olekms.com

About a year ago I decided to become vegetarian. Well, not quite vegetarian. Pescetarian. I still haven’t given up eating fish (or dairy). I decided to become pescetarian one night when I was out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with some friends. One of those friends is vegan, and was the only non-omnivore in the group. Once this was realised, people started asking questions about his reasons for being vegan and jokingly criticising his choice of diet. For whatever reason, I found this incredibly rude - I’ve never heard people ask or jokingly criticise Jews about their reasons for not eating pig, I didn’t see how there was a difference in this case. So for that evening I decided to be vegan in sympathy with my friend. Talking with my vegan friend during dinner and afterwards, I came to understand a little of his reasons for being vegan. Part of it was because he had recently read Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation. Looking into reasons for vegetarianism/veganism for myself, I realised it was a good thing and not something I could happily ignore after finding out about it. That was why I stopped eating the meat of land animals - I’m not as strong-willed as my friend - I still eat fish and eggs, cheese.

I’m going to list the reasons I’m a pescetarian. This isn’t going to be a self-righteous rant. The reason I’m writing this is so I can summarise it for myself and others when I’m asked about it (as I often am by my friends :P ). In no particular order, the reasons why I don’t eat meat:

1. Meat production is bad for the environment. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation published a report in 2006, that went into some depth about the affect of meat production on the environment. I haven’t read the whole report, just snippets of it, but it was enough to convince me that eating meat is not always a good thing, no matter how delicious. Clearly others agree.
2. Most animals bred for their meat are fed grain which is much better served feeding people. This gets a bit complicated. Basically, 7kg of grain produces 1kg of beef, with similar conversion factors for other types of meat (including fish). Huge numbers of people around the world go hungry  everyday, it doesn’t make sense to use grain to feed livestock so rich people can eat meat. There’s a report here which goes into the specifics of the impact of meat production on grain and water supplies around the world. The article is a little old, but the situation remains the same (or worse) as when it was written.
3. To eat meat (and indeed to subject animals to any treatment to which we would not subject humans) is speciesist. This is the primary focus of Animal Liberation. Peter Singer has written a short essay on this and animal liberation, which you may read if you don’t feel like reading the entire book. After reading the Wikipedia article on speciesism while writing this post, I realised that the Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead touches on this a little.

I’ve always regarded pescetarianism as a stepping stone to eventually being vegan. After re-reading some of these articles while writing this post I’ve realised how bad it is to still be eating fish, and now I feel the day I become vegan (or atleast give up eating fish) will be sooner rather than later.

The title of this post is a quote from a friend of mine who once joked that my being vegetarian explained everything I did. Even though I’ve been pescetarian for a year now, I’m still often quizzed about it by friends. Now I’ll be able to point them to this post to explain the details :)