Behavior Change

I was told to conduct a behavior change assignment in the Environmental Science Communication, or Eco-Rep class recently. The change’s content is to be a vegetarian for an entire week. It requires all the students to avoid eating meat for entire seven days. According to the class organizer’s intention, this will “help Eco-Reps develop sustainable living habits”, and thus “make improvements on a certain behavior to make it greener.” The entire proposal sounded very glorious.

In order to show the class organizer that they are strictly fulfilling the no meat diet requirement, students were required to make a video recording to every meal they will have for the coming week.

Today is my first day of the program. I avoid taking my favorite breakfast of scrambled egg and sausages. I stopped taking beef hamburgers and pizza for lunch. I also didn’t take any roasted pork for dinner which looked very tempting. After a whole day without meat, my only feeling is that I easily got hungry after leaving the dining hall for two hours, even though I had similar amount of food as usual, just without meat in them. The prevalence of hunger in the day made me eager to go to have my next meal as quickly as possible. As soon as I arrived there, my excitement completely vanish as I saw many of my favorite food that I just couldn’t touch since they have a fraction of meat.

I got hungry again only two hours after dinner, yet I still felt proud of myself, since I was always told that converting into a vegetarian is a prideful achievement. This was the longest time in my recent life that I kept not eating meat. It was especially awesome since it took place in the best campus dining hall in all the US colleges. I was able to resist my own desire! Cheers!

Psychological Superiority

As I look back, this superficial sense of pride actually means very little to both me and the society. I was not sure how much did my avoidance of meat today actually helped protect the environment I love. Did the dining halls put less meat into the supply line because they knew I decided not to eat more meat? Where did the meat I was originally going to eat go? Is it dumped? Is it eaten by someone else?

It’s really hard to answer these questions without enough background knowledge. However, I tend to believe that this little amount of meat I didn’t take into my stomach today was either wasted or consumed by other people. No less meat is produced, and no less carbon emission is released because of my behavior change. Now, it may be rotten in some garbage can in the basement of dining hall, or digested in someone else’s gut. After all, it can be originally used to reduce my painful and fatal hungry feeling.  I even start to think that this world will keep producing the same amount of meat even if I keep this behavior change for the rest of my life.

The question comes back again. Why and what am I feeling proud for after all? The behavior change does make me feel better about my sustainable and green decision, but it brings zero practical change to the work around. On the other hand, it increases the amount of wasted food. It takes many animals’ lives and blood and farmers’ hard works to get these pieces of meat. However, I wasted it today to fulfill my homework assignment, or more accurately, to exchange for my need of having some psychological superiority. Yes, I am a vegetarian today. I have more love, more passion, more sustainability, and more everything than you meat eaters around me. My spiritual superiority is so holy and pure.

Horror of Famine

I read a book last month online, called A Woman from Shanghai. It talks about the shocking disasters of two thousand rightists starving to death in a concentration camp in northwestern China in 1960. Some old people from my hometown of Beiwangping, a tiny village in China, told me once about the pain of starving. An old man recalled his feeling in the middle of starvation, saying “I would do anything, even die for you if you give me a basket of cornbread that I can get full.” His story is far less miserable than the rightist prisons’ stories I read in the book.

Exactly from the moment I read those stories, I realized that people will turn into beasts in times of total starvation. People will give up their life, pride, and even any common sense of human just to get rid of the hunger feeling. A person in extreme starvation would actually inhale toxic things that make them feel full, and be happy to die after having this happiness feeling. I hope the disaster of 1960 would never occur, in anywhere, or on anyone. I pray that this would never happen. Let no hunger be felt by anyone. It is the most shameful and dreadful human emotion that one can ever have. I am having this feeling now, not because of famine in western Massachusetts, but a justified and righteous movement called vegetarianism.

Misleading Animal Welfare

Some glorious people of virtue often say that stop eating meat is the best protection of animal welfare. I love animals myself, but it is fairly limited to wild animals. I don’t see any domestic animals worth protecting if they do not make practical uses for human.

Meat is only a portion of the causes for human to devote the tremendous amount of energy and resource into raising domestic animals. Every aspect of an industrialized or agricultural society depended heavily on domestic animals. From the work force in fields to the source of leather, any society after the stage of agriculture is build up on the basement of millions of domestic animals. Exploitation of human to domestic animals exists everywhere. Without it, all results of human’s civilization would suddenly collapse.

With this being clarified, any attempt of trying to connect animal welfare and vegetarianism is totally illogical, since giving domestic animals their total freedom and wellbeing would mean to give up every single aspects of advantage and enjoyments we as human used to have.

Faked Equality of Life

Vegetarianism is often given considered a merciful term, since it has the connotation of reducing animals’ suffering. However, it also states that people would only select plants as their food, an obvious discrimination that is dependent on the destruction of plants. For plants, this ideology is an absolute disaster aiming specifically at them.

Someone says that plants cannot sense pain, but animals can. This theory indicates that they consider plants as a less developed organism, which naturally just deserves less attention and care than the more developed animals. With similar logic, we can make similar conclusion that large mammals deserve better protection than tiny bees. Bacteria deserve less attention than the fully developed dogs and cats. From both practical perspectives and ethical point of view, they are all fallacies.

Most horrifyingly, the decision of eating plants rather than eating animal is made based on that animals generally share more morphological similarities with us. By developing on this theory, a great many more crazy ideas may be proposed just to intensify the conflicts between people with differences.

Glorious Cause of Sustainability

Even for people who care little about animal welfare, another strong support to vegetarianism is that it helps protect the environment. It lowers carbon emission and antibiotic uses. First, these positive influences of vegetarianism are only effective when many people together perform such behavior. Vegetarianism based on individual actions can only lead to the empty emotional superiority I mentioned earlier. If in another case that vegetarianism is conducted through a collective and forced manner, it becomes not only a restriction to personal rights, but also a repression on people’s desire in natural.

Such kind of repression can be even more harmful than any environmental disasters, since it degrades the free flow of human spirit, and challenges the fundamental resource of all human civilization, the desire.

Repression of Natural Desire

Desire is the best character and element in all human nature. It’s perfectly natural for human to want to eat more nutritious food, to live in better houses, or to wear more comfortable clothes. Without this natural tendency to reach for better conditions, human can not establish the greatness of our past, and would certainly stop progressing to a brighter future.

I believe that eating meat is one part of this justified desire. It becomes uncomfortable for most people if they are restricted from eating meat. Not to mention many morphological evidences showing that our body is desired for eating both plant and meat.

With a seemingly righteous cause, vegetarianism affirms that people’s desire of eating a more nutritious and hunger resistant type of food is vicious. From their perspective, this desire is either unnatural or selfish. In short, it advocates that a total demolish of such desire is the ultimate choice. For some uninformed environmentalists, vegetarianism is the sole mean of reaching a bigger goal of protecting the earth by repressing an important part of natural desire.

Failure Example

Similar to vegetarianism, another fatal ideology trying to reach a big goal for the good of all be repressing people’s natural desire is communism. Under such ideal’s planned economy circumstance, government manipulation is the only useful tool in controlling the society. It totally denies that importance of respecting people’s desire. Under it, no innovation or change is necessary, because the decision makers never want to know about the consumers’ preference. People are simply regarded as machines and resources under a powerful authority aiming to demolish people’s desire.

Advocates of communism often state that this unnatural action would ultimately help build up a society of abundance and equality. It seems true if people firmly believe in the beautiful picture that communism has painted. Ultimately, this great goal set with awesome natures and great aspirations will eventually fade away, since the nature that it builds itself upon the depression of human desire would eventually lead to total disasters.

Unnatural and Fallible Ideology

Based on my argument, individualized vegetarianism is useless in saving the environment, except the vast majority of the world’s population start to perform it. This, however, is both impractical and morally wrong. Most importantly, the idea of driving a nature out of human’s mind through strict restriction is fatal too.asdf

Bill Tianyi Ren (任天翼)

Amherst, MA

March 3rd, 2017-中華民國106年3月3日