8. STADIUM HOT DOGS - On Vegetarianism, Food, and Culture

I am currently writing this on my phone whilst sitting on a train to London to see a baseball game. The Boston Red Sox have been my team since my mother relocated to Cape Cod around the start of the century and I belatedly fell in love with the game. They have travelled to the UK to take on their long-time rivals, the New York Yankees, and as soon as I heard I got the first ticket I could. Bizarrely, after today, I will have seen the Red Sox face the Yankees twice live but never in Boston: once at Yankee Stadium, and now at London Stadium. The only thing I have ever been in attendance at Fenway Park to see live was Bruce Springsteen.

None of which really has anything to do with the topic of today’s Philosophy Unleashed blog, except as part of my stimulus this week for thinking about an issue which is a perennial favourite of mine. Because, reading a New York Times article on the efforts the MLB have gone to to bring a little corner of Americana over to London for the event - from ballpark hot dogs and crackerjacks to drinks vendors selling beers direct to your seat - I was reminded that I have never had a ballpark hotdog and, as a vegetarian, I probably never will. It made me wonder if, as a result, I maybe still haven’t had an authentic American baseball experience despite seeing several games live in the United States.

Then, this morning, I read a different article in the Times claiming that throughout their evolutionary history crocodiles went through three different vegetarian stages despite their contemporary meat eating ways.

I first became a vegetarian in 1998, almost twenty-one years to the day that I am writing this. I remember the time of year because the day I stopped eating meat was the last day of my GCSE exams. I had decided to become a vegetarian a few months before, but had worried that the change to my diet might somehow affect my academic ability and thought during that important time, so opted to hold off the conversion until I was clear of the pressures of exams. I remember very distinctly coming home from school after a morning exam - my last - and having a spicy bean burger for lunch. I haven’t eaten meat since.

My reasons for the change can be laid squarely at the feet of Peter Singer, whose ideas I had been exposed to through the music of Canadian punk band, Propagandhi. Despite years of eating nothing but meat and hating vegetables, despite months of mocking my best friend when he became a vegetarian himself due to that same damn Propagandhi album, at some point the argument Singer made became impossible to deny. To pretend the suffering of non-human animals somehow mattered less than the suffering of humans was speciesist and to pretend the animals killed to make our food didn’t suffer was to live in self-denial. Although I maintained the position that, speciesist though it might be, I probably did care more about the suffering of humans than non-human animals, I conceded to Singer that all unnecessary suffering should be avoided, and while I would probably give more to a charity that saved human lives over one which saved animal lives, I could no longer pretend that killing animals for their meat was particularly necessary. One could very clearly live a perfectly happy life without causing that suffering, and so if I wanted to be a morally good human being, I needed to stop eating meat.

That is the argument I still subscribe to to this day. I haven’t eaten meat since 1998 and don’t intend to eat meat anytime soon, but if I were dying of starvation and the choice was between death or killing a non-human animal for survival (or between a non-human animal and a human being), then I would see no ethical issue with killing the non-human animal as their suffering has now become, at least to me, necessary.

It is by no means a perfect argument. For one thing, the logic extends from my current vegetarianism to be just as compelling a call for veganism, and yet despite several week-long attempts (and regular buying of oat milk instead of dairy) I am still not a vegan. My main reason being the philosophically pathetic excuse of convenience. The transition to being entirely plant-based is hard, and though a recent influx in vegan-friendly products have made it a little easier, as someone worried about high blood pressure and the level of salt in my diet, I notice many of these recent delicious vegan products are through the roof with their salt content to ensure parity of flavour with their animal-based competitors.

None of which excuses me ethically. Morally speaking I know I should be a vegan, and so should everyone. That I am not means I commit a moral wrong every time I eat dairy or eggs. Currently, I have decided I am ok with living a life wherein I regularly commit those moral wrongs. It is much the same way I feel about killing a wasp in my kitchen or a spider in my shower - it is not OK, but I can live with the wrong committed because other values have taken priority.

But perhaps my hesitance at following through the logic of my argument into veganism comes from something else - a hope I have that my decision to avoid this form of unnecessary suffering may be wrong-headed, and like our crocodile brothers and sisters, perhaps we’ll look back at this time in evolutionary history one day with as much shock and ridicule as I usually imagine people of the future looking back on the way we all used to eat meat. 

This hope hits me the most whenever I am travelling.  A few summers ago I found myself in Vietnam and Cambodia, hunting for the “chay” food eaten by Buddhist monks and saying no to all of the many delicious smelling local delicacies of meat and fish. Whenever I visit friends and family back in America, I sit eating frozen gardenburgers while they feast on fresh seafood and barbecue. Next week I shall be in Paris, likely eating omelettes and eschewing the wonders of French cuisine, much as I spent my honeymoon in Italy on a diet of pizza and pasta which left the bulk of every menu unexplored. Last year I remember people asking me how I enjoyed the food in Dublin and realised I was describing to them largely Indian cooking from the excellent, but not particularly Irish, vegetarian restaurants we’d found.

Human culture is rich, and it is not always moral. Some of our greatest works of art become morally questionable with time and yet we recognise their importance and value for what they are. We read and we learn, we watch and we think, we see and we consider. Food, too, is part of culture. It tells us a lot about people and their values. And throughout most of human history we haven’t been vegetarian. Nor are we seemingly in any danger of becoming one hundred percent vegetarian any time soon. So much of the food culture around the world involves meat and dairy; recipes and methods passed down from generation to generation. When I travel, it always strikes me how immediately alienating and othering it is to have to tell people no to their local specialities. As a vegetarian, and as someone who on top of this also doesn’t drink alcohol for other reasons, I find myself constantly imposing a sort of cultural imperialism on the places I visit, insisting on meat-free alternatives and never fully being able to immerse myself in the culture I am there to see, and I often wish I hadn’t made the decision that the suffering of non-human animals matters.  When I realise that my ethics on this issue are not as absolute as they appear (whenever I eat dairy, or swat a fly) I sometimes wonder why I did? Is vegetarianism really something I believe in, or is it just a youthful fad that has outstayed it’s welcome? A restrictive eating disorder wrapped up in the rhetoric of ethical legitimacy?

I wish it was. I’d love to eat fresh Pho from a roadside vendor in Ho Chi Minh City, crack open fresh lobsters in Boston, see what all the fuss is about snails in Paris, and even try one of the ballpark hotdogs at today’s game. But the difference between crocodiles and humanity lie in the autonomy we appear to have in being able to make conscious choices about the direction our evolution is going in. Rather than being mere slaves to the happenstance of evolutionary forces with no particular end goal in mind, we, as humans, have the ability to pick a teleological end and encourage its evolutionary survival. Doing the moral thing when the world is not really set up for it is hard, and it’s easy to find excuses to pack it all in. If you can’t beat them, join them. But it is one of the wonderful things about being a human being that we seem to be somewhat in control of the world in which we find ourselves, and changes, slowly but surely, take place one person at a time. 

As much as I feel that perhaps as a traveller I am, by my vegetarianism, denied the full authentic experience of whichever culture I am trespassing upon, I can’t help shake the feeling - no matter how many times I try to rationalise its opposite - that the suffering of non-human animals really does matter. And it matters far more than my ability to taste these local delicacies. In fact, it matters so much that I probably should become a vegan too, especially now that the convenience argument has been defeated by the growing market for easy vegan foods (with the salt argument probably soon to be addressed by the marketplace too). And I probably should be kinder to wasps and spiders.

Living an ethical life is tough. But reducing the amount of suffering in the world is actually surprisingly easy. For over twenty years I’ve at least ensured a few meals a day of animal lives are spared by doing very little beyond making a different choice on a menu and learning to cook. It isn’t perfect, but it’s something, and in a world where nobody is perfect, something at least seems better than nothing.

AUTHOR: D.McKee