I have been studying diets for about a decade now and find it to be a fascinating subject. There’s so much to learn and experiment with that I can understand how people can give their lives over to trying to understand not just the physical effects of diet but the moral and social aspects of it as well.
I have always been fascinated by the Vegans who seem to be absolutely convinced their way is not only best for you physically in spite of boatloads of evidence to the contrary but also is the morally superior diet. However, I’ve never seen a vegan suggest something that struck me as absolutely evil. That changed today.
Western Michigan University “Medical Ethics” professors Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth have released a paper this week arguing that we should purposely infect people with a tick-borne illness called Alpha-Gal Syndrome that makes people alergic to red meat. An idea so preposterous that I thought it was for sure a joke but it seems that these two men are earnest in their belief and have issued a peer-reviewed paper justifying it.
Imagine being so confident in your views about the right diet for mankind that you are willing to infect people with a disease to enforce it. Absolutely staggering hubris. And they don’t stop at saying it’s a good idea, they go so far as to say it is “morally obligatory”. They are telling you that they are so sure that veganism is ethically correct that they are morally obligated to infect you with a disease to make sure you can’t eat red meat.
This idea is so staggeringly bad that I’m not even sure what is the best way to attack it so I’m going to give you 3 quick reasons you should eat meat and then finish with what I believe is the glaringly obvious conclusion.
You Kill Fewer Animals When You Eat Meat
When you are farming, you have to make sure nothing else is eating your crop so that means killing everything else in the field. Pesticides for the bugs and shotguns for the boars and other wildlife. You have to protect your crop from the things that want to eat it because it can’t protect itself. None of that is necessary for ranching besides occasionally dealing with a few wolves. Then you slaughter the one cow and it can be enough meat to feed one person for 6 months to a year. If you are just concerning yourself with total number of deaths, eating one cow is much less death the millions of bugs and varmits you have to kill to protect your crop. John Dutton probably explains it better than I do.
Monocrop Agriculture is Much Worse for the Environment Than Ranching
Monocrop agriculture strips the land of nutrients so badly we have to constantly spray it with fertilizers and other chemicals just to get a harvest. All those chemicals don’t just stay where they are spread but run off into our water table and cause the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of America where almost nothing can live. These are very real environmental impacts to our large-scale monocrop agriculture.
Contrast that with regenerative ranching and you have the animals restoring the soil with their waste causing it be for more biodiverse and be able to absorb more rainwater. Ever wonder why the midwest floods every time it rains? It’s because we have stripped the topsoil down so thin it can’t absorb any rainfall. Regenerative Agriculture can also cause it to rain more because the more plants in an area, the rain falls.
We Evolved Because We Ate Meat
We didn’t evolve TO eat meat, we evolved BECAUSE we ate meat. Our ape-like ancestors would ferment plants in their intestines to create the fatty acids they needed to live. As we began to get that fat from eating other mammals, we no longer needed to invest all that energy into digestion so we could use that energy for more important things like growing bigger brains for problem solving. Not a bad trade off!
This is an important thing to remember because every vegan that tries to convince you that you were born to only eat plants is asking you to take very large steps back down the evolutionary ladder. We are not apes, we need meat. Infecting people with a disease that makes it that much harder to get our nutrition from meat is going to cause a lot of harm to a lot of people.
It’s Bad to Infect People With Diseases
Finally, and again I can’t believe I even have to say this, you shouldn’t be infecting people with diseases. You sure shouldn’t be calling yourself a bioethicist if you are advocating for making people sicker. I am reminded of the long journey through covid where we found out that our government funded the creation of the virus that caused the epidemic. Why did they do that? Because they just knew it was the right thing to do. Same reason these guys give for infecting people with Alpha-Gal.
Hopefully no one ever takes this idea seriously or tries to implement it but it still shocks me that any serious person would even suggest it.
