(This is an article in 2 parts.)
I find it quite fascinating that the non-violence level of foods almost exactly parallels their value to us. To use the metaphor of karma, that is an amazing "coincidence."
At one end of the scale are diets which include a lot of animal foods. Naturally, to eat meat, poultry or fish involves killing the animal. That this usually happens out of sight, by an agent that we've hired indirectly—by creating demand through our purchases—doesn't mitigate the fact that the animal is dying for our dining pleasure.
Some have argued that animals don't really feel pain the way we do, so that killing them is morally justified. But recently the neuro-transmitters that cause pain in humans have been found in all varieties of animals, so that line of reasoning has become no longer sustainable.
Even if it were, just watching an animal as it flees away from predators (including us) makes it clear that the animal wants to live just as much as we do.
I had an epiphany about this some years ago when I went to a restaurant whose particular marketing thing was that you went to a big tank and picked out the fish you wanted, which was then immediately killed and cooked for you to eat.
I went over to the tank and this fish swam up to me. I studied it and it studied me, you might say. And I suddenly realized that it wanted to live every bit as much as I did, that we were not "different" in any fundamental sense. Perhaps I had a bigger brain, but that was incidental; of much greater commonality was the fact that we were both part of the community of living things.
It has also been argued that even eating vegetables involves doing some violence and pain to the plant, so what's the difference?
But we humans draw distinctions between degrees of things all the time. For instance, a court of law will make a very valid distinction between verbal abuse and physical abuse, though both are abuses. Similarly, the degree of pain and violence inflicted on animals seems more extreme, both because of brain chemistry and the animals' obvious signs of pain and struggles to live.
If eating animals is the most violent way to eat, it also seems to be the way that causes the most disease. Very high levels of fat and protein, which are inevitable in animal-food diets, have now been very highly correlated with all of the modern degenerative diseases, including heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, multiple schlerosis, etc.
That's been the major finding to come out of the famous China Project, the largest epidemiological study ever undertaken. Thousands of families with widely varying kinds of diets were studied, along with what diseases they came down with over time. All of this data was thrown into a large database and statistically studied.
The first thing to emerge was this: That high-fat diets are strongly correlated with all the degenerative diseases. But that was expected; strong evidence for that already existed. But the second finding that came out was a surprise: That high levels of protein, particularly animal protein (including fish), were also highly correlated with all the modern degenerative diseases.
Moreover, that this relationship was more-or-less linear. That is, the higher the levels of fat and protein in the diet, particularly animal fats and proteins, the higher the incidence of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis and on and on. Very interesting.
A big step down in violence is the vegetarian diet. Here one eats from the plant kingdom but also eats dairy and eggs. However, if we understand how eggs and milk are produced nowadays, the level of violence is still unacceptably high.
Dairy cows, for instance, are impregnated over and over and over until they're too exhausted to produce milk any longer, at which point they're slaughtered for meat. Their birth calves are normally taken away from them after 3 days or less, and the mothers bleat in pain at the loss of their calves. Their swollen teats, milked their whole lives, normally develop a painful mastitis.
Many of the calves, meanwhile, meet an even more gruesome fate. They are brought up as "veal calves." In practice, what this means is that they are kept in what's known as "tight confinement" their whole lives—so that for all practical purposes they can't move. The closest thing to it would be to imagine spending your life in a closet.
This produces the anemic and tender muscles (from lack of movement and exercise) so prized in veal meat. The calves are slaughtered after four months of this grim existence. It might be interesting to remember these distressed and helpless veal calves the next time we have a glass of milk, a piece of cheese or a pleasant ice cream or yogurt on a summer day.
And ultimately, dairy and eggs have the same disadvantages as other animal foods: They're high in cholesterol, fat, protein, pesticides & hormones, low in phytochemicals, and have a complete absence of fiber.
In addition, dairy products are highly implicated in asthma, colds, ear infections, arthritis & bursitis, and osteoporosis. It's a fact that the countries with the highest rates of dairy consumption have the highest rates of osteoporosis, and vice-versa.
(This is the end of Part 1. Go to Part 2.)
—jim sloman, for 8/19/02
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