Call me a (literally) blood-thirsty hypocrite, but I think it's high time for a tirade critical of self-righteous aggressive veganism. I don't see any nutritional or ecological sense in a vegan diet, but most of what gets me mad is when people attack me for about my food choices. The hypocrisy here is that I'm counter-attacking by attacking the vegan diet itself instead of the aggressive nature of it's prosylatizers.
Now, where I agree with vegans is in that "What I eat is nobodies business but mine" is kind of bullshit. One person's dietary choices have a huge impact on labor markets, climate change, the degree of local control in economics and other aspects of society. I'm not ashamed of chewing out a friend for going to dunkin' donuts for example. So, where hard-core vegans feel that animals should never be used or consumed for any reason they're totally wrong, but where they jump on other people, I understand. I've been there. This sounds backwards, I know.
There are two related scientific arguments for devouring the flesh of that which was once cute and cuddly. The nutritional argment and the ecological argument. Nutritionally, the argument can be summed up in one letter and on two digit number: B12! No terrestrial plant product contains any vitamin B12. Period. Barley grass, fermented soy, etc are all among the B12 marketing scams that prey on vegan consumers. These marketing scams and false information sources, however, are neither restricted to land or to the plant kingdom. There's the famous "nutritional yeast" which does contain hydroxycobalamin (B12) but it also contains analogs which block B12 absorbtion in most, but not all, human digestive systems. One bizzare aspect of the common vegan supplements is that there are a few which work for some people, but none that work for evereone. Spirulina is another such product. Research has shown that only 25% of people actually get any B12 from that popular greek algae product, and even those people have to consume a lot to get the benefits. So, failing these "more natural" sources, many vegans turn to the lab-synthesized B12 supplementation in soy-milks and fortified cereals. I've never been one to trust lab-synthesized vitamin supplements, but even if they are getting their vitamins, there's a hole in their logic. That brings us to the ecological argument.
Lab synthesis of B12 is done by major corporations in large, distant laboratories on a hugely centralized, industrial scale. The chemical reactions have significant energy inputs, and very often, they involve bacteria extracted from the rumins (guts) of sheep or cows, or extracted from chickens that are intentionally infected with germs that will kill them. The supplemented material then has to be shipped all around the world in petroleum fuelled vehicles (much petroleum is geologically compressed coral, and thus, not vegan.) To me, this all sounds much, much less sustainable and humane than the beef I eat, from free-range grass fed steer that live 5 miles from my house.
Herding animals has been a path to sustainability for aeons. If we look at history, we see a long period of hunter-gatherers, and then we see the domestication of animals. Cultures that began to herd sheep and a little later, goats, found it much easier to get essential proteins and fats, to survive droughts and extreme cold and to subsist in places where hunters couldn't. Throughout central asia, we see cultures that still herd livestock as they have for 20,000 years. This is a model of sustainability we could all learn from. I refer to these people as herder-gatherers. On the other hand, about 10,000 years ago, the rise of plant farming began between the Tigris and Euphrates. Since then, hundreds of empires have over centralized power, over exploited land-fertility and desertified vast swaths of once arable land. This isn't to say domestication of plants is inherently unsustainable, but it doesn't seem to lend itself to sustainability as much as herding, and so it must be done with great care. One danger faced by hunter-farmers, and later herder-farmers is that we become attached to an area of land and feel obilgated to stay, where herder-gatherers can leave when conditions become to difficult.
Modern permaculturists can learn valuable lessons from herder-gatherers. Even on the scale of 5 acres, using rotational grazing techniques such as the tibetan pattern: horses and goats, cows and then sheep, can allow for more meat and milk production from less land. There are aspects of animal husbandry that apply more to the farmer of domestic plants, and to modern technological circumstances. The vegan criticism that livestalk has to consume food that should go to humans hold absolutely no weight outside of absurd American CAFO operations. In a sustainable system stalks and leaves of black beans, amaranth, oat grass, hemp, quinoa and other unused parts of human food crops are excellent feed for goats, and pressed-seed-oil pulp, dairy wastes and inedible meat scraps are good feeds for pigs. The vegan alternative would be to compost all of those plant wastes. This denies the opportunity to create easy, sustainable B12 in meat and milk (along with complete proteins and fatty acids of course) the opportunity to generate ammonia fuel from urine, biogas and/or fertilizers from manure, and it denies the creation of leather, wool and fur clothing which is essential to winter survival in a world without synthetics. (Which are petroleum based, and so again, not vegan.)
Having concluded the more scientific and historical part of my deconstruction of veganism, there are some more aesthetic/spiritual/moral issues that I also feel strongly about on this topic. First of all, there's the basic ecological fact that all biomass on this planet must have at one point or another been part of an animal. Animals are an essential part of the global ecosystem, and animals eating eachother is absolutely a normal and sustainable part of that energy flow. The Zoastrian burial ritual was to leave a dead person on a 30-foot raised wooden platform next to a vulture breeding ground. Now that's a circle of life. I have to wonder exactly where vegans draw the line as to how long ago a specific piece of biomass was an animal. I fertilize my kale with bone-char so it has extremely high calcium content. Would hard-core vegans eat that kale? Or is it more righteous to burn fossil coral reefs to bring in kale from california because it's fertilized with mined calcium?
I've also never understood why animals are so much more sacred than other kingdoms of life. PETA types will chide the rest of us for being human-centric, but are they not also being considerate only of organisms more similar to us? Do they know that part of being a living human is unconsciously killing billions of microbes a year with our immune system? They tell us that we can't eat cows because they're inteligent. Honestly, if I'm going to cut the most intelligent organisms out of my diet, I'm gonna start with portabellos, and the maybe move to criminis and shitakes.
The third thing here is the most important to me. As I said, B12 supplements (and many, many other aspects of modern "civilization") often nesessarily harm or kill animals as part of the process. Many of our civilization's social and economic problems can be traced to the barriers we've placed between ourselves and the rest of nature, the ecological systems that sustain us. Animals consuming animals is part of that ecological frame-work. It has been since animals have existed. Homo-sapiens have never lived sustainably without consuming animal based foods. Hiding that consumption away in factories and labs and feeling self-righteous is a terrible sin. Developing a respect for the life that sustains us is a sign of our moral character and of our viability on this planet. Some of that life will have leaves and pollen, and some with have hooves or feathers. That is our nature as omnivores and we flee from our nature at our peril.