What’s your beef? An ethicist’s guide to giving up meat

By Arianne Shahvisi

The case for giving up meat should be easy to win. Eating meat is clearly inconsiderate to animals: slaughtering billions of sentient beings each year seems gratuitously cruel when our nutritional needs can easily be met in other ways. It’s demonstrably unfair to our fellow humans and the environment, too. Meat-eating – especially consuming beef, which is the most wasteful and environmentally damaging kind – is responsible for most of the carbon emissions the food industry produces.

Yet those who eat meat are largely unmoved by the arguments against it. Why? In most societies, meat-eating is still presented as the natural state of things, a necessary part of a healthy diet. It doesn’t matter that red and processed meats have been linked to cancer and heart disease, or that we know early humans mostly ate vegetables. For thousands of years, meat-eating has been not only normal, but aspirational. History shows that the richer people get, the more meat they crave: when people in poorer countries with traditionally plant-based diets become wealthier, their meat consumption tends to rise. It’s hard to accept that something is morally troubling when so many people around you are doing it.

Some thoughtful meat-eaters argue that there’s no point ditching the drumsticks because the sheer scale of the meat industry renders any individual action futile. They have a point. I’ve been vegetarian for more than two decades, but this has changed next to nothing. Any animals I may have spared have been gobbled up many times over by other people, as global meat consumption continues to rise. For every animal I’ve abstained from eating, some people really have eaten three.

Why bother making an individual sacrifice if the world scarcely notices your good deed?

Why bother making an individual sacrifice if the world scarcely notices your good deed? You could argue that this just lets the real villains off the hook. After all, it was the fossil-fuel industry that cooked up the idea of personal carbon-footprint calculators, a notion that left us feeling guilty about our actions as consumers, even as oil companies dodged their far greater responsibilities.

It’s true that various systemic changes could help stop the meat industry destroying the planet. If meat packaging displayed how much rainforest had been felled to graze each cow, guilt might put off some shoppers. Slashing subsidies to livestock farmers and putting a carbon tax on meat would raise the price of your sausages or Sunday roast, and so ration demand.

Yet calling a problem “structural” – even if it is – invites us to wash our hands of it. Racism is structural, too, but individuals still have an obligation not to be racist. Responsibility can lie both with an individual and the system at the same time.

When considering the significance of your own individual actions it’s useful to borrow an idea from Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher. He devised a simple principle for doing the right thing: “the categorical imperative”.

According to this principle, you should do things only if it would be fine if everyone did so. If scaling up your actions would be untenable, those actions are probably immoral. Kant, needless to say, would have taken a dim view of those who piled their shopping trolleys high during the first lockdown, leaving the shelves bare for the rest of us.

How does this apply to eating meat? Think about patterns in world meat consumption the same way you’d look at the different types of pandemic supermarket customers. First, there are the restrained shoppers – analogous to countries where moderate amounts of meat are eaten, which include India, Iran and Thailand. If the whole world followed the diet of these populations, less land would be used up in livestock grazing than is currently the case.

You think you’re entitled to more than your share of the world’s resources

Second are the stockpilers, those who buy extra but don’t strip the shelves. They’re like countries where the population eats large but not excessive amounts of meat, such as Russia and Spain. If we all followed this menu we’d have to cut down even more rainforests to provide enough room for grazing or growing feed for livestock.

Third come the hoarders, otherwise known as the shoppers who bought up all the loo rolls. The equivalent is countries where so much meat is eaten that there simply isn’t enough land in the world for everyone else to dine the same way. America, Australia and France are all culprits.

So which kind of consumer do you want to be? If you eat little or no meat, everyone in the world could follow a similar diet and some existing farmland could be reforested. Or you could eat 124kg of meat a year, like the average American, and Kant would call you immoral.

Eating anything other than a very modest amount of meat is, in essence, a declaration that you think you’re entitled to more than your share of the world’s resources (the Lancet, a medical journal, reckons that a 98g piece of beef each week and a slice of chicken every day is what counts as a fair share).

Whether or not you agree with Kant’s reasoning, putting your needs ahead of others’ is a dangerous habit, for yourself and for the planet. One way or another we’re going to have to change the way we live if we want the planet to sustain us. Isn’t eating fewer chicken wings and more chickpeas a relatively painless way of doing your bit? ■

Arianne Shahvisi is a senior lecturer in ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School

ILLUSTRATIONS: MATTHEW RICHARDSON