Why Vegan? – Walk Together Ministries

At the end of June this year, Joe happened to bring home a kid’s cookbook from the library that unknowingly was vegan. Enzo and I started going through it, making things in the cookbook and reading the facts and information that were spread throughout the book. Prior to this, we’ve been eating a mostly Paleo diet, lots of meat and eggs every day. I was back to eating dairy daily, however it seemed that it was really bothering Emilia’s stomach through breastfeeding, so I fully cut out dairy around May. To transition to veganism, I just needed to replace the meat and eggs with plant based proteins like beans and lentils.

I’ve only known a couple of people who are vegan and it’s something I’ve always thought about but never really looked into and I never thought I’d be able to give up the things I was eating. After reading through that vegan kid’s cookbook, the documentary What the Health came out. I happened to see someone post about it on Facebook and I watched it out of curiosity. It’s what pushed me to initially start eating vegan. I went on to start researching and learning more about the meat, egg, and dairy industries. I watched the Forks Over Knives and Vegucated documentaries (both on Netflix) which I highly recommend and I did a tremendous amount of online research to confirm what I had seen.

Ethical Impact (Animal Cruelty)

What ultimately drove me to call myself a vegan was seeing how inhumane and harsh the animals are treated. It really clicked for me that there is no difference between a cow or a pig and my dogs who are loved and sleep in our bed. Those animals (cows, pigs, sheep, goats, etc.) are all sentient beings meaning they have the ability to perceive and feel things. They care for their young, form bonds with their own species and could even form bonds with humans given the chance. Here’s an awesome infographic about ways these animals are sentient (feeling). They deserve to live their lives without fear, suffering and pain just like our pets. When I was talking about this issue with someone, they said “Well, there are animals for pets and animals for food.” Who decided why it’s okay to torture and kill some animals for our pleasure (food, clothing, entertainment, etc.) and why it’s okay for some animals to be loved and cared for? Why do some animals have a moral value and some do not? If a factory farm for dog meat seems immoral why is a factory farm for cows okay?

Common Practices

Did you know that in some states it is illegal to record inside of a factory farm? The laws, called Ag Gag Laws, criminalize investigative journalists and animal protection advocates who take entry-level jobs at factory farms in order to document the rampant food safety and animal welfare abuse. The ability to film inside these farms and uncover animal abuse and health issues have directly led to America’s largest meat recalls, as well as to the closure of several slaughterhouses that had cruel animal handling practices. If these laws and pending bills in the U.S. pass, it will put the animals at even more risk as well as consumers. This illustrates just how desperate these industries are to keep this information from getting out. For example, Iowa passed Senate File 431 and House File 589 that prohibits anyone from producing, possessing, or distributing a record of a “visual or audio experience occurring at [an] animal facility.”

There are numerous practices found in factory farming that are considered industry standard and are therefore exempt from animal cruelty laws. If we watched these practices happening, we would likely consider them inhumane. This also isn’t including the actual slaughter. There is no way to humanely slaughter an animal that does not want to die. I do recognize that there are farms (such as small, local farms) that may raise their animals in a better way and not subject them to the things listed above. However, the animals are still being killed before the end of their natural life. Did you know that dairy cows can live to be about 20 years old but are usually killed for beef around 4-5 years old? It’s important to understand that all animals bred and raised for food, clothing, etc. are killed regardless if they are raised free range or organic.

These animals lives are not mine to take and I don’t want someone else taking that life because I like the taste of meat. Especially when there are so many delicious plant-based alternatives.

Some of those common practices include but are not limited to:

250 million male chicks are born into the U.S. egg industry each year and are killed immediately after birth by being thrown into trash bags alive to suffocate (yes thrown away alive!) or ground alive by a machine. These babies are born into an industry intentionally through breeding and are then immediately killed because they can’t lay eggs and are not the right type of chicken to be raised for meat.
Piglets are castrated, have their tails amputated and their teeth clipped all without any anesthetic very shortly after birth.
Cattle can be subjected to branding, castration, dehorning, ear tagging, and nose ringing all without anesthetic.
Male calves born into the dairy industry (deemed useless because they can’t produce milk) are raised as veal and often times kept in very small stalls for months to immobilize them and prevent muscle development resulting in more tender, pale flesh.
Dairy cows have to become pregnant in order to produce milk and are routinely artificially inseminated.
Dairy cow’s babies are taken from them shortly after birth which is very traumatic for both mom and baby. The milk meant for that baby is then used for human consumption.
Once a dairy cow is “spent” and no longer makes enough milk (usually in 4-5 years), she collapses from shear exhaustion and she is killed. Naturally, dairy cows could live 20 years. See below for a 5 minute video showing how scary dairy really is (please excuse the language and there are some graphic images).

Health Impact

There is a lot of research pointing to the many health benefits of a whole foods plant-based diet. According to the American Dietetics Association, “vegetarian/vegan diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) and lower overall cancer rates. Vegetarian/vegan diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals.” There are numerous people who have reversed these diseases and eliminated most or all of their medications through a healthy vegan diet.

After deciding to be vegan, I started doing more research about nutrition and how to make sure our family was getting everything we needed. I met with a nutritionist who is very knowledgeable about veganism and talked with Enzo’s pediatrician to make sure it was okay to transition him to this diet as well. The American Dietetic Association has a position paper highlighting the many benefits of a vegetarian/vegan diet and states:

It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

Based on my research and my work with the nutritionist/pediatrician, it’s possible to get all of your required nutrients including protein, calcium and iron through a vegan diet. The one exception is vitamin B12. If we can supplement with B12 and live a cruelty-free, healthy lifestyle, then why not? There are many B12 supplements available and many products are fortified with B12 as well including cereals and plant-based milks. Here’s a good article that talks about B12 a bit more.

Protein, calcium and iron are all readily available from plant sources. Some great resources for plant-based nutrition can be found here, here and here. Though I am a huge proponent of the vegan diet, I am not a nutritionist and I highly recommend that anyone who wants to become vegan work with a professional to be sure all of your nutritional needs are being met.

Well isn’t meat healthy? The World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies processed meat (bacon, deli meat, sausage, etc.) as “carcinogenic to humans” and red meat as “probably carcinogenic” to humans. They didn’t complete one study to determine this but evaluated evidence from more than 800 epidemiological studies on cancer and red and processed meat. Based on those studies, they felt that there was enough evidence to classify these meats as cancer-causing. After learning about this in the What the Health documentary, I knew I had to cut meat out of my diet, especially processed meat. Tobacco and asbestos are considered Group 1 carcinogens (meaning they are proven to be carcinogenic to humans) and so is processed meat! If I avoid tobacco because I know it has been shown to cause cancer, I also want to avoid processed meats for the same reason.

Environmental Impact

Eating a vegan diet has been shown to be the single largest thing that we can do to decrease our environmental impact. According to the USGS Water Science School, one quarter pound hamburger takes over 460 gallons of water to produce. It takes a lot of water to grow the grain/corn to feed the cow as well as the water the animal needs to drink. “Per kilogram of product, animal products generally have a larger water footprint than crop products” (USGS Water Science School). More than half of the water used in the U.S. today goes to animal agriculture.

Did you know that animals produce 130 times more excrement than the human population and the run-off from the waste is getting into our waterways. That animal excrement also emits gases such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia which gets into the air around the farms, as well as methane and nitrous oxide that contribute to global warming. Rainforest deforestation is also taking place to raise soy and grains to feed the animals that we eat. Time Magazine reported that “40% of the world’s land surface is used for the purposes of keeping all 7 billion of us fed. And the vast majority of that land — about 30% of the word’s total ice-free surface — is used not to raise grains, fruits and vegetables that are directly fed to human beings, but to support the chickens, pigs and cattle that we eventually eat.” If we instead used that land to grow crops to feed humans, we would be a lot more efficient and on our way to ending the world’s hunger problems.