Vegetarianism: Limiting or Healthful?
On a breezy spring day, I made a decision that would forever change the quality of my life. For weeks I had been feeling low even though I was eating a balanced diet, supplemented by proper vitamins, and getting plenty of rest. I also regularly went for early-morning jogs. So, I just could not understand why I was feeling so drained and tired. I confided in my fellow jogger and friend and she suggested I try a vegetarian diet. I was quite hesitant at first, but finally I decided I had nothing to lose. After a few months I discovered what millions of reasonable Americans already know: vegetarianism is an environmentally sound, healthful, logical, and delicious alternative to eating meat.
To be a vegetarian basically means you avoid eating flesh – meat, poultry, and fish. According to the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” if you avoid all animal products, including foods like cheese and milk, you are called a vegan. Vegetarians offer many reasons for giving up eating meat.
Vegetarianism promotes environmental health. Douglas Lea, writing in “Mother Earth News,” reports that more than half of all water consumption in the United States goes to raising beef and 90 percent of organic water pollution comes from producing meat. More than half of all pesticides – 55 percent – are used in the production of meat and another 23 percent are used in dairy operations. Perhaps the most amazing statistic is that “if only ten percent of Americans stopped eating meat, oil imports would no longer be necessary” (49).
Vegetarianism also prevents cruelty to animals. Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” describes how inhumane our treatment of food animals is, and Singer argues in one chapter that such cruelty would diminish if his readers became vegetarians. Singer points out that, “In practical terms, it is not possible to rear animals for food on a larger scale without inflicting suffering” (172). Even old-style farms which let animals roam in pasture or on ranges, involve a number of cruel acts like castration, branding, and the horrible slaughterhouses (172). And those are the lucky animals. Singer argues that few food animals are reared on old-style farms: “the fact is that the meat available from butchers and supermarkets comes from animals who did suffer” from modern, intensive farming methods while being reared (173). As a consequence, Singer asserts another important reason to become vegetarian: it is “the most practical and effective step one can take towards ending both the killing on nonhuman animals” and the suffering they endure while alive (173).
Vegetarianism is also an important part of many religions in the United States and around the world. Louis A. Berman’s “Vegetarianism and the Jewish Tradition” explains how vegetarianism has been a part of the Jewish culture since Biblical times, despite the popular consumption of kosher meats (see also Pick). And one book, “The Essene Gospel of Peace,” hypothesizes that Jesus was a vegetarian (Skekely, 44, quoted in Ballantine 5).
Vegetarianism would also eliminate food shortages. Frances Lappe’s influential book, “Diet for a Small Planet,” argues that ceasing to eat meat would combat world starvation because we waste so much land growing livestock feed.
Besides all of these reasons – conserving the environment, preventing cruelty to animals, practicing religion, and eliminating famine – there’s the pocketbook benefit. Vegetables are cheaper than meat and over a period of years, the savings can add up.
But of all of the benefits vegetarianism has to offer, an increasing national interest in physical health has been the main motivation for meat-eaters to convert to a vegetarian diet. Since 1971, when Frances Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet” was first published, vegetarianism has become more popular in the US (Ballantine 7). Recent studies suggest that vegetarians, as a group, have fewer health problems and live longer than meat-eaters. Rudolph Ballantine, a medical doctor, reports that:
As the data accumulated, it became increasingly evident that not only is a vegetarian diet adequate, but in many respects, it is more conducive to9 good health than the usual diet consumed by Americans. Does this mean vegetarians are healthier? Actually, the more statistics pile up, the more it looks as though that might be the case . . . [Vegetarians] are found to be less prone to a number of those diseases that are most serious and prevalent today. (7-8)
Ballantine’s claim is backed by solid scientific evidence. Many articles in our most prestigious medical journals have indicated that a meatless diet can help prevent disease. For example, one article in “The New England Journal of Medicine” demonstrates that vegetarians have lower cholesterol than meat-eaters (Sachs et al.) and another article in the “U.S. National Cancer Institute Journal” found that beef diet raises the risk of colon cancer (Golden and Gorbach).
If these diseases are not enough to repel a person from digging into a juicy steak or some barbecued chicken, maybe some eye-opening facts about toxins, chemicals, and bacteria would do the trick. Meat-eaters often end up consuming whatever bacteria may be trapped in animal tissues. Not to mention all the mold, spores, yeasts, and bacilli picked up during the handling of a dead animal. Of course these dangers occur with other foods, but the problems are much more likely and potentially hazardous with meat. In “Eating May Be Hazardous to Your Health,” Food and Drug Administration biochemist Jacqueline Verret emphasizes that half of all the antibiotics produced in the United States go into feedstuffs for animals intended for human consumption. These antibiotics make the animals gain weight and keep them disease-free. But these same chemicals are eventually consumed by millions of meat-eating Americans.
Given all of this scientific evidence, why wouldn’t everyone rush out to buy vegetables? One reason is that many people think they need meat to get protein. But Americans tend to overemphasize the role of protein in a healthy diet. Much of Lappe’s book is devoted to disproving this myth. Americans typically consume twice as much protein as they need, according to Lappe (40). And a diet of vegetables can supply our necessary levels of protein. Arnold Bender points out that “the cereals – wheat, rice, barley, maize, and all others – also contain protein,” and that “most of the protein in the diets of human beings across the world comes from cereals.” (164).
Some people might be afraid that vegetarian dishes are bland of bad-tasting. Most local newspapers will prove this “truth” to be false. For example, in the Food section of “The Austin American-Statesman,” Linda Waggoner, an extension agent with the Expanded Nutrition Program of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service, provided two delicious recipes for sweet potatoes, which are readily available and nutritious as well:
This vegetable [the sweet potato] is on the list of most nutritionally complete foods. One medium sweet potato, boiled and peeled, provide more than twice the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of vitamin A for an adult, plus appreciable amounts of iron, thiamine and other vitamins and minerals. (D2)
And any number of books for vegetarians can teach the most confirmed meat-eater how to prepare tasty meals without meat. Probably the most famous of these is Ellen Buchman Ewald’s “Recopies for a Small Planet,” which, inspired by Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet,” tells cooks how to prepare high-protein vegetable dishes.
The best advice for preparing vegetable meals is to get away from the “meat-substitute” way of thinking. Keneth Lo complains that cooking with meat-substitutes ends up in meals like “vegetarian goose” and “vegetarian duck.” Such dishes “sacrifice much of their [the chef’s] energy and creativeness, which could otherwise be devoted to bringing out the true assets and qualities of the vegetables themselves” (7).
But another reason people might hesitate to become vegetarians is prejudice. Like all prejudice, the views of these people who mistrust vegetarians are based on ignorance. As recently as 1946, a distinguished medical journal published an article called “The Cruel Vegetarian.” The author, Hyman S. Barahal, argues that vegetarians, though not necessarily lunatics, fringe on lunacy and display cruel, sadistic, and malicious tendencies. Today, no one would accept such a statement, but the attitude that vegetarians are somehow weird or different from “normal” people remains in our minds.
No doubt much of the attitude results from the association of vegetarians with social radicals. We think of hippies as being vegetarians. This association is not a new thing. For example, Percy Shelley, the famous Romantic poet and libertine in the early 1800’s wrote “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” which argues for vegetarianism. Shelley liked vegetarianism to the democratic values of republican government, which was considered radical in the years following the French Revolution. Meat-eating, for Shelley, was a symbol of aristocracy because only the rich could afford meat and hunt games (21-22). But while Shelley’s poetry grew popular, the vegetarian philosophy behind Shelley’s “Natural Diet” has remained outside the mainstream.
The reason may be the image of meat. Most Americans are raised on meat and potatoes, so their ideas of family and tradition are often associated with a hearty meat dish of roast beef or turkey. These meals are as old as America. Amelia Simmons, credited with writing the first American cookbook in 1796, begins her book, appropriately enough, with “directions for . . . procuring the viands [meat], fish, etc.” (5). Her pages are dominated by the preparation of America’s variety of meats, from stuffing turkey to dressing turtle. For good or bad, meat is as American as apple pie. Frances Lappe discusses this obstacle to the acceptance of vegetarianism:
Beef eating in America is clearly associated with status. And to some, there seems to be an association between beef and masculinity. How many women have I heard sigh with pretended exasperation (but real pride) that their husbands were unyielding “steak and potatoes” men . . . With our meat-centered [diet] firmly (albeit recently) established . . . how could I ever . . . truly expect us to change? (42)
Joseph Conlin’s study of nineteenth-century American eating habits suggests that our meat-centered diet is not so recently established. But his book does imply, as Lappe does, that a lack of meat is seen as unpatriotic, even un-American. “Pork was president of the republic,” Conlin writes, and “Americans had grown up and conquered half a continent with pork in their bellies” (11). Meat is still central to Americans in the twenty-first century. A study by Norge Jerome determined that bacon, ground beef, chicken, wiener, and beef remain part of urban America’s core diet (107). If you don’t think image of meat-eating in influential, just imagine the difference between a cowboy driving a heard to market in the old west – all the romance that image conjures up – and a broccoli farmer harvesting his veggies.
But are these images and myths reason enough to keep eating meat. I do not think so. But I did not quit eating meat to protect animals, nor to conserve the environment, nor to lessen famine, nor to avoid cancer and heart disease, nor even to take advantage of the wonderful flavorful meals vegetables provide. I quite eating meat to feel energized and it worked. Ever since I became a vegetarian, my energy has become threefold and my endurance has steadily improved. Perhaps this image is the most compelling reason to become a vegetarian: the hearty, healthy, high-performance individual.
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