The great food debate

It’s hard to walk around Portland for a lengthy period of time without seeing stickers or flyers proclaiming “My food doesn’t have a face!” or a variant thereof. It’s hard to walk into a restaurant in Portland and not have your pick of vegetarian, if not vegan, options.

And yet it’s not at all uncommon for newly-declared veggies to hear the quizzical response: “Why would you want to do that to yourself?” followed by “Hey vegan! If you love animals so much, why do you eat all their food! Oh, and tell me, do vegans swallow? …Ha ha. Hey, Hitler was a vegetarian too!” Conversely, in some circles around these parts, ordering a burger is like voting for Bush.

How strange it is that personal decisions about food have gotten so politicized and up for judgment these days.

I’ve sort of run the gamut since my wildly carnivorous days of high school. I entered college as a pescetarian (eating fish but no meat), slipped back into omnivore-land after a year and a half, went to being a strict vegetarian after another half-year, and soon after went vegan for a month. I have since reverted to plain old vegetarianism, earning much eager and unsolicited advice from friends and family along the way-omnivores, vegans and vegetarians alike.

It’s understandable how emotional we can get over the issue of what we put into our bodies. Shake-ups of dietary choices reach deeply into cultural traditions and personal ethics, childhood delicacies, vociferous memories of slaughterhouses from omnivores and veggies alike. An accusation of murder, even an indirect one, makes for no small conflict when pitted against traditions of meat eating from grandma’s baked ham to the Creation (“Then God said ‘Let us make man in our own image… and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth'” Genesis 1:26).

I admit the one time I broke my vegetarianism since it was renewed last September was when presented with traditional Mennonite farmer sausage at Christmas in my rural Canadian hometown. I broke it for emotional reasons, and do I regret it? Well, I’m not really sure.

Clear lines and definitions can break down extraordinarily fast when discussing the ethics of eating animal products, revealing far more complex questions. Simple compassion for the well-being of animals is a cornerstone for many veggies, a point often countered by omnivores, who consider that for animals to eat other animals is the natural way of things. But of course, vegetarianism has existed in human cultures for millennia. Sure, our bodies are designed for eating meat, but it’s been proven not to be necessary.

Just because we can be violent in our eating habits, should we? On the other hand, hasn’t violence for survival been an integral part of being an animal on this planet since the beginning of time? So what does that mean? On top of all this, studies have come out suggesting (though not proving) that plants feel pain in a way similar to animals, concurrent with studies suggesting (though not proving) that fish don’t feel pain at all. Not to mention the process of raising a crop inevitably kills animals living on the cropland, though not as many as the land was use to raise livestock, as was previously claimed.

There are some other things to consider, such as the fact that not eating animal products is undeniably more sustainable for the environment, and that most diets across the animal-product spectrum can be healthy. But the ethical question that tears apart kitchen tables across the country? It would be easier to get Barack and Hillary to be golfing buddies. And I don’t think they even like golf.

The heart of the whole issue is this: We are all consumers in the biological sense of the word, and we are all harvesting the earth’s bounty so that we may live. Be it the microscopic bugs we’re not aware of crushing, or the wood mice killed by the wheat we reap or the big ol’ slab of bacon on our plate.

What do vary are the lines we wish to draw. What should we take from the earth to sustain ourselves, and what should we not? There is no objective, correct answer to that question. It’s a deeply personal decision, one that should be free from judgment or explanation no matter what you decide to eat. This is Portland. The vegan mac and cheese is an aisle down from the hormone-free beef. Scrutinize what’s on your own plate, and not anybody else’s.