Christian Reasons for Vegetarianism: Part IV

This is the end of perfect virtue for all alike-that, even while still desiring it, we should approach with restraint the food that we are obliged to eat in order to sustain our lives.
-John Cassian ”The Institutes”

Welcome to the fourth and final blog on Christian reasons for Vegetarianism.

Let me remind (admit to?) everyone that I am not a vegetarian, will likely never be one, but nonetheless like finding ways to cut back on my meat consumption. I don’t believe in prescribing vegetarianism as a kind of dogmatic rule for all Christians, but I hope everything I write here will challenge all those reading to examine their consciences on the matter. One way or another, I feel Christians should follow the advice of John Cassian, who is quoted above.

In the second part of these blogs, I wrote about things Christians believe in: fasting, greed, concern for the poor, and the environment. In the third, I described some realities of food production and the finite nature of what we can grow and produce. In this blog, I will finally put them together and offer some practical ideas of practices Christians can take up, if they feel so compelled.

The Environment

Many Christians I know drink water out of reusable aluminum bottles, recycle their soda cans, and even drive a Prius. We all do this because we are well aware of the impact our garbage and our gas have on the planet, which we regard as God’s creation to be cared for. We do this even knowing that the problem is “to big” for a few of us to solve. Regardless of what industries might do, we know that our individual “footprints” on the earth can be lessened.

Eating habits are a nice extension to the things just mentioned. Food is usually not high on the list of environmental concerns, but it is there. Growing meat requires a significant amount of resources. In my state of California, that means fresh drinking water for cattle in addition to the water that was already used to grow crops. Also, even though cars come first to mind, the raising of cattle produces significant amount methane into the atmosphere.

Fasting

Imagine giving up on meat one or two days a week consistently. What might someone learn by going through this simple process when combined with prayer and personal reflection?

One thing that someone might learn is that meat is a luxury. Now, I know that term comes off as rather strong. It needs explanation. I do not mean luxury in the common sense of “something that everybody wants, but few people have” like a Rolex watch or Lexus SUV. I mean it the sense that eating meat is non essential to human well being. It does not meet any of our basic physical needs like nourishment, shelter or clothing. Likewise, it is not needed for any of our higher needs such as our need for good relationships, aesthetic and artistic needs, intellectual needs, spiritual needs etc. Neither (except in very special cases) does it meet our need of economic survival in a society such as ours.

This definition of luxury is broad. Most things we labor for in our society would probably be luxurious and most people have them regardless of their economic standing. However, would this perhaps not be something that God might want to teach Christians in affluent nations? Ecclesiastes reminds us of how seeking things, including food, does not make us happy. It is one thing to read about it and learn it, but the Holy Spirit also teaches us when we take up certain habits. The simple truth: “we have too much in America” is not something that is easily learned by book reading alone.

Overcoming Greed

People like Christian anti-debt advocate David Ramsey and many other financial gurus offer a profound piece of wisdom: eat beans and rice until you meet certain financial goals, like paying off debt. What is the connection here? The idea is that meat is usually more expensive than beans and other vegetables. In fact, the price of meat is kept artificially low though government subsidies for crops that serve as food for cattle or other industry. If it were not for these subsidies*, the price of meat would be so much that I am fairly certain most people would be de facto vegetarians.

Bottom line is this: the less we spend on meat, the more we have to either be financially stable ourselves or to simply have more to give away to those in need.

Keeping the World’s Poor in Mind

Most of us can think of a meal-time prayer -usually before a large amount of food at family time- in which someone asks God to “help us to remember those who have less.” All Christians want to keep the world’s poor in mind, but why not pick a more practical way to do it? In other words, why not eat like the poor of the world every once in awhile?

Obviously, I do not mean do not eat at all. But why not have a (as one Christian called her nights in) a “poverty night”? Instead of inviting friends over for a barbeque, why not take one of the simpler vegetarian recipes from the Mennonite inspired More-With-Less Cookbook? Eating like those who don’t have meat will surely help us to remember those who don’t have what we have. Another popular classic on this subject is Diet For A Small Planet, which details out eating habits from several perspectives.

End

Hopefully, by now the idea of eating meat is something on everyone’s mind. Again, I don’t think that vegetarianism is a kind of mandate for all Christians. I do think, though, that our eating habits need to be on our consciences. The ecological realities and the spiritual practices that Christians accept, really do make this an issue that cannot be ignored.

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*To be clear, I am not opposed to government subsidies for food per se. It is important to keep the cost of food whenever possible. The question is: does it have to be in favor of the meat industry? There are other issues worth considering. For instance, given that meat is not a biological necessity, is also an inefficient expenditure of resources, is it reasonable to provide food-stamps for chicken and steak?

Christian Reasons for Vegetarianism: Part III

Part III

In the last blog, I explained some universally held Christian beliefs. While it may not seem that these important practices connect to vegetarianism, I think after explaining some realities of the world it will be a little bit clear.

When discussing food, especially meat, we need to ask where it comes from. No, I don’t mean Ralph’s and Costco.

The Energy Pyramid

There’s one thing we all learned in high school biology called the energy pyramid. Basically, there is a certain amount of energy that comes from the sun. It is continuous and inexhaustible, but only comes in at a constant steady rate. This energy in turn helps produce plants, which provide energy for herbivores, which are then eaten by predators and so on up the food chain.

What results is a loss of energy at each link on that chain. It works like this: the sun makes a plant grow. This plant has certain amount of potential nourishment for a mouse. The mouse eats some of the plant, and then uses that nourishment to move about, dig holes, squeak, etc. The mouse is now potential nourishment for the snake. Because the mouse used some of the energy from the plant, it now has less potential energy to give to the snake. Likewise, once the snake eats a few mice, it then uses some of that nourishment stored in them. So the snake provides even less nourishment to the hawk. At each step, the total energy that first came from the sun is lost. This is one reason why there are more mice in the world than hawks and more plants than mice.

”Growing Beef”

Agriculture is no exception to this reality. Growing a large land mammal like a cow for purpose of steaks is something that heavily taxes the resources of the planet. Cows eat quite a bit and they also need quite a bit of water to survive. It takes the equivalent of twelve loaves of bread to produce one pound of beef. Beef is one of the most extreme examples of this kind of resource consumption, but the same principle applies to chicken, pork, or fish.

Twelve loaves of bread could go further than a hamburger. Maybe this isn’t such a problem though. After all, the population of hawks still survive even though they eating snakes. This is certainly true, but Americans –who eat meat with nearly every meal- must understand how much they are consuming. There is not enough fertile farmland on the planet for everyone in it to eat like an American. According to the UN, if all United States citizens abstained from meat just two days a week, we’d be doing the world a huge favor.

The consequences of this issue are put best a scholar wise than myself:

12.9 pounds of grain could have been converted to 12.9 loaves of bread that could have, in turn, been fed to world’s starving poor. Instead, that grain/bread is wasted, just so people in affluent nations can eat meat and other animal products. There is no way around it: Whenever one purchases a pound of beef, one is supporting a system of agriculture that effectively squanders 12.9 pounds of grain for every pound of beef produced.*

The point then is clear. You can probably already imagine where I am going with this in my final blog. Eating is wasteful. My last final blog will explain how abstaining from meat, given everything I have said here, connects with the things that Christians already believe. Then, I will offer a few practical suggestions to cut back on our meat consumption.


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*This quote comes from Mylan Engel, Jr. in his 2003 article “Hunger, Duty, and Ecology: On What we Owe Starving Humans”

Christian Reasons for Vegetarianism: Part II

Thank you for reading the much belated Part II. As most of you know, bloggers often apologize for not writing more often. Tonight, I write to with (likely) many mistakes and am sipping a cup of coffee to keep me going.

In other news: Stargate

The Subject at Hand

In my previous blog, I mentioned arguments that I do not intend to use and to find persuasive towards vegetarianism from a Christian conscience. I mentioned that despite the weakness of those arguments, there are things that Christians believe that I think will guide us towards vegetarianism if we prayerfully examine our consciences towards that end. Here they are.

The Principle of Fasting

Fasting is something that all Christian believe in one way or another. It is most famously found in the Gospels in which Jesus fasts for forty days and is tempted by the Devil. Traditionally, fasting from food for a short amount of time gives us more time to pray. Also, it teaches us to discipline our bodies so that we better resist temptation. After all, if one can resist the natural desire for food, than one can learn to resist other desires as well.

Of course, it is worth noting that food need not be what we fast from. After all, I remember during lent one year I gave up facebook. Nor does it have to be all kinds of food, but perhaps a specific kind. Fasting is flexible. The duration of it and what kind it may be is left to the individual conscience of the believer.

Freedom from Greed in order to be Generous

No Christian I know denies the special admonitions to help the poor, yet still Christians fail to give even the paltry 10%. Understandibly, this is because we are in financial straits ourselves and are habituated to self-preservation first. But equally, we too easily fall into the pattern of the world around us.

Part of what prevents us from giving is our natural greed. Greed, very broadly spoken, is giving ourselves some kind of non-essential luxury when that money might be better used to provide life-sustaining essentials to another human being. So I do not need new video-game, pair of shoes, Blue Ray player, or expensive book. That money is better spent either in my church nearby or sent to a World Vision child across the oceans.

With the idea of Christian charity comes the idea of solidarity with the poor. Can every Christian, take up his cross, sell all he has, and live in a semi-homeless state like Jesus and the apostles did? It turns out not all of us are cut out to be Franciscan Monks. Nonetheless, all Christians need to be aware of, understand, and keep in mind the world’s poor. Again, we must remember the poor near us and the poor across the ocean.

Environmental Concerns

The Christian Environmental conscience is, sadly, weak. Nonetheless it is there. More and more Christians are beginning to understand that the earth is a creation to be cared for, and not a resource to be plundered. Some may object that I have stepped into the world of new-age religion at this point, but how seriously ought we to take the idea that earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it? It seems that if we recognize God’s creative purpose for the world and his ownership of it, than we have a good reason to think that care for the earth is important.

This point is especially strong depending on your view of eschatology or “end-times.” Many Christians believe that the “end” is restoration of the present world. In other words, when God re-creates through a liberation from the effects of sin, not a cataclysmic “reset button” in which God smites the entire planet. Yet even if Christians expect this world to be destroyed by sin first, that is no reason for Christian to stand by and watch it happen.

Onward and onward

If you’ve read this long, you’re awesome. Thanks for sticking with it. In part III, I will show how these Christian beliefs, when combined with environmental and economic realities, point us in the direction of vegetarianism.

Thanks for reading.

Christian Reasons for Vegetarianism: Part I

Opening Thoughts

I am not a vegetarian. I eat meat most days of the week, although I avoid red meat like I avoid soft drinks. I do not think that I will ever feel the need to become a full, strict, vegetarian either. I certainly could never become a vegan. I also do not believe that I am willing now, nor should ever be in the future, able to commit to a “cold-turkey” (no pun intended) instant cut out of meat from my diet.

Nonetheless, I believe that there are good reasons for Christians to cut back on meat consumption. I have, imperfectly, committed myself to refraining from meat on Sundays. I find that I am losing my need to eat meat and am fully satisfied with not eating it once a week. I hope to eventually take this into other days of week.

Scaling back and even eliminating meat from our diets is something all Christians should consider.

Why avoid meat when Scripture doesn’t say so?

To begin, here are some arguments I am not using in these blogs.

I am not, for instance, arguing from a perspective of animal rights. Many people argue against eating meat by virtue that animals are moral equals in the universe. While the points they bring up are often of great value, I believe that Christians are right to point out that many of the animal rights activists do not so much as elevate the moral status of animals, but rather bring down the spiritual status of humans. Humans, so said by animal rights activists, are very well evolved animals, but not above the animal kingdom or better than our cousins the chimpanzees. Whatever reasons people may have for this, I think it is right for Christians to reject these appeals on the grounds that we do believe that we are above animals via our special relationship with our creator.

Neither do I argue that eating meat is intrinsically wrong. Christians have often said that the raising of animals for slaughter, consumption, and obviously sacrifices cannot violate the laws of God. These things happened in scripture and received no condemnation from God and sometimes even his mandate. Many of the early patriarchs in the Old Testament domesticated animals and treated them as property. God also called for the sacrifice of animals. Several other passages, such as the famous example of eating meat before idols in the New Testament, could be added here. So the point is this: If God ever felt that the killing of animals by humans was wrong, and this includes eating them, then it would seem he has contradicted himself.

Furthermore, I am not arguing that we need an explicit, clear biblical command to refrain from meat in order to do so. Many things Christians do (like blogging) come not from a clear command in scripture, but rather from careful reflection on what the Christian life is (which includes scripture), and an application to our contemporary habits of living. Thus I would never say that vegetarianism is “Biblical” but rather that it is “Christian.”

There are few things that Christians believe that influence how we think about our diets. Likewise, there are some facts about the economy that we live in it that should make us think about what the real cost of a nice steak is. When two things are put together, I think it seems that Christians can be light of the world more fully if we, as the Church, pass on the capon when eating dinner.

Stay tuned for part II. It will be up by Monday.