The Moral Case for Serving Vegetarian and Vegan Items at Homeless Feeding Projects
by ADELINE HILL
Adeline Hill is a student at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University who has volunteered at homeless feeding projects for the past ten years. Ms. Hill has been recognized by TMM Family Services, The Interfaith Coalition for the Homeless and by Tu Nidito Children and Family Services for having participated in over 1,000 separate projects in the last decade.
I believe eating animals is unsustainable at its very core nature, but I believe that Americans today are eating their way into a deeper, highly unethical hole from which there is no environmental escape. As I've been a strict vegan since March and a vegetarian since the age of thirteen, I've learned that every animal killed for food in the world uses more fossil fuel per protein calorie than plant-based options: 78 calories of fossil fuel are needed for every calorie of beef protein, 35 of fuel for one of pork, and 22 for one of poultry, but only one calorie of fossil fuel is needed for one protein calorie of a soybean. More fossil fuels are used by the meat industry (and the agriculture industry used to produce feed for the animals in the meat industry) than the world's cars, trucks, boats, ships, and airplanes combined: more than 40 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions come from the meat industry. Ethically, how can we focus so heavily as a culture on the devastation caused by our SUV's and trucked-in mass merchandise, when every night for dinner, Mom serves up a pot roast from a farm that emitted more carbon dioxide and methane than her $40,000 Dodge Durango has all year? Also, with much of the world facing a huge hunger crisis due to global warming-induced drought and weather irregularities, how can we, as the major culprit, continue to pour 760 million tons of soil-destroying grain into the mouths of cows and chickens that will become cholesterol-laden McDonald's hamburgers and unrecognizable lumps of breaded "nugget" that will, in turn, only serve to further our own nation's obesity epidemic, especially when that grain could have fed the millions currently starving? How can we, as Americans, as the "all men created equal," as the "leaders of the free world," allow this massive inequality to continue?
Eating animals is also highly immoral. Just being more intelligent doesn't make one more superior; by that logic, the mentally disabled people of our world should be treated just as the cows, chickens, pigs, lambs, ducks, turkeys, and fish of our factory farms. Can non-human animals reason, and can they talk? Perhaps not. However, can they suffer? Certainly. And just because we can inflict extreme suffering on "lesser" species, it does not mean we should. Chickens are kept in cages so tightly packed with hens they cannot move around or even open their wings to stretch; this means many of them suffer excruciating bone and joint problems before dying horrible deaths from the rampant disease carried by the waste that piles up at the bottom of each cage. Dairy cows are artificially inseminated or forcibly raped by bulls injected with growth hormone every year to keep their milk production up; their calves, once born, are ripped away from them, screaming all the way to the slaughterhouses of the veal industry. Every veal calf in this country is the son or daughter of an American dairy cow: buy milk, cheese, or yogurt, and you support the veal industry. Pigs, some of the most intelligent non-human animals (more intelligent than dogs and cats, in fact), are kept on gratings in groups of 80 to 200 in almost eternal darkness; there is no straw on the split floors, so the pigs and sows cannot clean themselves or their young, and they die horribly, thrown sometimes still alive into vats of boiling water meant to strip their bodies of bristle and skin. Turkeys are genetically selected for breasts so disproportionately heavy they live the entirety of their 22-week lives sliding around on their chests; their beaks (similar to human lips) are cut off to reduce the inevitable fighting injuries among anxious, paining turkeys. How can we, as a supposedly intelligent species, allow our animal brothers and sisters (humans are animals, too) to suffer so? We ban the torture of human beings without batting an eye, but each morning we wake up to a breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage produced by houses of unthinkable cruelty. This must stop: we wouldn't dream of eating a murdered dog, and yet we reach for that jug of milk in the supermarket or that medium-rare steak in the restaurant or that "heart-healthy" chicken at the cafeteria. The situation in these factory farms is deplorable, and no self-respecting human animal could continue to support these houses of hell in clear conscience. Meat is unsustainable, earth-ruining murder, and the world must recognize that for the axiom it is.