THE VEGAN VISION
by Joanna Macy
Copyright(c)1995 by Joanna Macy

From "For the Vegetarian in You" (Prima, 1995), by Billy Ray Boyd

I took a walk on the beach below the oil refineries on San Francisco Bay. Seagulls careened in the afternoon sun. A tanker hooked up a half-mile out on the jetty.

As I watched idly, a strange fantasy arose in my mind. It was a scenario of what would happen if Americans no longer found animal products attractive. Say they simply woke up one day and found meat and poultry and dairy products unappealing. Given U.S. eating habits, that speculation borders on the absurd, I know. But suppose some magical transformation took place that would diminish our attraction to animal-based foods, and at the same time increase our appetite and enjoyment for other foods which really nourish, and are far better for us.

What would happen? What would it mean for our lives and our world? Would that tanker, for example, still be making its deliveries of imported oil? Would those refineries stretch back for as many miles as they do now? Would there be as much DDT in the gulls overhead or in my own body? Would they and I be likely to live longer and healthier?

From the evidence accrued in hundreds of recent medical, agricultural, economic and environmental studies, we can indeed estimate the results if Americans were to change their eating habits and kick the habit of over-consuming animal proteins and animal fats.

I imagine then the scenario, as I walk along the water's edge.

The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis, a major affliction among older women; my mother suffers from it; I fear it. The hormonal imbalances causing miscarriages and increasing aberrations of sexual development similarly drop away, as we cease ingesting with our meat, poultry and milk the drugs pumped into our livestock. So do the neurological disorders and birth defects due to pesticides and other chemicals, as we begin to eat lower on the food chain where these poisons are far less concentrated. Mother's milk, where they concentrate in greatest intensity, becomes safe again; we can nurse our babies without fear. Since these toxins attack the gene pool itself, causing irreversible damage, the change in diet improves the health of my children's children's children and generations to come.

The social, ecological and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale. We discover what it is like for us to sit down to eat without feeling guilt. Once relieved of it, we realize how great was that burden, that unspoken sense of being watched and judged by those who were hungry. We find ourselves also relieved of fear. For on a semiconscious level we knew all along that the old disparities in consumption were turning our planet into a tinder box, breeding resentments and desperations that could only eventuate in war. We breathe easier, letting ourselves be emotionally in touch again with all our brothers and sisters.

The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes (that was, we discover, the major cause of deforestation), begin to grow again Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.

The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and factory farms had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants.

As expenditures for food and medical care drop, personal savings rise--and with them the supply of lendable funds. This lowers the interest rates, as does also the drop in oil imports, which eases the pressure on the national debt.

A less obvious effect of our meat-free diet, but perhaps more telling on the deep psychological level, is the release that it brings from the burden of guilt of cruelty inflicted on other species. Only a few of us had been able to face directly the obscene conditions we inflicted on animals in our factory farms and modern slaughter houses; but most of us knew on some level that they entailed a suffering that was to much to "stomach."

We can appreciate now what it did to us to eat animals kept long in pain and terror. Because the mass methods employed to raise and kill animals for our tables were relatively new, we did not fully realize the deprivation and torture they entailed. Only a few of us guessed that the glandular responses of the cattle and pigs and chickens pumped adrenalin into their bodies and that we ate with their flesh the rage of the chickens, the terror of the pigs and cattle. It is good for our bodies, our relationships and our politics to have stopped ingesting fear and anger. Acting now with more respect for other beings, we find we have more respect for ourselves.

As I picked my way over the shale and driftwood, I thought to myself, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." There is a new way of living taking birth in our time. I encounter it everywhere I go in this land, in cities and small towns, in churches and schools, where folks are fed up with violence and disease and alienation, where they are creating new forms, new lifestyles, determined to live in ways that lend meaning and sanity to their lives. This new way takes seriously the values of individual dignity, freedom and justice that were heralded at the birth of our nation. It wants to share these values with all beings--knows it must share them in order to survive. It is fed up with consuming over half the world's resources; it is sick of being sick.

That is why, I suspect, the fantasy that occurred to me on the beach may not be so unrealistic.