Eat Your Veggies

Eat Your Veggies

The Abbot at the Houston Zen Center gave a talk last Wednesday on the importance of vegetarianism. I can not say I buy into all of the arguments in favor of a vegetarian diet. Humans are, after all, omnivores, and evolved eating both meat and plants. I am certainly not convinced on reincarnation. I reject the argument that animals have emotions and should be treated with the same levels of compassion as humans. That is, at best anthropomorphic.

Why then am I planning on changing a significant portion of my daily food intake to a vegetarian diet?

There are two reasons. First, a vegetarian diet is an act of compassion for my fellow humans. Global warming is having a serious impact on people around the world. As sea levels rise, increased numbers of people, particularly the poor, are displaced (e.g. in low lying areas like Bangladesh). In my own state of Colorado, the rise in temperatures has caused an explosion in the population of pine bark beetles, which have, in turn, killed huge swaths of lodgepole pines. In Colorado, we rely on nature’s beauty for a significant number of jobs. Destroying the forest destroys the livelihoods of a large number of people. (see http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/09/climate_100.html for a long list of effects).

Food production contributes 17% of fossil fuel usage in the United States. In addition to the fossil fuel usage, animal production releases other green house gases (e.g. methane from animal manure). A rather dense academic discussion from the University of Chicago can be found at http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/papers/nutri/nutriEI.pdf. I am attempting to be more mindful of everything I do. Moreover, I do not think that it is moral – no matter what the basis is for your morality – to impose such drastic impacts on the planet and its people for the sake of a bad cheeseburger from a fast food place.

Second, during our discussion at the Zen center, one of my fellow students noted that switching to a vegetarian diet led to the loss of ten pounds. Sounds good to me!