Omnivore's Dilemma: The Ethics of Eating Animals (chapter 17)

This chapter deals with the philosophical aspects of eating animals.  Various ideas are discussed both from the animal rightist groups perspectives and from the meat eater perspectives. The chapter starts off by questioning why we start questioning the animal industry. Maybe it is because our civilization is moving toward a higher plane of consciousness, where we now realizing the terrible barbarity that we are doing towards animals.  In the present time, this barbarity is often hidden by the fact that the packaged meat looks as little from parts of animals as possible.  The morality of inflicting pain is then investigated. Since we all agree that animals, from humans to pigs, will try to avoid pain, why would it be right to inflict pain on animals and not humans? This view of discriminating against animals that are not humans is know as "speciesism''. However, one could argue that human suffering is amplified by the distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

I found this chapter to be quite thought provoking. Some of the ideas discussed actually made me want to stop eating meat since they were so direct and profound. I almost feel like my possible refusal to eat meat would make myself rise to a more informed and wise level in society. I always thought that turning vegetarian or vegan would solve every problem created by meat consumption such as animal cruelty, pollution, ressources used ect. I was however surprised to read some of Pollan's counterarguments about this subject. He concludes that killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we chose to eat, supporting this idea with the fact that field mice ends up in combines. I agree with this statement but I still think that not directly eating meat would greatly help the case. His next point is that vegan utopia would make people import all their from distant places in some areas since their are many places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it. His last point was that the food chain would be even more dependent on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility, in the form of manure, would be short supply. I however disagree with this point because it was been shown that raising meat requires way more crop and thus everything associated with raising it, than eating greens directly. This chapter confused me a lot since many ideas are discussed but no obvious answers are apparent.

Questions raised:

Is turning vegetarian/vegan as great as we often hear about in solving the problems associated with meat consumption?

Is it even possible to cut our meat consumption to zero as a society? (Pollan is doubtful that you could build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production)