CHAPTER 3 - Ethical Eating - Why Becoming a Vegetarian is Good for You and for the Earth
Some people become vegetarians because they simply find meat unappetizing – chewing and digesting hunks of animal flesh isn’t their idea of fine dining. And that’s a perfectly valid reason to embrace a meatless lifestyle. But for many others, vegetarianism is part of their commitment to living theirs lives with as much environmental, moral and political responsibility as possible – and becoming a vegetarian is a natural part of that resolve.
In fact, just because humans can digest meat and metabolize the protein, that doesn’t mean that we were designed to eat meat as a primary nutritional source. Yes, we can eat meat – but the way our bodies are built shows that we function more efficiently on plant foods. One clue is the design of our teeth. If you examine the teeth of true carnivorous animals, theirs are long, sharp and pointed in the front for the purpose of tearing away flesh. Our so-called "canine" teeth – the four teeth in the front corners of our mouths – are very poorly designed for the task when you compare them to the teeth of dogs, cats, lions and wolves. Human teeth are short, blunt and only very slightly rounded on top – not designed to tear at meat at all! Similarly, the lower jaws of meat-eating animals open very wide but move very little from side-to-side, adding power and stability to their bite. Like other plant-eating animals, our jaws not only open an close but also move forwards, backwards and side-to-side, designed to bite off pieces of plant matter and then grinding it into smaller pieces with our flat molars.
But the most important evolutionary development that sets humans apart from other animals is our huge, overdeveloped brain. We have the ability to choose what we eat and how we live – we aren’t just eating machines forced by the circumstances of nature to eat a specific diet. As a human, you can make decisions based on science, ethics, morals and good old fashioned common sense.
Every choice you make has repercussions, from the excess packaging that you toss in the trash (plastic and cardboard that ends up in a landfill) to the light bulbs that you use (most likely manufactured by a company that supplies nuclear triggers to bomb manufacturers). The food you choose to eat is no exception. In our industrialized Western world, meat appears in tidy wrapped packages in our grocer’s case so we don’t have to think about where it came from – the resources used to raise the animal, the additives pumped into feed to increase production, and the manner in which the animals live and die. But every time you buy meat, you support the system that created it – and chances are, you have no idea just what that entails!
