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NEW YORK, March 8, 2012 (by Mark Bittman, NY Times): It is pretty well established that animals are capable of suffering; we’ve come a long way since Descartes famously compared them to nonfeeling machines put on earth to serve man. No matter where you stand on this spectrum, you probably agree that it’s a noble goal to reduce the level of the suffering of animals raised for meat in industrial conditions.
That is perhaps difficult when people eat an average of a half-pound of meat daily. But as better fake plant-based “meat” products are created, that option becomes more palatable. But I have felt, if you want to eat less meat, why not just eat more of other real things? But in October I visited a place in The Hague called The Vegetarian Butcher, where the “butcher” said to me, “We slaughter soy.”
Really: Would I rather eat cruelly raised, polluting, unhealthful chicken, or a plant product that’s nutritionally similar or superior, good enough to fool me [a food critic] and requires no antibiotics, cutting off of heads or other nasty things?
“When you ‘veganize’ food convincingly,” says Kathy Freston, author of “Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World,” “people can enjoy a healthier, better version of their traditional favorites. And if you know that food won’t hurt your body or the environment and it didn’t cause any suffering to an animal, why wouldn’t you choose it?”
Indeed. This country goes through a lot of chickens: We raise and kill nearly eight billion a year — about 40 percent of our meat consumption, compared with roughly 30 percent beef and 25 percent pork. Chickens are grown so quickly that The Veterinary Record has said that most have bone disease, and many live in chronic pain. (The University of Arkansas reports that if humans grew as fast as chickens, we’d weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday.)
I don’t believe chickens have souls, but it’s obvious they have real lives, consciousness and feeling, and they’re capable of suffering, so any reduction in the number killed each year would be good.
And almost all unbiased people agree that less meat is better than more: for our health, for the environment and certainly for the animals treated as widgets.
See a video of the soy “chickens” here