I also think it’s interesting how people tend not to address the mass amounts of habitat destruction and animal death caused by non-animal farming, (harvesting equipment hacking animals in the fields to death, pesticides, etc.). For humans to eat any kind of diet, animals and the land will suffer. It feels better to point fingers than to look at hard truths. Whatever we eat, we can make better choices on how the animals and land were treated while growing our food.
This is the part of the conversation that usually gets skipped. A field cleared for row crops was habitat before it was a field, and the harvest itself isn't bloodless. It's just mechanized and out of sight. Visibility isn't the same as magnitude, and most moral accounting runs on what's easy to picture.
Which is why your last line is the right one. There's no diet that costs nothing, so the useful question was never which one is innocent. It's how the animals were kept and how the ground was treated. That question is open to everyone, at every meal, wherever they land on eating meat, and it has produced better outcomes than sorting people into camps ever has.
I also think it’s interesting how people tend not to address the mass amounts of habitat destruction and animal death caused by non-animal farming, (harvesting equipment hacking animals in the fields to death, pesticides, etc.). For humans to eat any kind of diet, animals and the land will suffer. It feels better to point fingers than to look at hard truths. Whatever we eat, we can make better choices on how the animals and land were treated while growing our food.
This is the part of the conversation that usually gets skipped. A field cleared for row crops was habitat before it was a field, and the harvest itself isn't bloodless. It's just mechanized and out of sight. Visibility isn't the same as magnitude, and most moral accounting runs on what's easy to picture.
Which is why your last line is the right one. There's no diet that costs nothing, so the useful question was never which one is innocent. It's how the animals were kept and how the ground was treated. That question is open to everyone, at every meal, wherever they land on eating meat, and it has produced better outcomes than sorting people into camps ever has.
Thanks for bringing it up!