Buying organic is meating vegans halfway

If you love Mother Earth, good food, animals and being a human, please don’t become a vegan. While adherents to vegetarianism’s extreme cousin claim that their lifestyle, which completely eliminates the consumption of animal products, springs from a concern for animal rights and the environment, a close look at vegan practices reveals them to be largely ineffective in terms of their stated goals. A simple awareness of the benefits of locally-grown and organic food and a dedication to small lifestyle changes is much more beneficial to the earth we all love so dearly.

It’s no secret that livestock is raised and slaughtered in this country in alarming volumes and by abhorrent methods. We’ve all seen the disturbing pictures of rows and rows of pigs and chickens suffocating in factory farms. We should be concerned about the pesticides that get sprayed on the produce they eat and about the incredible amount of energy that is used in flying food in from all over the world. In a recent article in The New York Times, food writer Mark Bittman noted that every day, Americans eat twice as much meat as the rest of the world, and that livestock production creates more greenhouse gases than transportation does.

These statistics are alarming, and it’s no wonder that earthfriendly dietary practices are gaining popularity. While no one lifestyle is a perfect synthesis of practices that will solve our food-related environmental and ethical problems, veganism is particularly ineffective. Its stipulations are so constricting that average Americans are highly unlikely to consider making the necessary lifestyle changes, and if the tenets of an idea can’t take hold within a society, how is it supposed to make an impact? Being a vegetarian because you can’t stand the taste of flesh is one thing, but refusing to use honey and only wearing pleather in an effort to champion animal rights is just naive.

Chickens are going to get killed and cows are going to get milked no matter how many eggless carob chip cookies vegans bake, because so few people are inclined to deprive themselves of the American niceties they’ve grown up with.

Americans are a meat loving people, and since money is going to be spent on meat no matter what, it makes sense to direct that money towards organic and free-range meat and away from mass processed, hormone ridden, factory-raised meat. Not eating meat at all is ineffective because while it creates slightly less demand for the unethical product, it creates no demand for a better one.

If you really want to do something constructive for the cows that will inevitably end up in supermarket coolers, buy organic, or buy local. Small changes, like buying meat from a local butcher or shopping for seasonal produce at farm stands, are much more productive ways to slow down individual consumption of mass produced and farmed food products while maintaining relatively normal eating habits.

While it’s true that organic food is popular mostly among upper-middle class yuppies, it’s a trend that has the potential to trickle down as increased media attention and culinary awareness make organic products more mainstream and eventually more affordable. The Slow Food movement, which works to incite communities to turn back to their culinary roots by eating locally grown food, is gaining popularity not only among individual consumers, but with restaurateurs who realize the movement’s potential for commercial success and its ecological and ethical benefits.

Our current food production system is unsustainable, and the small changes that have begun to take hold need to become ingrained in our national routine. When there are so many more productive ways to ensure that our animal friends are treated well and that our environment will continue to nourish us, there is no need to deprive yourself the visceral pleasure of a nice big steak, much less a swipe of Burt’s Bees lip balm.