(By the way: Happy New Year! I hope.)
One morning as I walked to the train station, someone handed me a booklet entitled “25 Reasons to Try Vegetarian.” Not counting the front and back covers, it’s 14 pages of persuasive writing with excellent presentation and quality graphics. Mercy For Animals (“a national non-profit organization dedicated to preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies”) sank big bucks into producing this piece. The booklet is nice, but it misses the mark for me and, I suspect, for a lot of Americans. Like many arguments for vegetarianism, it tries to appeal to my morality and values instead of to my practical side. Out of 25 reasons, only four of them are about me as an individual. The rest are about helping the planet, environment and animals. Unfortunately, people like me just aren’t morally good enough to be persuaded by that, so vegetarian groups need to refocus their pitch.
Everyone wants to think of herself as a good person who isn’t destroying her planet, but the strongest motivators are always the most immediate. Even though we’re all familiar with the phrase “the greater good,” we worry much more about the well-being of ourselves and those close to us than about millions of people who we’ll never see, let alone animals we’ll never see. If vegetarians really want to persuade someone like me, they should tell me how eating a vegetarian diet will help me in an immediate way, not my children, which I chose not to have anyway. For me, the most interesting statements in the Mercy For Animals booklet are reasons #1, #2, #6 and #23, which are: to reduce your risk of cancer, to reduce your risk of diabetes, to reduce your risk of heart disease, and to maintain a healthy body weight.
Those are good, immediate, personal reasons, but the rest of the booklet describes the horrors of our farming system, the morality of eating other creatures and effects on the environment. These are also powerful arguments, but they aren’t enough to get me to give up a critical part of my daily diet. I’d like to help animals and the environment, but not at the price of my own well-being, which is how I see giving up meat, poultry and fish. Convince me that avoiding animal flesh is better for my body, and you’ve got a convert. I need a nutrition-based argument, not a moral one.
Maybe I’m a heartless animal-cruncher who is ignorant of how my habits affect the environment and too selfish to consider any species besides humans. I’m being short-sighted about future generations and hypocritical about animal treatment. Fair enough. So I am. But my point is that if I’m the audience such vegetarian groups are trying to reach, they’ve got to bring their arguments home for me. How will my physical body benefit from a vegetarian diet today? For many of us, that kind of discussion has more potential for getting us to give up our baloney sandwiches than a list of ideals about abstract concepts such as the future of the rest of the planet (“the rest of the planet” is impossible for me to conceptualize and does not matter nearly as much to me as my own health).
The part of the booklet that intrigues me most is reason #15: caring for some animals (like dogs and cats) and eating others (like pigs and chickens) is morally inconsistent. Yes, I agree with that. I’m a hypocrite. But we’re all hypocrites at various times because it’s humanly impossible to live strictly by principles in every moment. We all make decisions about what hypocrisies we can accept in ourselves. It’s called rationalization. Reason #15 intrigues me because it suggests that it’s possible to live without moral inconsistencies, or at least it urges me to abandon this particular moral inconsistency. Unfortunately I’m not prepared to do that, not if it would endanger my personal health.
I doubt I’m morally good enough to be a vegetarian. I don’t have it in me to give up the foods that give me the best energy and clarity of mind for the good of other species and the planet. If groups like Mercy for Animals really want to reach selfish cartilage-chewers like me, they need to meet us where we live: tell us how giving up meat benefits our bodies right now. A self-interested American public that’s comfortable with its moral inconsistencies needs arguments that are more practical than moral. If Mercy for Animals revised its booklet to focus on medical reasons for switching to vegetarianism, I think they’d capture the interest of a lot of people who glance at concerns about animals and global warming and dump the piece of literature in the trash. Sure, we probably suck, but that’s the reality of it.