Thanksgiving arrives every year with a heated debate over how to best cook that plump and juicy turkey. But the idea of a tofu turkey (also known as a “tofurkey”) has gone from a joke a couple years ago to a reality for many. While vegetarianism has been practiced for over a thousand years in some countries, it is a relatively new concept in the West. And so, with the question cropping up more and more often, should we eat meat?
It’s easy for those of us lucky enough to live in rich Western countries blessed with fertile soil and temperate climates to insist on a plant-based diet. But for millions of people worldwide, a non-meat diet is a starvation diet.
The Masai people of East Africa, to take an extreme example, live almost exclusively on a diet of blood, milk, and meat from their cattle. For generations, cattle have been more or less their only source of food, warmth, shelter, livelihood, dowry, and status. Without cattle, the Masai would lose their sustenance and their culture in a single blow. Anyone arguing for a meat-free world must take on the unenviable task of telling a Masai warrior (and perhaps more crucially, his wife) that the cows are going to have to go.
Even for the poor in America, meat is a powerful totem of wealth and good living. People on a limited food budget will trade a smaller number of total calories in exchange for a morsel of meat once they get above starvation levels.
To be an absolutist against meat eating is fairly uncomplicated for relatively wealthy Americans who make up, say PETA’s membership. But it asks a huge sacrifice of millions, perhaps billions, of people whose lives are already harder, bleaker, and (too often) shorter than our own.
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