somehow, PETA heard about this news. And they ended up creating a petition online to “save” Bill and Lou — a petition that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures from around the world of good-hearted people who thought they were doing the right thing.
PETA also threatened every slaughterhouse in Vermont that if they processed Bill and Lou, PETA would ruin their business. After over a month of poor Lou suffering terribly, we ended up having to euthanize him and his meat went to waste. The PETA supporters rejoiced and considered this a “win”, claiming they’d made a positive difference in the world. And little Green Mountain College had to eat another tortured factory-farmed cow that semester…but never mind that.
Let’s talk about veganism. Many people believe it’s the most ethical and healthiest diet. If only everyone in the world became vegan, there would be no more animals suffering, there’d be far less disease, we could have such a peaceful and healthy world!
It is a nice concept, but it turns out the issue isn’t quite so black and white. And like the thousands of people who signed that petition to “save” Bill and Lou, sometimes you think you’re doing the right thing but are actually doing more harm than good in the end.
Most of the concepts and information here come from two episodes from the podcast Rewild Yourself by Daniel Vitalis:
Why I’m A Conscientious Omnivore
I highly recommend this podcast to anyone who enjoys being a part of this planet. Daniel Vitalis and Arthur Haines have far more experience on this topic than I do (Daniel was a hardcore vegan for 10 years, and Arthur is a botanist/scientist), which is why this piece has so many quotes from them. I just want to share this information with the world because this is a conversation not too many people are speaking up about or even considering. Also, as an anthropologist, I enjoy observing and pointing out the ways our culture convinces us of strange shit.
First, I want to commend vegans for taking a stand for what they believe in. Being a vegan can be extremely difficult, but they persevere because of a strong sense of morality. That is incredibly brave. I applaud vegans for taking a stand against industrial farming and the truly awful ways animals are being abused in factory farms.
This article is not an attempt to mock animal rights or make fun of people who wish to be gentler to the Earth. It is quite the opposite. It’s an effort to re-establish the notion of honoring our food chain in a mature manner, and not just because it’s a noble thing to do, but because our health and our planet are at stake.
The way industrial farms raise food doesn’t take into account the biological, social or emotional needs of the animals. It’s also very harmful to our Earth. By refusing to eat animals or their by-products, vegans are actually taking a stand and doing something about it. Vegans care about the quality of lives of organisms — at least for the higher organisms (e.g., animals). That is commendable.
Daniel Vitalis (D.V.) explains effectively:
“Life is a sacred thing. That [idea] has been lost and forgotten as we have gone down the path of mechanisation and industrialisation. It has brought us a lot of benefits, but has also left life hanging precariously in this place that we can say is less than sacred.
So I think there’s a bit of a desire to have that sacredness as the keystone of our lives again. And vegans have taken a stand against this wanton destruction of life. This can’t go on. And I think a lot of us, when we first see factory farming…You would have to be slightly sociopathic not to be moved by what you see. The fact that people take a stance against that is important.” -D.V.
On its face veganism might appear to be the most ethical diet out there, especially as you explore the horrific impact of industrial farming. But if you zoom out to the big picture of existence, it becomes obvious that there is far more to the story, and that the pursuit of a vegan lifestyle can actually be harmful to your body and the planet.
“From the inside it’s very, very convincing. It looked bulletproof to me. The vegan lifestyle made so much sense to me. I had the impression that humans were vegans, that we were a frugavore animal. And that we had somehow fallen from grace and we now were eating these bloody dismembered corpses, and that we had gotten into this just disgusting way of living. And that it had led to so many of the ills that we see in the world today. Without the knowledge I have now, still to this day, I could still [make] a fairly convincing argument [for veganism], if I didn’t understand the greater context of human big history.” -D.V.
Which leads us to the first and most important point:
Humans are omnivorous animals.
Many modern humans are completely out of touch with our roots and where we came from. We have forgotten that we are animals.
Arthur Haynes (A.H.) is a botanist. He has dedicated his life to studying plants. If there was a way to sustainably and healthily live on a plant-only diet, this man would absolutely practice veganism.
But even this fanatic plant-lover acknowledges that humans are omnivores:
“The fact that hunting is part of the human species is memorialized in our artifacts, our rock paintings, our carvings, and the ubiquitous act of hunting itself found in ALL indigenous cultures, past and present. To deny that humans are predators is comparable to rejecting that humans are communal organisms.” -A.H.
In other words, it is obvious to most people (although there’s quite a few lately who forget this fact, too) that humans are communal — we need human contact to be happy and healthy. We are also biologically designed to hunt and consume animal foods.
Every piece of data we know from archaeology, ethnography, basic physiology, biology, and comparative anatomy to our ape ancestors provides the same information: We are omnivores.
Humans and our ape ancestors have been eating animal foods for at least 3.5 million years — and that’s a conservative estimate.
“There is no point in the history of the Earth where humans ate only vegetation and only raw food. Even the hominids before us and the common ancestors we share with them were cooking their foods and eating a mix of plant and animal foods. We have always been omnivores, since humans appeared on this planet.” -A.H.
Some people believe that there are plenty of thriving tribes of healthy vegans that exist. There is no evidence, neither anthropological nor anecdotal, to support this claim. Absolutely none.
“I have not read a single [report]. Even groups living near the equator in lush environments where there were ample plant foods. In all of the reviews of anthropological reports of diet, no one has ever uncovered a single group that was vegan. Not one.” -A.H.
There are civilizations that exist in Asia that are largely vegetarian, but they still consume dairy products. They still acknowledge the need for animal food. Milk is essentially liquid meat, and it plays a central role in the diets of these cultures. Anthropologists still have to call these communities omnivores, because they consume animal products.
You might be thinking, “It’s a different time now. We can’t be going back and looking to hunter gatherers, we’re different people.”
While that’s absolutely true, don’t forget that we have the same DNA as people who lived 50,000 years ago. We can’t just transcend that overnight, even if we wished to. We still have the same nutritional requirements that need to be fulfilled.
We can’t transcend our DNA. We can’t transcend our biology.
It’s just not that simple. We can’t change something as fundamental as our natural diet overnight and expect to sustain health.
There isn’t any science on long-term veganism. There are no populations of humans to look to who have sustained a vegan diet for generations to see that it actually works.
“If a diet is deficient in a nutrient that species needs, it can’t be that species’ adapted diet. Therefore, any argument about [veganism being] the better direction for us is a clear fallacy.” -D.V.
This is an entirely new concept for humans.
Veganism has existed, at best, for 100 years. It is an experiment people are conducting on their own bodies.
There is significant clinical data to support that children thrive on the fat and nutrients obtained from animals in their diets. There are studies that show reduced cognitive ability and a failure to thrive in children on vegan diets.
“Consenting adults can do whatever they want to themselves and to other consenting adults. That is the great thing, is that most adults have the capacity to consent to what they do to themselves or what they do to other adults. Children don’t. Taking a diet that is so far away from our evolutionary history and aside even from our recent ancestry, it is in some ways to me criminal.” -A.H
Almost every vegan ends up being a former vegan as they get older. They will claim it is because they weren’t doing it right. If this diet is so difficult to do, how can it be the right path for us?
If it causes impaired cognition in children and requires injections of essential nutrients from doctors, how can this be touted as the healthiest diet?
Why did this new concept of veganism emerge in the first place?
If you had been born just 100 years ago, you would have probably witnessed firsthand the regular slaughter of animals. It was a normal part of life. Growing up, you would have come to understand that killing, bleeding, dying and suffering are all a necessary part of life.
Every animal on the planet eats the body parts of other living things. Things have to die for others to live. As unpleasant as this concept may be to modern sensibilities, every time we eat anything, we are eating the corpses of some plant, animal, fungi or bacteria.
However, most of us today didn’t grow up witnessing the killing of the animals we ate for dinner. We have become removed from that process. The animals we grew up around were domesticated pets that have had their wildness bred out. Soft, cushy lap animals that we can cuddle and play with. This makes people ignorant of what wild animals are really like.
In general, modern humans have a very skewed understanding of animal ecology. Animals usually end up eaten by other animals in the wild — usually in a pretty brutal fashion. Raised in modern society, we have lost sight of this.
“Because we are that kind of animal, we used to go out and kill those animals. Is it cruel? I mean, it’s just natural. But, sure, if we want to say that it’s cruel when a robin eats a dragonfly. If we want to say it’s cruel when a snake eats a rodent. If we want to say it’s cruel when a lion eats a gazelle. Is that cruel? Well, it’s just biology. I think it’s actually pretty amoral.” -D.V.
I personally don’t think it’s cruel or not cruel—cruelty doesn’t enter into the equation. Perhaps it seems cruel to people who grew up on cartoons. It feels cruel to people whose only encounters with other species are puppies and kittens. But it’s just nature. It’s just what we do as omnivorous animals.
Combine an upbringing of anthropomorphized animal cartoons and toys, plus fluffy domesticated pets as your only first-hand contact with other animal species, then add the discovery of heinous factory farm practices. What do you get? Lots of people horrified by the thought of ever eating animal products again.
Factory farming is truly horrible. The slaughterhouse industry and the industrial farming of animals is every bit as horrendous as the very worst of what human beings do to each other. These animals are forced to live in brutal slave conditions and are routinely tortured. There is no respect for their lives or wellbeing. You can’t blame people for seeing those horrors and wanting out of that system.
Then organizations like PETA come along and tell you that humans don’t even need animal products to be healthy. In fact, everything you need can come from plants! Well then, why not try it? You’ll be healthier, be participating in a greener world, saving lives…it all becomes very compelling. Veganism becomes the obvious answer to many people on how to live a moral, ethical, healthy life.
Confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecies
“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.” – Terence McKenna
When you surround yourself with a specific ideology and people who also believe in that ideology — no matter what it is — it becomes easy to have these self-fulfilling prophecies. You get stuck in these loops of confirmation bias. You create a reality around you that may not be consistent with the outside world, but you believe it is.
When you turn an ideology into your identity (whether it be Christian, vegan, feminist, whatever), when you hear someone criticizing that ideology, it starts to feel like they are attacking you, instead of a set of beliefs. This makes it nearly impossible to ever have a rational debate with an open mind, keeping personal feelings out of it.
“I did this for 10 years. You really start feeling that you are doing something so righteous and so necessary and no one else cares. All these people, they just don’t care. They’re cold and callous and unethical and you care about these animals and their suffering and they don’t care. And you always want to bring that up, and that just pushes everybody away, ‘cuz you just end up raining on everybody’s parade with a thing that they don’t even relate to. And then it feels like, see? Look! They don’t even care about me, they don’t care about anything! And then you won’t eat with anyone. This is a key piece.” -D.V.
We are social apes that share food. That isn’t a belief, that’s just truth. It’s a key way that humans socially bond with one another. We feed each other.
When you start refusing food from people trying to be social and friendly to you because of an ideology you hold, it can really alienate people trying to bond with you. This ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people start to push you away because you don’t realize you’re actually pushing them away.
“It can look as if you’re with a bunch of racist skinheads, and you’re like, no way, I don’t participate in that. That’s how it can feel. But you’re doing it to something that actually isn’t like that, it’s just their food. It’s their omnivorous food, that’s the food that people eat. We are an omnivorous ape. We know it from the biology, history, from every which way we can look at it, we know it. So when you deny that and put yourself in this elitist category, it’s really off-putting to other people and then people won’t really want to eat with you and you start to feel isolated. What it creates is an environment of social isolation where you feel like the only other people that understand you are other vegans.” -D.V.
Vegans often have a monastic fervor in the way they preach about their diet. They instill strict rules upon themselves just like a highly religious person would, and feel extreme guilt any time they stray from their ideals. Their reasons come from a highly compassionate place — they really believe they are doing the right thing. Their motivations may be just and righteous, but their actions often become anything but. They have gone so far down an extremist path that they aren’t able to see they are actually contributing more to the problem than the solution.
Veganism is possible because of agriculture, which is incredibly destructive.
Agriculture is human beings trying to triumph over nature.
Once humans began practicing agriculture, hierarchies were established — males above females, females above children, children above animals, animals above plants.
We started looking at these hierarchies as a natural order, when it is in fact a completely artificial and arbitrary way of looking at life.
“It is easy to forget how recently we still had a paradigm where an anthropomorphic god-head in the sky created us in 7 days and how much you see that religious monotheistic deism was influencing the early science, and we’re really not that far away from that on the timeline yet. We’re still shedding some of that stuff, so some of those beliefs that we were created special from all other animals and given dominion over the planet, as much as we’ve grown in our ability to understand that’s not real…still a lot of that stuff is tagging along, a lot of people still believe that and so it influences so much of our thinking. There is still that belief that we are not an animal.” -D.V.
This is a pretty logical outcome of “nature divorcement.” We were wild animals until we became domesticated. People stopped understanding that we are still a part of nature, as hard as we try to distance ourselves from all other animals and plants.
The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to this planet. It destroys entire ecosystems.
How many forests were pulled down, how many rivers were dammed, how many wild animals died so people could drink a sugary soy latte and feel righteous about it?
Lierre Kieth eloquently states in her book The Vegetarian Myth (available for free as a PDF!),
“Agriculture isn’t quite a war because the forests and wetlands and prairies, the rain, the soil, the air, can’t fight back. Agriculture is really more like ethnic cleansing, wiping out the indigenous dwellers so the invaders can take the land. It’s biotic cleansing, biocide.
It is not non-violent. It is not sustainable. And every bite of food is laden with death.
There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat, and soy. About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year. Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal. They count, and they died for your dinner.
Soil, species, rivers. That’s the death in your food. Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole.”
When this is the foundation of your diet, how can you feel morally superior about your food choices? The only way is to ignore uncomfortable truths.
Eating meat isn’t wrong, it’s the system in place that’s wrong. Factory farming plants is just as bad as factory farming animals. A feed lot of cows, a monocrop of corn — it all leads to the same problems. Deciding to only eat plants is not going to bring us to a balanced, harmonious world.
Death is a natural, essential, inevitable part of life.
There’s a desire for the world to be a really simple place. Many people view the world in very black-and-white terms. But the truth is, the world is incredibly complex. It’d be nice to have simple truths that cause the innumerable challenging paradoxes of life to go away, but to believe this could be true is to simply ignore nature.
“It’s really hard to understand how there can be such awful things when you want to be in a loving universe. You want to believe in goodness. But as you grow and mature you realize the world is full of these difficult paradoxes.” -D.V.
For many, knowing that we have to kill so we can live is a difficult concept to come to terms with — especially for people who grew up in cities and are so removed from the very ordinary occurrence of witnessing death every day in nature.
This is part of the challenging intricacy of being human and having such a developed neocortex that allows us to feel so many emotions and understand the complexity of so many concepts. We all have a desire to do what is right. So many people attempt to step away from the reality of the necessity of death in order to create and sustain life.
The Mayan people had a concept called kas-limaal, roughly translated as “mutual indebtedness.”
“The knowledge that every animal, plant, person, wind, and season is indebted to the fruit of everything else is an adult knowledge. To get out of debt means you don’t want to be part of life, and you don’t want to grow into an adult,” a Mayan elder explained to Martin Prechtel.
This concept is vital to those of us who are passionate for justice for the inhabitants of our planet. We need to grow up and accept the fact that for something to live, something else has to die. No amount of meditation or yoga or bowls of rice and veggies is going to make this go away. We can either shut our eyes to this truth like a child closing their eyes during the scary parts of a movie and pretend it doesn’t exist, or we can accept and even embrace the concept that death is a natural part of life.
Even if the things you’re eating didn’t have a face, they still died for you. Why should the lives of creatures with faces matter more than those without? Just because we find them harder to connect to and relate with?
If you are able to reframe it, you can appreciate that, in fact, this cycle of life and death is one of the most beautiful concepts of being a part of this Earth. We allow the bodies of other life forms inside ourselves, and then the molecules that made up that life literally become a part of us, a part of who we are. As such, eating becomes an incredibly sacred act.
“I love to think about the lineage of every one of my cells and the molecules that make them up, going backward through time. Because my cells in my body would have been made up of these building blocks that would have come from so many different other organisms from different continents. Truly, we are beings of this planet.” -A.H.
In short, it’s not only incredibly difficult to sustain a healthy lifestyle as a vegan, it’s unnatural — it goes against the grain of evolution and the life of the planet, of which we humans are only a part. Life brings death and death brings life. Death exists in everything we consume so that we may live. This isn’t something to fear, run away from or be sad about. Instead, we should be utterly grateful and acknowledge our deep respect for the sanctity of the food we eat every day, from animals to plants to fungi to bacteria.
Resources and further reading:
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration – Weston A. Price
Signs of Impaired Cognitive Function in Adolescents with Marginal Cobalamin Status
The role of nutrition in children’s neurocognitive development, from pregnancy through childhood
Meat Supplementation Improves Growth, Cognitive, and Behavioral Outcomes in Kenyan Children
The myth of the Indian vegetarian nation
anthrobliss 