Thanks so much for all the wonderful comments and discussions! I’m so impressed with how everyone is both passionate and civil, and HELLO, if there’s going to be drinks later, you guys better invite me too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my assumptions about food, and especially my assumptions as someone who has read 60+ books on vegetarianism and factory farming, and not much about an other related agricultural topic.

These are things I believe to be true:

1. Factory farms treat animals abhorrently in a variety of ways, including (but not limited to): being unable to live their lives naturally expressing their own instincts and behaviors healthfully, cruel handling of the “healthy” animals but also exceptionally cruel handling of the fallen, an unnatural diet that often makes them sick, and a death that is at least terrifying, if not drawn out and downright torturous.
2. Factory farms are horrible for the environment as a whole, but especially damaging to their own regional ecology, causing sickness in surrounding communities, and polluting local soils and waterways.

(Seafood – a connected topic that I have thoughts about, but I’d like to concentrate right now on the farm animal industry and talk about seafood at a different time.)

Those are the 2 main reasons I’ve wanted to go vegetarian for so many years. Because I believe it’s possible, and because I believe it’s morally wrong to support an industry that causes so much needless suffering and environmental degradation.

Based on this, it’s clear that the values I feel strongly about here are:

• Diminishing suffering.
• Diminishing environmental impact as much as I can.

So, based on my education, and combined with my values, what are my assumptions?

1. Eating a vegetarian diet will keep animals from suffering.
2. Eating a vegetarian diet will keep me just as healthy as eating meat would have.
3. Eating a vegetarian diet will be a net positive for the earth because it has less environmental impact than eating factory farmed meat does.
4. It’s very possible for a significant portion (like, say, around 90%) of the human population to live quite healthfully and happily without eating meat, it’s “just” a matter of changing tastes, habits, and transitioning from one cultural norm to another.

These are assumptions I don’t regularly question, but am starting to now. Specifically:

1. What is the environmental impact of industrial agriculture? What are the costs and benefits? Who are the big players, what’s being done to the land, how is it being done?
2. I know where my beef comes from (literally I do – the name and address of the farm), but where does my brown rice come from? Where do my barley and soybeans come from? Why isn’t this question just as deserving of scrutiny as the source of any meat I might want to eat?
3. What is the environmental impact of animal-based agriculture where factory farms don’t exist, where animals are raised in the open, where the impact to the land is minimized?

You might be asking why I’m not questioning whether we should animals at all. I’ll write about that more later, too, but that would be a pretty huge post and I want to think about my feelings on that more. I wanted to get this stuff down while it’s fresh.