Why Quakers should be Vegetarians

This article appeared this month in FJ.   Here is the slightly longer unedited version.

Being a Vegetarian is a Climate Issue                                           By Lynn Fitz-Hugh

I would like to make the case for Quakers becoming vegetarian.  Quakers at one point wore black and white clothing so as not to create a market for dyed clothing because the dying process was so carcinogenic that those working in the industry died young.  Quakers also, over a process of many years came to unity on the practice of owning slaves as inhumane, unjust, and inequitable. Our testimony of simplicity has always called us to own less as a way of not being driven by material attachments or over consumption of our earth’s resources..  John Woolman called us to look to our possessions and removed the seeds of war (and I would add suffering.)  All of these ideas: caring for our ourselves, our fellow human beings, and the earth, lead me to conclude that the modern day application would be for Friends to become vegetarian. 

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I first became a Vegetarian while attending Earlham and I have been a vegetarian, of some stripe now for 4 decades.   I became vegetarian not for health or spiritual reasons or the issue of animal welfare.  (Although after reading Charlotte’s web in childhood I never again ate pork)  I became vegetarian for political reasons. I learned at Earlham that we could end world hunger if we stopped using food to feed cattle consumed by people.

I will briefly describe my journey with vegetarianism to illustrate the point that there are many ways to flexibly hold a witness about the effects of meat production on our environment, animals and our planet.  I grew up in a meat and potatoes kind of family where every meal was meat, carbs and over-boiled veggies. I therefore could not even imagine how someone could or would eat vegetarian.  The first time I had a week of delicious vegetarian meals when I was 21 I was instantly converted.  I knew then that it was possible to eat well without meat.  Nine years later I wound up in a situation where I had to travel a stretch of road dotted with one fast food restaurant after another during dinner hour and then enter a facility for three hours that had no food! The only thing I could find to eat was bean burritos at Taco Time. That was okay for a while but after three months of bean burritos three times a week I thought I would barf if I saw another one!  I reluctantly added fish back into my diet.

For the next 15 years, I only ate meat outside of my house and then infrequently . In order to welcome my meat eating step-son into our house I began to cook chicken and fish at home. My husband at the time, who had been 100% vegetarian for nine years, was amused that I describe myself as vegetarian.  I told him that so far, he had still eaten vastly more meat in his life than I and that would be true for years. After we divorced I stopped eating meat again.   Then I developed some health issues that the doctor said was from not eating enough animal protein.  Currently I eat fish and eggs each once a week which seems to be enough to maintain good health. Apparently, sometimes what we wind up eating is a series of events created by the landscape we travel.  

In my early vegetarian years, I learned quickly that simply mentioning that I was vegetarian brought a strange guilty/defensive reaction from others.  Without my saying anything other than “I don’t eat meat”, people would start offering explanations and justifications for eating meat.  I learned not to make a big deal about my choices because I got tired of listening to people’s guilt. I had not become vegetarian to assume a position of moral superiority over others.  I mention this because some of you as you read this may notice feelings of guilt or defensiveness.  I ask you to try to wrestle with those feelings.  I suspect that Friends who were first asked to give up owning slaves also wrestled with guilt and defensiveness.  I think that each of us will have to do the best we can with the moral issues present at this point in history that involve meat production and consumption.  

As my bumpy path demonstrates I have no morally superior position to speak from.  I am not trying to tell the reader how to eat.  I am however  asking you to exam the moral issues with meat consumption in the age of climate change.  I also think that this is not a black and white no meat no dairy or everything.  Some people choose to be vegan, some vegetarian, some eat no red meat, some are pescatarian eating only fish, and some just eat less meat than they used to.  Change is not easy, but if we hold this loosely we can explore and begin to shift.

Climate Change

The first reason that I would call Friends to vegetarianism is climate change.  Friends overall are well aware of and very concerned about the threat of climate change. Friends have earlier written to FJ about why climate change touches on every one of our testimonies.  Early in my climate activism I started making a comprehensive list of what people could do to lower their carbon footprint.  What blew me away was discovering that one of the biggest reductions people could make was simply cutting out eating meat!   The fertilizer used to create animal feed, the transport of the feed, the amount of feed to produce a comparable amount of animal protein, and the transport of the animal are all very energy intensive activities.  Eating lower on the food chain and eating foods grown organically produces far less carbon.  

There’s yet another drawback to eating animals such as cows and sheep.   Their manure, burping and flatulence deposits large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon.  I know that sounds like a joke, but it is true.

I have seen various charts showing how much carbon per day/per year a person would save if they didn’t eat meat.  The data doesn’t agree exactly, but they all show HUGE savings.  By one estimation if you cut out eating meat one day a week for a year, you save 700 pounds of carbon, cut it out two days a week  you save 1400 pounds of carbon a year and cut out all meat and you save a whopping 4,900 pounds of carbon a year. By point of comparison switching out one 60-watt bulb saves 100 pounds a year.  

A more conservative chart showed the savings from giving up all meat to be equivalent to giving up driving a Prius. (Some of this depends upon how much meat you were eating to begin with.)  The UN list meat production as 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) production.   What would happen to climate change if we all cut out that 18% of GHS emissions in the next year? This is the point at which I went back to not eating any meat.  The newly released book Drawdown by Paul Hawken’s lists 200 ways for humans to reduce or sequester carbon.  The fourth solution is eating a plant based (non-meat) diet.

Again, if one holds flexibly the goal of eating less meat to achieve more social justice, it is helpful to know the following.  The production of lamb is by far the highest carbon footprint, two times that of beef which is also terrible.   After beef, cheese has a little less than half the footprint of beef (but still high because of how cows are raised in the US), then comes pork, salmon, turkey, tuna…with tuna being half the footprint of pork, and eggs just a bit less than tuna.    Yogurt or tofu has one third the footprint of tuna.  Inexplicably cow milk is lower than even vegetables. (See www.ewg.org       For chart) 

A vegetarian who did not eat cheese, but did eat eggs, yogurt, tofu and milk could get enough protein and produce relatively low GHG emissions. Forty percent of all energy used for industrial agriculture is for fertilizers and pesticides.  Thus organic food systems use 30 to 50% less energy and the soil sequesters about 28% more carbon than industrial-farmed soil.

Clearly being vegan would have the best carbon footprint, but there are significant health issues surrounding eating vegan.  (Hats off to those of you who put in the effort to do it safely.)  There are also vegans who feel that it is indeed perfectly safe and there are conflicting studies about this.  Like all the choices mentioned here eating vegan may work for some though not all.  Each of us needs to find our right choice.   

Peace Testimony

Not killing animals speaks to our testimony of non-violence. Even if you are comfortable with the idea that in the cycle of life some animals eat other animals, I would suggest that if you take even a cursory look at Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), you would be horrified.  The animals are raised and killed in inhumane, crowded and violent ways.   This, at a minimum, is reason to look to pasture raised animals.

Climate change is creating drought and resulting food shortages.  The argument has been made, I feel convincingly, that the war in Syria really began over food shortages.   So the issue of using food to feed production livestock rather than export it to other countries so more people can eat is a peace issue.

Social Justice, Equality and Simplicity

As explained above meat is an energy intensive way of producing protein. Seventy nine percent of farmland is for livestock feed and pastures.  Rich countries have higher levels of meat consumption (and resultingly higher obesity levels).  We could feed 2.9 billion more people if meat were not produced.  One acre of grain produces five times more protein than one acre used to produce meat, and feeds 25 people as opposed to one carnivore.  Meat production is also a much more water intensive way to produce food, and as water becomes more scarce it will also be increasingly more of a resource issue.  Both equity and simplicity testimonies always have been about not living in ways that deprive others of their quality of life.  The idea of “live simply, so others can simply live” is embodied here.

Earth Stewardship

Quite aside from all of the climate change issues mentioned above, CAFO’s (where most meat in the US is produced) are one the greatest contributors to the pollution of local creeks, ponds, rivers and aquifers due to the runoff from animal waste into these water sources.  The way mass crops are produced (most of which in the US are for animal feed) under agribusiness strip the soil of nutrients and do not sequester carbon like organic farming methods do.

So Friends I invite you to take up the challenge of reducing or eliminating your meat consumption!  I would like to see that for our Quarterly, Yearly and annual gatherings like FGC that we try working with our food providers to provide only vegetarian meals.   This would be a great way for Friends to experience delicious and healthy eating, and to support those who are working on such changes.  I invite you to this witness for peace, equality, stewardship and justice.