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Was perusing Jack Morgan's blog for, admittedly, the first time after David Horton gave a shout out, and was struck by a little animated link from PETA in the bottom corner. The link is a calculator for the amount of carbon emission you would save over the course of your life by switching to a vegan diet. This brought me back to a topic I spent a lot of time on in another blogging life (a livejournal page that no one's ever seen)- the complexities of questions dealing with the health of humans. In this case, the argument is over the health of the planet, though PETA also has plenty of material on the health of humans vis-a-vie vegan diets, and the underlying issues for me are the same.

Anyone who knows me knows I eat a hell of a lot of meat, so bias will certainly show through. The start of my argument is that PETA provides no analysis of their claim, except that the calculations are based on life expectancy. What you have to assume is that they are doing some side-by-side comparison of daily consumption of omnivores and herbivores and multiplying by the number of days each is expected to live. What exactly are they comparing though? Is it calorie for calorie? Meal for meal? Certainly there are a hell of a lot of calories in a pound of meat, more than several pounds of grain. Meat, however, is extremely economical in terms the array of essential amino acids it offers per pound. If you take that array and try to get it out of unprocessed vegetable matter, you are no longer talking about a pound for pound comparison. Again, I would need to see the data behind PETA's analysis to figure out what the claim actually is. If they are merely doing carbon-emmision analysis of what typical omnivores and typical herbivores do eat, that's not terribly satisfying from a human health perspective- the vast majority of us, vegans and animal killers alike, eat horrible diets. They are likely relying on a calculus of the amount of vegetable matter that gets wasted feeding to an animal that a human could just directly consume- discounting the function of turning that vegetable matter into essential amino acids we need to form tissues the animal plays for us (and that bold little bit of instrumentalism will draw the ethical line in the sand for anyone paying attention). To make the analysis satisfying, you'd have to start with what sort of a diet, both vegan and otherwise, would actually feed a human animal (and you would further have to talk about the genetic makeup of that animal, i.e. is it an animal whose ancestors cultivated rice millenia ago and who is lactose intolerant or an animal whose ancestors lived through an ice age ten thousand years ago and ate mostly meat for centuries), and then do the carbon analysis. I don't want to know what the carbon imprint of any diet is that isn't actually fit for a human.

The second half of the analysis would be of farming practices. Certainly factory farming of animals is without defense, but so is factory farming of vegetables. The petroleum dependency of Big Ag is headed for doom at the same rate as the depletion of grazing land (which of these operations even grazes their corn-fed cattle and poultry anyways). Each industry kills plenty of animals in destroying habitats and sucking up rodents into farm tools (don't think the wheat thresher that brought you your Kashi whole grain cereal didn't decapitate a few ground hogs on the way)- one just sells a dead animal as its end product, the other kills animals and sells you guilt-free vegetables.

I'm trying not to revel in this. It's rare that a poet picks a fight I'm interested in. So, if you stumble on this Jack, or PETA- where's the beef?