Your entry seemed quite well developed, but I think, as you quoted, that it's not a black-and-white issue. As an environmentalist and a vegetarian, I was interested to read your article, but it didn't convince me that I am being entirely hypocritical. I think we will agree on one of the biggest underlying problems: industrialization of agriculture and horticulture. To generalize, industrializing tends to reduce the producers' connection with the product. As a result, factory farmers do not sympathize with the livestock and large agricultural farmers lose respect for the land, as Steinbeck portrays in The Grapes of Wrath:

“And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. […] Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread.”

We vegetarians see the problem of factory farming to be an especially bad problem because it involves the loss of respect for other animals that aren’t too much different from human animals (with whom it is easy to sympathize). In fact, what most vegetarians are protesting is factory farms, and in that respect you seem to side with us. We don’t eat meat because most meat comes from factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses. As for meat that doesn’t come from these, it is difficult to find and difficult to recognize.

I think that respect and understanding play important roles in any cause, and environmentalism is very much included in this.

I wrote some articles on vegetarianism for my online magazine, The Second Wind. I am also hoping to write an article about general steps to improve the environment on an individual level. If you want to check out the magazine, it is at http://the2ndwind.tripod.com.

Hi Nate,

"factory farmers do not sympathize with the livestock and large agricultural farmers lose respect for the land"

This is false, an urban myth. Growers do what they must in the environment they live in. They hold their noses and farm the government because the alternative is marginalization for them and their families. There are growers that accept the losses and struggle at the margins, and they deserve our support, but it is mean spirited to dehumanize those growers that work within the system - the one that the universities, banks, government, packers and suppliers urge them to work within.

"what most vegetarians are protesting is factory farms"

How ironic. A better way would be to patronize local growers who have multi-use general farms that raise meat and veggies in efficent ways that cause the least damage to the environment. Demonizing all animal operations rather than supporting the good ones, demonizes the good ones. Not logical.

"As for meat that doesn’t come from these, it is difficult to find and difficult to recognize."

No it's not. Almost any whole foods type market clearly labels their products. If all else fails you can google it up and have it delivered to your door, but you'll find all sorts of local organizations that list producers. Often you'll have to pay extra, but if you care about food enough to alter your diet that doesn't seem to be a big issue. And if you care about food you probably ought to be aware of and patronizing local producers even if all you buy is veggies. Excuse not accepted.

I took a look at your essay on the front page. I don't think you are doing a good job of gathering evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions from that evidence. You are selling a package of biases, cherry picking data that supports those biases, presenting it in biased ways, and failing to address contary data or in genral do a useful analysis of the whole issue. For example, you say:

"Broiler chickens (chickens raised for their meat) die off prior to slaughter at a rate of 1% a week. This is more than twice the weekly human death rate in London during the Bubonic plague less than three months before it peaked. For a chicken who lives in a shed with 30,000 others (which is quite common), 1% a week means that during its short six-week lifespan, over 1,755 of its comrades will perish without being slaughtered."

Any business plan for livestock will include an expectation of 10% death loss for any number of reasons. The longer the animal takes to mature, the lower the weekly rate but on short lived animals like poultry it can be 1% a week. That's still only a 6% death loss, better than some.

There are a few hundred chickens and turkeys ranging after my cattle - the classic happy cows and feisty but addled poultry scenario. Everyone gets everything they could want and all they have to worry about is each other and the occassional predator. Chicken hawks watch closely and snag a bird now and then, but the chicken dog is alert and usually saves the day. Still, even with these best of conditions, when you count beaks at the end of the week it isn't unusual to lose 1 in every 100.

Factory poultry operations make the opposite argument, that they have lower mortality figures, and that's one of the things that makes them more profitable. They justify their excessive use of medications with their low mortality numbers. And of couse, no chicken hawks, coyotes, racoons, possum, or the whole creeping, crawling, buzzing, biting insect kingdom.

I suspect that you are in an echo chamber, that the only voices you hear are saying things like you say. That's not a useful way to understand systems.

It is true that most of my readership is people who agree with me, or don't know enough to disagree, but I am not proud of that. In fact, I am grateful for your challenge of my content. Would you mind if I publish part or all of your response in the "Letters and Opinions" section? This would help dissolve the "echo chamber" which, as I mentioned, is not there by choice. If you let me publish it, I could link to your page. Also, it might be nice to have your real name and possibly where you are from, unless you are opposed to giving it. If you like, you can email this to me: cellulartheband@hotmail.com.

I use a Creative Commons license. You can use all or part of anything you find here for any purpose except making money with it so long as you attribute the content to this blog. It's the sociable approach.

I suggest that if you wish to do insightful and meaningful essays and articles on these subjects that you take advantage of the net and do some homework. An obscure general blog like this isn't a very good source given that there are many sites that explicitly focus on the subject and have a wealth of information including peer reviewed papers from credentialed authors.

Even though you are running an advocacy site your credibility will be better if your sources are not just other advocates and popularizers with agendas. That's the meaningless political circle jerk, noise in the system that masks good information. Get real. Let your opinion pieces in service of your beliefs be based on evidence rather than merely other opinions. The evidence still needs analysis, and there are often multiple conclusions that can be reasonably drawn from that evidence, but the differing analyses can be useful in that they identify where more and better evidence is needed.