…this is where the logic of industrial farming gets us. Instead of people on the land, committed to the welfare of the agricultural enterprise and the resources that make it possible, there was this horror — a place where millions of chickens are crowded in tiny cages and hundreds of laborers work in dire conditions.

It takes only a little investigation to learn how bad things have been inside those buildings. The list of offenses for which the DeCosters and their farms have been fined in Iowa and Maine only begins with hiring children and illegal immigrants.

In 2000, Jack DeCoster, the operations’ founder, was named a “habitual violator” of Iowa’s environmental laws. His egg factories have been cited by OSHA for deplorable working conditions. In 2003, Mr. DeCoster paid more than $1.5 million to settle an employment discrimination suit charging that 11 women working in the Clarion plants had been subject to sexual harassment, including rape and threats of retaliation. There have been nearly 1,500 illnesses as a result of the salmonella outbreak. Every one of the billions of eggs produced this way has been tainted.

Here’s another article summing up some of this producer’s offenses.

Related posts:

1. End of an era
2. Factory farming as a crime against humanity?
3. My bullet-point life

An article appeared in PLoS one this May which describes brain differences between Vegetarians, Vegans and Omnivores in the way they process pictures of animal suffering.

The study in question is a neuroimaging study intent on investigating whether

“the neural representation of conditions of abuse and suffering might be different among subjects who made different feeding choice due to ethical reasons, and thus result in the engagement of different components of the brain networks associated with empathy and social cognition”

The hypothesis behind this study is based on the observation that Vegetarians and Vegans tend to base their decision to avoid animal products on ethical grounds. Assuming that Vegetarians and Vegans – because of their underlying moral philosophies – show greater empathy towards animal suffering, it is very well possible that these differences in empathy extend beyond the animal domain and show up as general differences in the degree of empathy felt towards other humans also; even at a neurological level.

The study – in basic terms – investigates this hypothesis by placing subjects into a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine and looking at the “activation” of different brain areas as subjects view a randomized series of pictures. The pictures used for this study included neutral scenes and an even share of scenes depicting various kinds of animal and human suffering.

The first main finding of this study is that, compared to Omnivores, Vegans and Vegetarians show higher activation of empathy related brain areas (e.g. Anterior Cingular Cortex and left Inferior Frontal Gyrus) when observing scenes of suffering; whether it be animal or human suffering.

Further, pictures of animal suffering (in contrast to pictures human suffering) recruited specific brain regions in Vegans and Vegetarians that were not differentially recruited by Omnivores. These were areas which are thought to be associated with higher-order representations of the self and self values (e.g. medial Prefrontal Cortex).

In addition to generally higher activations in the above mentioned areas, a second main finding of this study is that there are certain brain areas which only Vegetarians and Vegans seem to activate when processing pictures of suffering. In particular, when viewing pictures of human suffering, Vegetarians in this study recruited additional brain areas thought to be associated with bodily representations that distinguish self from others. (Notably these areas were particularly active when mutilations were shown).

Fascinating stuff. Read the full article here…

Related posts:

1. Plants are living too. Aren’t vegetarians inconsistent?
2. Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’
3. Is empathy declining?

The venerable Dayamati, aka Professor Richard Hayes, has a provocative post (“How to feed an ego“) about the tendency for vegans (and to a lesser extent vegetarians) to cling to a notion of “us versus them” purity that reinforces a sense of identity rather than weakens it.

After mentioning a radio program discussing factory farming, he goes on to say:

One of the observations that most caught my attention in these discussions was made by a woman who was a vegan for 20–30 years and eventually changed her diet to include some animal products. She observed that being a vegan is much more than deciding what to eat and what not to eat. It is also taking on an identity. It is carrying all the baggage of a persona that must be defended almost every time one picks up a fork. It is, in other words, to take on a practice that has exactly the opposite effect of what most Buddhist (and other spiritual) practices are designed to do, namely, to reduce one’s attachment to a particular identity.

And, said this former vegan, whenever one takes on an identity, one loses perspective and enters into a mentality that warps almost everything one sees, systematically refuses to look at evidence impartially, and enters into the epistemological vices of believing things for which one has insufficient evidence and not believing things despite having plenty of evidence.

Buddhists called these epistemological vices by the simple term moha, which means the state of being perplexed, confused, infatuated or fooled.

I recognize this. When I was younger I tended to be rather scathing of those who ate meat (or, when I was a vegan, animal products generally). I’d turn down a cup of tea with soy milk if the spoon that had been used to stir it had been “contaminated” by having just previously dipped into a cup of tea with cows’ milk. I was a bit obsessive (although always willing to let myself off the hook if I really “needed” (i.e. wanted) to eat something non-vegan.

At the moment I couldn’t call myself vegan. I eat a vegetarian diet, but once or maybe twice a week I’ll eat something that has cheese or eggs in it. But I do aspire to move in the direction of a vegan diet, and in fact I’m having some success.

While I agree with Dayamati’s point that our dietary preferences can become unhealthily clung to as an identity, I don’t think he sufficiently takes into account that it’s possible for us to live on a vegan or vegetarian diet without it distorting our identity. He does say, “Needless to say, there is no invariable causal relationship between deciding to be a vegan and becoming incapable of thinking carefully and impartially.” That’s welcome news.

I’m more bothered, however, by the following:

As long as one makes such decisions whimsically and realizes that the decision is a manifestation of sentimentality, everything is fine. It is only when one begins to think that there is something rational and righteous about the decision that one begins to get into spiritual (and philosophical) trouble.

I’m not sure quite what he means by making a decision to eat a vegan diet “whimsically.” If he simply means “with a lack of attachment” then that’s fine by me. If he means that we should only decide to eat a vegan diet on the basis of a passing irrational impulse, then I disagree. I think it’s possible to seriously consider the effects of our diet, and the sufferings that farm animals experience, and decide not to eat animal products. It’s only when I disengage my thought processes and refuse to consider these things that I can eat animal products. It’s when I surrender to the passing irrational impulses of hunger and craving that I find myself eating dairy products or eggs.

The suggestion that we should realize that “the decision is a manifestation of sentimentality,” leaves me puzzled. The word sentimentality implies that we have a disproportionate emotional response to a situation. Actually, our situation as a species is grave. We’re seriously messing up our world, and the problem is caring enough — our brains just aren’t well designed, it appears, when it comes to thinking about long-term consequences and the suffering or large numbers of beings. Certainly people can decide to adopt a vegan diet our of sentimentality, but they can also decide to do so out of a proportionate emotional response to the state of the planet, and the sufferings our dietary choices inflict on animals.

“It is only when one begins to think that there is something rational and righteous about the decision that one begins to get into spiritual (and philosophical) trouble.” This implies that it’s delusional to think that we can make a rational decision about our diet. Actually, I think there’s a point here: I think to be healthily vegetarian or vegan (and I mean emotionally healthy) it shouldn’t be either a purely rational decision nor a purely emotional one. If there’s just reason, we’re going to have to beat ourselves up to keep us on the straight and narrow path. If there’s just emotion, we’ll enter the realm of “them and us” and do a lot of hating. There needs to be, I think, a mature emotional response — one that’s been thought over, and that’s been examined for signs of attachment, hatred, and delusion. Rational self-examination purifies our emotions.

Someone deciding to eat a vegan diet on the basis of such a process of examination won’t see veganism as part of her identity. She’ll simply eat vegan, without thinking too much about it. My own practice of vegetarianism is like that. I don’t see vegetarianism as part of my identity any more than I see breathing as part of my identity. I just do it, and don’t think about it. I don’t hate people who eat meat. I don’t see myself as better than them (I used to eat meat myself). I don’t see vegetarianism as a form of ethical purity — it’s something I do because it lessens suffering. I don’t want to eat a dead animal because I don’t want animals to be killed.

There can be plenty of emotionality and judgment on the part of people who eat meat, incidentally. These attitudes apply across the spectrum of dietary habits, and don’t just apply to vegans and vegetarians. Here’s an extract from an article in a British newspaper by a meat-eating chef who was asked to eat vegan for a week:

I hated vegans. Really, I did. They’re farty bores, I used to say, with pallid skin and bad breath, and the cheek, the utter cheek, to lecture people like me about animal “welfare”, when their knowledge of wildlife extends no further than pulling tapeworms out of a house-bound cat’s arse (all vegans have a cat). What’s the difference, I would joke, between a vegan and a Malteser? Answer: some people like Maltesers.

There writes a man whose (meat-eating) diet is a large component of his identity. Is hiss attitude any different from that of the most militant vegan? I don’t think so.

“Righteous” — well, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be righteous about anything.

I’m not quite there with my veganism yet. There’s a conflict going on between, on the one hand, habit, laziness, and craving, and on the other, a sense of compassion and responsibility. I haven’t done enough of the hard work of thinking the issue through and of probing my emotions. I know that when I do I’ll be eating a vegan diet, just as I know that when I’ve developed more emotional maturity I’ll yell at my kids less. I think in fact that I would benefit from speeding up the process of self-examination because the conflict I’m in at present is painful. I do things that I know are harmful to others, and I don’t feel good about that because I know I could do otherwise.

I’m sure that when I do make the decision to eat vegan, I’ll do so in a healthy, non-judgmental way. I did it with vegetarianism, and I think most vegetarians I know have too.

Related posts:

1. UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet
2. Can you be a vegan and eat animals?
3. Inmate wins case vs. state over diet

This is very encouraging. Eventually we have to face the reality of how insane the meat industry is.

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: “Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.”

Read the rest of the article…

Related posts:

1. Does a vegan diet feed the ego?
2. Would in vitro meat be vegetarian?
3. Vegetarian diet is better for the planet, says Lord Stern

Whether you can be a vegan and eat animals seems like a bizarre question, like asking if you can be celibate and still have sex. The definition of a vegan is “a person who does not use or eat animal products,” after all. But Christopher Cox makes a good case in a recent Slate article for regarding oysters as compatible with a vegan diet.

Now of course oysters are animals. And vegans don’t eat animals. But why don’t vegans eat animals? The main point of veganism is to avoid causing suffering to sentient beings. A related reason is environmental reasons, since meat-eating is environmentally disastrous, but in a way that’s the same reason — avoiding causing harm. (Some people are vegan for health reasons, although those are not central to veganism, in my opinion — many people would still be vegans if doing so shaved a few months, or even years, from their lives.)

But what if there are animals that can’t feel pain? Cox points out that oysters fall into this category. And what if there were animals that had a neutral, or even positive, environmental impact? Again, oysters fit the bill.

This is what Cox has to say:

Oyster farms account for 95 percent of all oyster consumption and have a minimal negative impact on their ecosystems; there are even nonprofit projects devoted to cultivating oysters as a way to improve water quality. Since so many oysters are farmed, there’s little danger of overfishing. No forests are cleared for oysters, no fertilizer is needed, and no grain goes to waste to feed them—they have a diet of plankton, which is about as close to the bottom of the food chain as you can get. Oyster cultivation also avoids many of the negative side effects of plant agriculture: There are no bees needed to pollinate oysters, no pesticides required to kill off other insects, and for the most part, oyster farms operate without the collateral damage of accidentally killing other animals during harvesting. (Relatedly, although it’s possible to collect wild oysters sustainably, the same cannot be said for other bivalves like clams and mussels. These are often dredged from the seabed, disrupting an entire ecosystem. For that reason, it’s best to avoid them.)

Moreover, since oysters don’t have a central nervous system, they’re unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours—unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster. They can’t move, so they don’t respond to injury like those animals do, either. Even monkish ethicist Peter Singer sanctioned oyster eating in Animal Liberation…

I’m assuming that Cox has his facts right, and that oysters don’t in fact have central nervous systems and can’t feel pain. That wouldn’t be surprising, given that oysters live like plants. Think about it. What’s the point of feeling pain? It’s so that you can withdraw from a harmful stimulus. If, like plants, you’re literally rooted to the spot, then you can’t withdraw from a source of pain, and so there’s no point evolving a central nervous system that can feel pain. A leaf being munched on by a caterpillar may have a chemical response to the damage that leads to increased lignification and the production of nasty tasting chemicals, but that’s not the same as pain.

Now, there’s an interesting thing, here, which is that often ideas of purity and impurity creep into veganism and vegetarianism. People become vegetarian or vegan because they want to reduce the amount of harm their diet causes. But very quickly, for many people, the thought of eating meat becomes revolting. That’s then taken as confirmation of the “rightness” of veganism/vegetarianism, but that, from a Buddhist point of view, doesn’t follow. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. A monk, for example, is recorded as having eaten the finger of a leper that fell into his begging bowl when the leper was making an offering. You or I would find that repulsive in the extreme, but was any harm caused? And was the monk motivated by greed, hatred, or delusion? (He was enlightened, so presumably not). We might flinch from eating food that has even been touched by a leper, but that flinching would actually be unethical — an action purely based on aversion. The ethically skillful thing to do would be to eat food a leper has touched.

There are powerful social and religious traditions of certain foods being pure and impure, and vegans and vegetarians often buy into these cultural belief systems. But properly speaking, such aversions should have no place in either Buddhist ethics or the rational practice of veganism or vegetarianism.

To get away from issues of leprosy, the point I’m trying to make is that just because vegans or vegetarians may have a sense of revulsion at the idea of eating oysters, that doesn’t make it wrong. If Cox is right, and oysters feel no pain and are environmentally beneficial, then vegans and vegetarians should feel free to eat them. (They may have some explaining to do, but that’s another issue.) Rather, these revulsions themselves are unethical, as I once pointed out to a Buddhist who was critical of other people eating veggie-burgers. Veggie-burgers reminded him too much of meat for him to be able to partake of them. But he wasn’t being more ethical by having a revulsion of vaguely meat-like patties, he was being less ethical.

Will I be rushing out to eat oysters? I don’t think so. Long before I became a vegetarian — when I was 16 or 17 — I bought a dozen oysters in Brittany. I gingerly poured one into my mouth, but my throat went into a spasm and I was unable to persuade myself to swallow it. Just to be clear, this is revulsion I’m talking about, not an allergic response. If I had managed to swallow the slimy thing it might well have come straight back up again. I may be braver now, and so if the opportunity to eat an oyster comes up I’m open to giving it a try, but I’m not going to risk heaving up all over a restaurant in order to prove a point.

Related posts:

1. Does a vegan diet feed the ego?
2. One final book-launch party offering, via Dirk Johnson
3. If we are what we eat, we are in trouble

Suppose that you and your partner go out for dinner tonight. You order steak and salad while your partner has chicken with rice. Now inspect your plates. Your cow spent almost all its life in a shed, burping methane that heats the planet. It was then slaughtered, often incompetently: it may have been still alive when its head was skinned and its legs cut off. Your “salad”, doused in dressing, is really “fat with a little lettuce”.

Your partner’s chicken lived for six weeks, diseased and crammed so closely with other birds that it cracked several bones. After torture, came slaughter: the bird was shoved into a truck, taken to the slaughterhouse, and shackled upside down. It died screaming and excreting on itself in terror. The rice comes from plants bred by scientists in the 1960s. Both your meals are lathered in the extra fat, sugar, salt and chemicals to which you have become addicted. Enjoy your meal.

You can read the rest of the review here…

Related posts:

1. Can you be a vegan and eat animals?
2. Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?

A BBC article reveals that the price of fish includes the mass slaughter of endangered turtles.

Millions of marine turtles have been killed over the past two decades through entrapment in fishing gear, according to a global survey.

Described as the first global synthesis of existing data, the study found especially high rates of "bycatch" in the Mediterranean and eastern Pacific.

Six of the seven sea turtle types are on the Red List of Threatened Species.

If I were a person who ate fish, and who had a conscience, I’d be asking myself whether pleasing my tastebuds was worth this level of destruction.

Related posts:

1. If a tomato contains fish genes, is it still vegetarian?
2. Fish
3. Unstable protein pyramid

This rather mind-blowing infographic was on Consumerist.com.

Eating vegetables in the US is expensive!

Related posts:

1. Are Mac users more likely to meditate?
2. Opportunity cost
3. If a tomato contains fish genes, is it still vegetarian?

Welcome to the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View. All today I’ll be online, doing various things connected with the book and its subject. Do feel free to drop in and say “hi” or “congratulations” or anything else you feel inspired to utter (using the comment form, naturally; you can talk to your computer if you want but I probably won’t hear you!).

As well as the welcome video I’ll be adding new material to the blog all day, and I’ll add links on this post. So this is the “home page” for the party, with different “rooms” where you can mingle.

First you have to dodge the author touting his wares in the hall and spouting his opinions:

• Here’s a list of places you can buy the book…
• How Bodhipaksa became a vegetarian…
• How should Buddhist vegetarians relate to meat-eaters?
• The Buddha ate meat. So what?
• The ecological benefits of vegetarianism (book reading)
• Plants are living too. Aren’t vegetarians inconsistent? (book extract)
• Now that the comments are fixed we’re getting some comments below and on other pages. It’s easy to leave a comment. Just use the form at the bottom of this page.
• And we’ve had well over 300 almost 400 visitors so far today.

In the kitchen:

• Here’s a recipe for one of my favorite curries from Tipu’s Tiger in Missoula, Montana, where I used to eat all the time.
• Another Indian recipe, this time for Mango Dal (mangoes and lentils)
• Buddhapalita has a recipe book for meals he used to serve in the acclaimed Tipu’s Tiger veggie restaurant in Missoula, Montana. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy!
• Whole Foods has an amazing searchable database of recipes. You can search for veggie or vegan recipes (or both) and also select whether you’re looking for a starter or a main course. Leave the search term empty and you’ll bring up all the veggie/vegan recipes. They also have a handy iPhone application.
• Goodnight folks! I just wanted to share with you some of tonight’s dinner, which was pretty much a spur-of-the moment confection, and rather delicious.

In the lounge:

• Eric explains why he’s a Buddhist and a vegetarian
• Anilasri explains how vegetarianism fits into her Buddhist practice
• Danamaya’s a Buddhist who isn’t vegetarian. Here she says why.
• Meet Laura, who says how vegetarianism fits into her Buddhist practice
• Why Roger’s a vegetarian

TV room:

I have to warn you the movies can be upsetting…

• Meat the Truth (trailer) This one isn’t gory and scary!
• But if you eat veal, you really should watch this
• This one’s tough viewing as well…

The gossip corner (Psst! Have you heard…?)

• Meat off the menu as Windsor Castle goes vegan
• Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals
• More from Safran Foer
• More Foer!
• Vegetarian diet is better for the planet, says Lord Stern
• Natalie Portman on moving from vegetarianism to veganism
• How green is tofu?
• What’s your pet’s “carbon pawprint”?

 

 

Related posts:

1. Living a Buddhist Life: Vegetarianism
2. One final book-launch party offering, via Dirk Johnson
3. Come to my online book launch party, Friday Nov 13

Dirk Johnson, a friend from Twitter, wrote a poem a while back about Buddhists who justify their meat-eating on the grounds that “it’s ok to eat animals because everything is empty.”

Here’s a link to the poem. Please do go read it in its entirety. It wags a finger, but in a playful way.

And here’s an extract:

Oh, you Buddhist, so far along the path
That you’ve realized
Your own inseparability from emptiness,
That your own pain is without essence,
That your own suffering is an illusion,
That your imputed self is a mirage,
You, who realize this so deeply
That you even experience
This emptiness in the minds of other beings,
The bliss that they think is their pain,
So that you can see them killed and eat them
Without the slightest perturbation of regret.

Related posts:

1. Come to my online book launch party, Friday Nov 13
2. A short video about my Nov 13 book launch party
3. Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View – The Launch Party!