Intelligent and Free?
Let’s talk about one of the many ways in which our food choices are a moral issue. We’ll start with a comment from Pope John Paul II talking about consumerism …
“A given culture reveals its overall understanding of life through the choices it makes in production and consumption. It is here that the phenomenon of consumerism arises. … In singling out new needs and new means to meet them, one must be guided by a comprehensive picture of man which respects all the dimensions of his being and which subordinates his material and instinctive dimensions to his interior and spiritual ones. If, on the contrary, a direct appeal is made to his instincts — while ignoring in various ways the reality of the person as - intelligent and free - then consumer attitudes and life-styles can be created which are objectively improper and often damaging to his physical and spiritual health.” ~ Pope John Paul II, Encyclical, 1991.05.01
Compare that with what’s been happening to animal agriculture in the U.S. in recent decades with the development and expansion of factory farming:
“One of the best things modern animal agriculture has going for it is that most people… haven’t a clue how animals are raised and processed … the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.” ~ Cheeke, Peter, Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture, 2nd ed., 1999 pg. 248
We demand an endless supply of cheap animal flesh but we insulate ourselves from any understanding of it’s true cost to our environment, our health, or our ethics. We allow our government to subsidize animal products that we don’t need and that are produced in ways that we can’t even bare to witness to the exclusion of grains, fruits and vegetables for human consumption. We bemoan the rising cost of food while the Standard American Diet kills us with diseases of affluence, lifestyle diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity. We reflect with condescension on the ancient Israelites and their insistence on worshipping their golden calf, complacent in the assurance that “we don’t worship cows”. Meanwhile, according the United Nations Food and Agriculture report entitled, “Livestock’s Long Shadow” we learn that: ”In the absence of major corrective measures, the environmental impact of livestock production will worsen dramatically. … Livestock-induced degredation of the world’s arid and semi-arid lands will continue, in particular in Africa and South and Central Asia, again contributing significantly to climate change, water depletion and biodiversity losses, and sometime leading to irreversible loss of productivity. The poor who derive a living from livestock will continue to extract the little they can from dwindling common property resources while facing growing marginalization”.
“Beef has become a symbol of the extravagant, resource-consuming American who is destroying the global environment to live a life of luxury, while most of the rest of the world suffer pestilence and famine …. Strictly on a scientific basis, there can be no dispute that corn and soybean meal are used with more efficiency, and can provide food for more people when they are eaten directly by people rather than being fed to swine or poultry to be converted to pork, chicken meat, or eggs for human consumption.” ~ Cheeke, Peter,Contemporary Issues in Animal Agricultre, 2nd ed. 1999, p.74
This is something that Christians, vegetarians, and vegans care deeply about, surely we can talk about this together. Further reading and additional resources:
