I never truly considered giving up hamburgers until today, when I heard the most convincing reason yet for vegetarianism. It was actually in an interview with Aaron Weiss, the singer for MewithoutYou, a recent lyrical love of mine.
This realization actually began about a month ago when I watched "Home," that movie about how we have exploited the Earth and destroyed our environment. It should be in the Horror section because of how unsettling it is. This movie, in part, discusses the allocation of feedstocks and creates a disturbing perspective of the amount of crops that are dedicated to feeding livestock so that we Americans can eat meat. To those who haven't done their environmental homework, this information should bring nothing short of a slap in the face, and perhaps even a tear to the eye when you think about the starving masses who aren't even fed as well as the livestock, much less the people who eat the livestock.
I was surprised to feel legitimate guilt about indulging in the occasional 99-cent cheeseburger. I'm not even a big meat eater. I've had many vegetarian friends but people rarely give a strong reason for their dietary habits. Their explanations are usually indecisive comments about health and animal cruelty, at best--not that these aren't valid reasons. They just weren't enough to get me really thinking.
Today's realization was different though. Aaron Weiss touched on a facet of the vegetarian cause that hadn't been presented to me before. The problem with the massive meat harvest isn't just that these cows live in cramped, unsanitary conditions. Give them all five star hotel rooms and we've still got a question of humanity. Animal cruelty, I've come to recognize, is the treatment of animals as commodities. They are no longer living, but existing, completely for the benefit of humans. How can we bring cats and dogs into our homes and treat them like family while we disregard the happiness of other animals? Why do we get to decide which animals deserve good lives? Here, one might say that cows are stupid so it's different. But people with lower IQs deserve the same shot at living life to the fullest, right?
Many people already considered these arguments, I'm sure. Perhaps I've been blind to something obvious to true vegetarians, and now I can silently appreciate when they steer clear of the meat on the menu; but I'm gonna wait to publicly high five them until I've made the decision myself. I can't be sure next time I go to Applebees I won't think about ribs and forget what I've heard, figuring the world is a corrupt, unchangeable place that I might as well enjoy to my own sense of fullness.
Bottom line: The commodification of life is out of control. And commodification should be a word. For how prominent it is, there shouldn't be a red squiggly underneath it. Maybe just a little yellow sad face. :(
The interview with Aaron Weiss: The video quality is pretty bad but it's worth a view. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkQK-8Au894
