Why?

I recently flew home from Florida - Miami Beach in particular - where it was 85 degrees and sunny today, the air so perfectly warm and slightly heavy in the air it feels like you are suspended in it. At the company we visited, there was a Lamborghini parked in one of the reserved spaces just in front of the door, and after lunch we had to navigate around a Rolls in the restaurant parking lot. But that's not what I'm going to write about.

On the plane, I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, the latest bestselling book about (to simplify vastly) food and where it comes from - think of it as a more philosophical version of Fast Food Nation, the book that inoculated me against eating at McDonald's. In the last section of this book - just before describing how he went hunting and shot a pig - Pollan discusses vegetarianism, and comes to a decidedly murky conclusion. After reviewing in detail the arguments for animal rights, and the evils of the meat-production industry, he seems to say that there are two possible responses: to look away (and ignore where meat comes from) or to be a vegetarian. But after several more pages he ends up arguing, or more accurately implying, that the most moral stance is to eat meat, but in full consciousness of what you are doing. As I said, it's pretty murky.

But enough about him; let's talk about me. I just ate at two restaurants where the practical drawbacks of being a vegetarian are hard to ignore: Chili's (which was my choice, but it was late and I was hungry and it was there), where the black bean burger with steamed vegetables is the only vegetarian entrée on the entire menu, and Hunter's, a very nice restaurant in North Miami Beach overlooking the water, where I had an undistinguished house salad (iceberg lettuce, crunchy julienned carrots, corn, big tomato wedges, creamy vinaigrette (?!)) and a dish of brown rice and black beans. And remember, last week I ate an omelet at a nice French restaurant on the Ile St. Louis in Paris because it was the only vegetarian main course.

People ask me occasionally why I am a vegetarian, especially since I just became one. (Although I haven't eaten mammals in several years, or birds in two years, I only stopped eating seafood a couple months ago - and my close friends know that there is one enormous loophole in my vegetarianism.) If you're not interested in this whole question and find vegetarians humorless and self-righteous, stop reading here.

There are many reasons to be a vegetarian, but none are all that compelling. I don't do it for my health; although it is good to eat fruits and vegetables, in my case being a vegetarian means that I eat a lot of carbohydrates and probably don't get enough protein. (If you could condense Pollan's advice on the subject of health into a sentence, I think it would be "eat as un-processed food as possible.")

On average, not eating meat is better for the environment than eating meat: first, modern factory meat production is far more polluting than growing vegetables (think enormous swamps of pig shit washing into rivers and lakes); and second, it takes something like ten calories of grains to produce one calorie of meat, so by eating meat you are indirectly consuming an enormous amount of grain, whose production is also extremely polluting (think lakes of nitrogen-rich fertilizer washing into the Gulf of Mexico and suffocating sea life for thousands of square miles). And because farming today consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels (as Pollan says, where once we ate solar energy transformed into food by plants, now most of the energy we eat comes from fossil fuels), one of the surest and easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to reduce your meat consumption. But this is not a conclusive argument; from an environmental perspective, it is probably better to eat a cow that grazed on grass on a sustainable farm than to eat, like I did in National Airport, a burrito with rice, beans, squash, and guacamole wrapped in a flour tortilla, every ingredient of which came from a factory farm.

Then there are the moral arguments, of which I think there are basically two. The first is that the production of meat causes intense suffering to millions if not billions of animals at every moment of every day. This is basically an inarguable fact, and I'll spare the details for those who eat meat. This is essentially a utilitarian argument that says that by eating meat you are causing suffering to animals, many of which are every bit as conscious, intelligent, and loving as my dog. But this is not an invincible argument. First, it leaves open the option of eating cows that graze happily on a diet of mixed grasses. (There are far fewer of these cows than you might think, though; most of the politically correct meat you see at Whole Foods comes from a factory farm, just not quite as brutal a farm as the meat at Safeway.) Second, it leaves open the option of eating animals that are not as conscious, intelligent, and loving as my dog - some kinds of shellfish come to mind. Third, one could quibble about consistency - what about leather shoes? what about eating soybeans from farms that were cleared out of the Amazon rainforest, destroying habitats for thousands of endangered species? Fourth, you could go down the interminable rathole of what would happen to these domesticated species if humans stopped eating them; most of them would vanish from the face of the earth. To which I would say, better that than to spend your lifetime... wait, I said I would spare the details. On balance, though, I think these are weak counter-arguments; even if you aren't a vegetarian, it remains a fact that by eating less factory-produced meat you are reducing suffering among intelligent animals.

The second moral argument is that it's just wrong to eat animals, no matter how happily they were raised. I can't say why, because arguments from principle invariably depend on your principles, but the easiest way to argue this is to compare it to cannibalism. Most people believe on principle that it's wrong to eat other people. I believe that at some point in the future we will believe the same thing about animals, because we will no longer be able to justify the distinction we draw between ourselves and all other species. The more we learn about dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, bonobos, dogs, and pigs, the more they seem like us.

But ultimately I'm not sure I could defend that position, either, against a determined and sufficiently sophist opponent. In the end, I don't eat meat because it's something that I can do. To be honest, it's simpler and easier than wondering how happy the cow was each time I order a hamburger; it's easier than wondering if a flounder has feelings (not sure), or if a scallop has feelings (I doubt it); it's easier than having to come up with flimsy reasons why my dog is different from my food. And finally, it makes me happy to be doing something.