sawyl | Vegetarianism vs sustainability (Reply)

Interesting piece by Jenna Woginrich on Cif which asserts that vegetarianism as a way to improve animal welfare conditions in the meat industry is ultimately a mistake. But while I admire Woginrich for having the courage of her convictions — for deciding to ditch her own vegetarianism and instead to concentrate on producing meat on a small-scale sustaining farm — I don't think her basic claim about vegetarianism holds up to scrutiny.

Essentially, she appears to be claiming that because vegetarians abstain from meat eating, they are therefore neutral when it comes to exerting influence on meat processors and consequently unable to advocate improved animal husbandry conditions:

It's a hard reality for a vegetarian to swallow, but my veggie burgers did not rattle the industry cages at all. I was simply avoiding the battlefield, stepping aside as a pacifist. There is nobility in the vegetarian choice, but it isn't changing the system fast enough. In a world where meat consumption is soaring, the plausible 25% of the world's inhabitants who have a mostly vegetarian diet aren't making a dent in the rate us humans are eating animals. In theory, a plant-based diet avoids consuming animals but it certainly isn't getting cows out of feedlots.

This is clearly incorrect, as an extension of the pacifism analogy shows; for everyone on Earth were to become a pacifist overnight, they wouldn't simply be avoiding the battlefield, rather they would have invalidated the battlefield as a contemporary concept. Likewise, if everyone simultaneously ceased eating meat, many animal welfare problems would also disappear. It is unlikely, pace Woginrich, that the meat industry would continue to stock the feedlots to the their current levels despite a complete lack of demand. And it's also not clear that vegetarians can't help to improve animal welfare standards, either by indirectly encouraging restaurateur to provide better vegetarian options, thereby encouraging the omnivorous majority to eat less meat, but also by pragmatically accepting that because some people will always want to eat meat, it may be pragmatic to continue to campaign for improvements in animal husbandry (I realise that this last is controversial, since it may be taken as promoting meat consumption...) Whatever the rights and wrongs of the last point, it seems to me that it is clear that vegetarian isn't the morally neutral position the article — or at least the article subheading — seems to suggest.

A more charitable reading of the piece suggests that the argument isn't so much that vegetarianism is a useless position, but rather, that vegetarianism is too demanding a position for the majority of the population and that it is more realistic to argue that people deliberately source their meat from providers who are dedicated to minimising suffering and maximising sustainability.

But this reduce and refine argument seems to suffer from the same problem as the vegetarianism-is-too-hard argument. Is it really true that it is easier to find ethical meat than to become vegetarian? Are people really more likely to invest time and effort and money — a point Woginrich acknowledge when she says about buying sustainably sourced meat "...you are willing to sacrifice more of your paycheck to dine with dignity." — particularly when they live busy lives, live in cities distant from where their food is produced, and must choose between eating a cheap beefburger every day or an expensive piece of stake once a fortnight?