Eating Meat: A Question of Morality

In this week's reading of The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, he discussed the ethics of eating animals. Pollan, admittedly a meat eater, brought forth many questions surrounding the killing and consumption of animals. Mainly, he considers the arguments presented by Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, a book promoting vegetarianism. Throughout the chapter, Pollan tries to refute Singer's argument, but is continuously rebuffed. Pollan concedes that he must "take the steer's interest into account or accept that I'm a speciesist" (309). The vegetarianism argument is "disarmingly simple" (307), and for this reason Pollan slowly begins to question his eating practices. Pollan was most troubled by the idea that someday speciesism might be regarded as an evil comparable to that of racism. This leads him to reluctantly become a vegetarian. Unfortunately, Pollan immediately discovers some of the more and less obvious flaws of being a non-meat eater. He conveys that eating meat is more convenient and sociable, but most importantly, it has alienated him from other people and "a whole dimension of human experience" (314). Pollan speaks of how meat eating is more than just a dietary decision; it is a cultural and evolutionary tradition. Our ancestors ate meat in order to survive, and some evolutionary changes that have occurred, both physically and mentally, involve the hunting and eating of animals. Pollan shows how meat eating is ingrained in the human mind, but the current moral questions surrounding it create an interesting omnivore's dilemma.

The most interesting aspect of the vegetarian argument is the idea that history will judge us meat eaters harshly; that "a crime of stupendous proportions is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice" (309). I find this perspective from the future intriguing. The idea that we might not even recognize the crimes we are committing daily; that we are just as ignorant as the Nazis participating in the Holocaust or the millions of people who enslaved Africans for centuries, is hard to wrap my head around. It makes me question my eating practices; will I look back one day, as well as my kids and grandkids, and be shameful for the crimes I committed? Eating meat is simply a dietary option in modern times. It is not a necessity, so is eating Earth's animals worth the moral dilemma?

How can we make a rational decision about eating meat?
Is eating meat a crime against nature or is it simply a natural phenomenon?