Whenever I'm out to eat with friends or going out to eat, I always have to let the people in charge of my food know, "I'm vegan." 95% of the time, my server or friend stares back with a blank, confused look.
If they know what being vegan means, I can usually expect a fake smile to help mask their underlying judgement and/ or disgust.
Especially living in a small town, there is quite a bit of confusion that I'd like to clear up about why I chose to go vegan.
1) To Save Human Lives
Animal agriculture has a huge impact on human lives that many of us don't know. In the fishing industry, many of our seafood comes from Southeast Asian countries that use slave labor to catch the fish. Countries such as Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Vietnam have all been know to use slave labor, where slaves are beaten, abused, and can ultimately die. This sometimes leaves remnants of the bodies in the seafood that ends up on our plates in the United States, Europe, and Japan, according to an extensive AP investigation.
In factory farms here in the US, many workers come from Mexico. The documentary Food, Inc. tells the story of how ads are placed in Mexico offering job prospects to people desperately in need of money to support their families. These undocumented workers come to work for the farms, yet many of the biggest factory farms have agreements with Border Control where they turn in so many workers each week to get deported. This allows them do treat these workers horribly and then dispose of the workers a month or so later.
Additionally, author Victoria Moran tells in her book Main Street Vegan how these workers are also at a higher risk to develop arthritis from doing the same motion all day every day. If these workers aren't documented, then they can't unionize or demand better working conditions, so they continue to work in these conditions to get the paycheck, despite the medical repercussions. Even worse than that, these workers are significantly more likely to commit cases of sexual assault and rape due to becoming desensitized towards violence.
These are just some of many human rights abuses that are associated with animal agriculture. Even if one has problems believing certain stories and facts, there are just so many out there to discount all of these stories. After reading about multiple accounts similar to these, my heart was broken. Someone had to do something!
2) To Save Animal Lives
This is one of the most widely-known reason why someone would go vegan. But let's clear the air a little bit-- you don't have to be a hipster or participate in animal rights rallies to care about this cause! As a Christian, I believe that God gave us his creation so that we could be good stewards of the earth. With the creation story, in the garden before Adam and Eve had sinned, we don't have any accounts of them eating the animals who shared the garden with them! We know they ate the plants, but it appears as if this did not occur until after they sinned. Even for people who aren't Christians or may not ascribe to any particular faith, most would agree that we need to take care of our Earth because... well, we live here!
In Economics, we talk about the idea of Ricardian Equivalents, which is where a government increases spending in the present, but eventually, they are going to have to pay off that debt. Because they don't see the future realities in the present, it is easier to pay the cost later. This same idea can be applied with how we treat the Earth and the animals on it. We see an unsustainable requirement for meat in the present-- one that requires factory farms which treat animals as commodities instead of living beings-- as a necessity, not realizing the impact it is having on these species or on our futures.
In Philosophy, there is this idea of a "perfect world" used in many thought experiments. When mass producing animals and making them live in unnatural and unsanitary conditions, we have to ask ourselves if this is necessary. In a perfect world, would animals have to suffer and die so that we could eat them? Many people would answer no. While we don't live in a perfect world, most religions are in place because we are striving to get closer to that goal here on Earth. If this is the case, it only makes sense that I join the thousands of others in this pursuit towards a more cruelty-free world.
3) To Be A Good Steward of the Environment
The human impact on climate change is a problem that many politicians, advocacy groups, and organizations have tried to combat. However, most of these groups focus on cutting down carbon emissions, which is a great and noble cause. But we as a society have failed to try to mitigate our biggest impact on the environment-- animal agriculture. According to a recent study from the Food and Agriculture Organization, Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation.
Not only does animal agriculture produce methane, but livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, according to a World Watch study. Whole documentaries have been made about this concept, such as Cowspiracy, yet why doesn't anyone take these statistics to heart?
Because it's hard!
Or at least we have the perception of being vegan as hard. American culture prioritizes eating meat, dairy products, eggs, and other animal byproducts so much, that our initial reaction to these facts is that it may be good for you, but NOT for me.
I fell into this camp too, which is why I waited for about a month after feeling convicted from these facts to do anything about it. Even then, I took another month after that to tell anyone what I was doing and why. On a college budget, I thought that making this change would be extremely difficult. I was so releived when I learned this was not true! So many vegan staples are pretty cheap. For example, beans are a great source of protein, and I can buy a pound of lentils for $1 and they'll last me a week.
Hopefully, these three reasons help to clear up some of the haze around veganism and why people like myself make this lifestyle change.
