Volume Matters

At the bus stop today, I got into a conversation with a man who claimed to be a vegetarian. After talking to him for a few minutes, he mentioned that he eats fish. I asked how eating fish doesn't count, not because I was questioning his dedication to the cause or whatever. I was just wondering if it was because of the taste, health reasons, or animal cruelty.

He gave me a really vague answer so I didn't press him on the matter. It got me thinking about it and I decided that eating beef was the most humane form of carnivorism. If you think about it, when you eat a fish, you are consuming the entire life force of another living being in one single meal. When you eat beef, even in a big meal, you couldn't even fully eat an entire leg of a cow.

Let's say an average cow weighs 1,200 lbs and about 1/2 of that, 600 lbs can be ground up. Each Big Mac has around 3.2 oz of meat in it and there are 16 oz to a lb. 16/3.2 = 5 so each lb of beef gives you 5 Big Macs. 600*5 = 3,000 Big Macs.

I could eat Big Macs three meals a day, seven days a week and it would be three years before I will have directly caused the death of another being to sustain my own life. If I had eaten fish each time instead of a big mac, I would have caused the death of 3,000 souls. Imagine if I had eaten shrimp or caviar instead. The death toll would just keep rising.

Why is it that the amount of value we put on a life is based purely on the volume of meat it contains. When a beached whale washes up on the shore, the whole town shows up to help. Yet, if we see a single cockroach on the floor, we scour the room for the quickest way to end it's miserable, puny, volumetricly insignificant existence. If you think about it, size is completely relative. Most people could probably be convinced that placing less value on the lives of animals that are smaller is wrong, but I also believe that putting more value on the lives of creatures larger than us is equally flawed. The whole thing makes me wish dinosaurs were still around. Imagine if we started breeding Brontosaurus for consumption. Not only would they be delicious, but we could all sleep much more soundly knowing that there would be far fewer angry animal ghosts haunting our nightmares.