A few vegan products

Commoditization is all around us. Health care is being commoditized, media is being commoditized, and even veganism is being commoditized. Is this a problem?

Actually, yes, it is a big problem.  Initially we might think that vegan commodities can compete in the marketplace with the best non-vegan commodities, and that vegan ideas can also compete in the marketplace of ideas.  We certainly should try to advance veganism in whatever ways we can, but commoditization has serious adverse effects both on veganism and on society at large.  I want to explain why this is, so that we can explore ways of dealing with it.

What is commoditization? Check out, if you can find it, the book Privileged Goods by Jack Manno. (Try interlibrary loan.) You can get the basics of his thesis, which he elaborates at length, in just the first few chapters.  His basic point is that some things make good commodities, and others don’t.  Things that are standardized, easily transported, can easily be assigned property rights, have embedded energy and knowledge, and are stable and predictable, etc., make good commodities.

Here are two lists of things which fill similar needs.  (This is taken from Manno’s book, p. 27).  First is a list of some high commodity potential goods, and then there is a second list of things in the same general category of needs which are low commodity potential goods.

High Commodity Potential
Barbie dolls
Commercial fertilizers
Mass marketed drugs
Hospital supplies
Fossil fuels
Mind-altering drugs
Junk bonds

Low Commodity Potential
Group play
Knowledge of soils
Knowledge of healing
Life style changes
Energy conservation strategies
Friendship
Personal loans

Our economic system favors the first list over the second, even when items from the second list might be a better answer to the actual need involved. This leads to distortions in the economy.  Is it a problem?  You bet.  Take a quick look at the problems our society faces, then think about the above two lists.  Manno discusses this dispassionately and in some depth in his book, which is really worth reading for this reason.

So does this affect veganism?  Yes, and here are three examples.

1. The marketing of medicine.

The way to make money in medicine is through big ticket items and standardized treatments like bariatric surgery and pills. It is hard to make money at being a vegan expert, even if you are somewhat famous like Dr. McDougall.  Can they make money at what they do?  Well, sort of.  You can write a book or two, but any author can tell you that even if you are a good writer, this is not the quick route to riches and wealth. There is basically a limited market for this sort of thing.

The basic reason why bariatric surgery sells better than veganism is that what vegans are really selling is knowledge of basic nutrition. That is not something that can even be privately owned. Eating eggs and bacon cheeseburgers is bad; sprouts, grains, lentils, and green leafy vegetables are good.  Now you know.  This is not something that Mr. Capitalist Entrepreneur can make lots of money doing.  You could consult with individuals as an M. D. or a nutritionist, but even that takes special training, and is not something that can be mass marketed and standardized, and even then it is not a “big ticket” item like surgery.

The marketing of medicine is Exhibit A of the problems that commoditization creates for vegans.

2. Magazine articles and the mass media

James McWilliams’ recent blog “Vapid” explores this problem:

Big media generally relish stories that challenge the status quo, but here’s the rub:  only so long as advertisers aren’t threatened. I’ve heard from several reliable sources—one of them an editor at a major magazine—that advertisers have become so dominant in print media that they’re now insisting their ads run next to “upbeat” stories. Ever wonder why foodie magazines dedicated to the world of cuisine won’t go near an article questioning the ethics of eating animals? Advertising would vanish. One editor who’s published some of my writing on-line has claimed that my articles would “sink” a mainstream print magazine.  I realize this may be old news for an adbuster generation, but it bears repeating.

Uh, I rest my case.  The basic message is that anything that’s critical of the status quo of our industrial civilization is going to have a hard time making in the mainstream media: it doesn’t sell the ads that go with it.  But most of the problems in our society could be dealt with in ways that not only don’t involve making money, but would threaten the abilities of people who are currently making money (by peddling pills and death) to continue making money.

3. Vegan diets and Tofurky.

Commoditization even leads to distortions in vegan diets and activism.  It’s easier to buy meat and dairy analogs like Tofurky and soy milk, than it is to throw together a good soup, make your favorite salad, or try out the latest in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  Now I’m not above eating Tofurky on occasion, but basically a lot of “mass produced” vegan food just isn’t that good for you, and people need to understand this.

Outreach is one time when commoditization may actually work to the vegans’ advantage. You can just point to the supermarket shelf and say, “here, buy this,” and you’re done.  Some outreach groups promoting veganism will specifically promote these off-the-shelf products, for example VegFund, which suggests this sort of food sampling:

You should serve samples that are eye-opening to non-vegans and will help them transition away from animal products.  Examples include vegan mock meats, non-dairy milks, vegan cheese or ice cream, and vegan versions of egg-based products (e.g., tofu scramble).

But it is widely recognized within the vegan community that these off-the-shelf foods aren’t usually the best. Many experienced vegans will smile and roll their eyes when you talk about meat analogs.  Better than meat, they will say, but not the best way to “do” veganism.  But, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, these off-the-shelf products aren’t always healthy.  In fact, some of them, that use soy protein isolate, are downright unhealthy.

I’m not suggesting that we stop doing food sampling with Tofurky.  However, it is a problem, because we want healthy vegans.  We also want people not just to become vegans, but to remain vegans.  For this to happen, you need more than Tofurky. Once people are introduced to veganism and see how easy it can be, then we can bring them to the next step, which is knowledge of healthy foods and how to cook and live vegan. Fortunately, there is a whole vibrant community of activists and individuals (Meetup groups and the like) who can be relied upon to furnish this sort of ongoing education.

Commoditization is a general problem, not just a problem for vegans. Our culture is a consumer culture and everything has been commercialized. This is a problem first of all because sometimes something that can’t be readily commoditized is actually the best answer to a need.  But all the energy, money, and resources are going to the things that can be commoditized.  It’s also a problem because this kind of exploitation of nature just can’t continue anyway, because we’ve cut up, dried up, exhausted, and sold off most of the earth already.  Environmentalists have been talking about this basic problem for decades.  No one has been paying attention (there’s no market for it! except perhaps selling solar panels), and now the bill has come due.

Veganism is a necessary part of the solution. Veganism isn’t something you get off the shelf; it’s a way of life.  This is the ultimate message we should be promoting.

There are several significant problems, though.  What do we mean by “human” and what we mean by “natural”?  Unless we separate out what we mean by all this, the arguments will be endless and unresolvable.  And there is one key issue, megafaunal extinctions in the past 100,000 years or so, which can most easily be explained on the basis of the dominance of hunting, and which is very related to human evolution.

So what is “human”?  Are we talking “homo sapiens,” “homo erectus,” Australopithecus, or what? How far back do you want to go? Anatomically modern humans go back about 200,000 years before the present (BP).  But other hominid ancestors go back millions of years BP.  And what do we mean by “natural”?  Do we just mean what humans, historically, ate at an earlier time?  Or do we mean the diet on which they do the best, however that is defined?

If you go back far enough, yes, indeed, we are vegetarian.  There seems to be agreement that Austrolopithecus, four million years ago, was basically frugivorous.  Because genetic changes occur over much longer time frames even than this, you can make a good health argument that humans are naturally evolved to eat a vegetarian diet. This is in accord with modern studies, such as the China Study, which show the same thing; humans thrive on a plant-based diet.

However, at some point in prehistory hunting enters the scene, and it is a well-established behavior by the time humans “officially” made their entrance onto the stage, about 200,000 years BP.  While it is true that hominids were initially scavengers, not hunters, between about 2 million and 1.7 million years BP, there was a dramatic increase in the height of hominids. (See “Animal Source Foods and Human Health during Evolution,” by Clark Spencer Larsen, J. Nutr. 133: 3893S.3897S, 2003.) This was probably related to hunting and meat consumption.

But then, sometime later, there was a spectacular series of extinctions of large mammals (such as the wooly mammoth, saber-toothed cats, American lion, etc.), which went hand-in-hand with human migrations over the globe.  Further along, about 10,000 years BP, there was a food crisis of some sort because all the easy animals to hunt were essentially gone.  The book The Food Crisis in Prehistory, by Mark Nathan Cohen, postulates that it was population pressure that was the motive force behind the development of agriculture.  Overhunting not only killed off the big animals, it also forced humans to find another source of food.

Scientists debate the outline I have presented above. But it seems likely to me that this is pretty much correct, and that humans were responsible for these megafaunal extinctions through overhunting.  Even though our genetic makeup hasn’t changed that much in the last 10,000 years, or the last million years for that matter, hunting very definitely did have an impact on human evolution.  We are a much different species today both in numbers (billions) and range (everywhere), due in no small part to hunting.  It’s not necessarily a good thing that we hunted these species to extinction, but it happened and it had an impact both on us and the world around us.  Furthermore, “homo sapiens” has been eating meat in substantial amounts throughout its existence during the past 200,000 years.

So I think that Freston’s comment that “humans are natural vegetarians” is correct if we go back far enough, say to 4 million years ago.  But we should keep in mind that this is well before when “homo sapiens” officially entered the scene, and at that point hunting was an already well-established behavior.

We would do best to tell the story as we find it, and resist the temptation to cite data piecemeal when it happens to support a predetermined narrative, even a narrative that we like. The emerging story, one of human meat-eating which causes massive and negative environmental changes even in prehistory, is one that in my mind supports the case for veganism even more strongly than the fact that our distant ancestors lived on fruits, nuts, and green leaves.

Too Smart for our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind

Wow, what a book! Craig Dilworth, a Canadian professor of philosophy, has written a significant new book on our ecological predicament. I hope that everyone who is interested in any sort of environmental issues, including and especially vegans, should take a look at this book.

Dilworth is not content just to rehash the standard anguish over the environment, but to show where our environmental problems really come from.  They come from our very nature as a species — from our own inventiveness.

Whenever humans are faced with shortages, they come up with a new technology.  This could be anything from how to start a fire all the way to a modern computer, and everything in between — agriculture, the wheel, and the steam engine.   The result of this innovation is that — it works!  The shortages are alleviated, new resources are discovered or made available, and in fact a surplus is created.  But as a result of this surplus, consumption increases and so does population.  Eventually, increased consumption and population catch up with us, and we are faced with shortages all over again, which makes a new technology necessary.

Dilworth calls this the “vicious circle principle”: we get ourselves out of one fix, only to land in another, depleting resources as we go.  It is not our failures that are the problem, but our successes.  We are too smart for our own good.

Malthus was on the right track when he said that population tends to overshoot the food supply, which can only be corrected by misery or vice.  But Malthus was wrong on several counts.  First, these shortages could be things other than food; and second, Malthus overlooked the role of technology.  Dilworth shows that the very factor that Malthus overlooked is the key to understanding our environmental dilemma. Technology makes new resources available, resulting in surplus, increased consumption, increased population, and then a new scarcity.  This circle continues until at some point all the earth’s resources are exhausted.  At that point — well, that’s where we are right now.

Why this book is convincing

This book convinces me for a number of reasons.  There is a strong interdisciplinary focus.  These are not vague generalizations, a la Michael Pollan, together with a sermon.  He dips into everything from evolutionary biology to basic physics.  There is too much specialization these days, and our human problems overlap numerous disciplines; in fact there is scarcely a discipline which is untouched, from physics to anthropology.  Dilworth demonstrates a clear technical grasp of all of these.

Many years ago, I read Mark Nathan Cohen’s book The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture, which deeply influenced me.  Dilworth quotes Cohen a lot and clearly approves of his work. Cohen’s thesis — that food shortages in prehistory were the driving force behind the introduction of agriculture — immediately made sense to me.  It’s a bit counter-intuitive, because it is hard to think of the world as being “overpopulated” when there were only three million humans on the entire planet, but of course this overpopulation is relative to the hunter-gatherer technology of the day.  In fact, pre-agricultural humans drove many well-known large animal species to extinction, such as the wooly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger, and many others.  Humans were running out of animals to kill, so they turned to a new technology, agriculture.  Just as the “easy animals” were gone when we turned to agriculture 10,000 years ago, so the “easy oil” is gone in our contemporary society.

Dilworth also refers to Herman Daly (co-author of Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications) and the discipline of ecological economics, which deals with the same issue of technology and resource depletion from the point of view of modern economics.  New technologies all have the same result; they tend to further exploit existing resources.

It is this discussion, stretching across multiple disciplines, which convinces me that we are not just dealing neither with an ethical problem of “greed,” nor with a political or an economic problem.   We are dealing with a biological problem.  By the way, Dilworth has some impressive blurbs in his support from people like Herman Daly and David Pimentel.

Need some empirical support before buying this idea?  The bulk of Dilworth’s book is an overview of the last 7 million years, right up to the present day.  He goes back to apes, protohominids, and Austrolopithecus (up to 7 millions ago) to show that “tinkering” is part of our nature.  It is part of our species’ “karyotype.”  Our ecological predicament arises not out of greed, or a perverse political or economic system, but out of our very nature.

So what does this mean?

Oh no, human nature is the problem!  What can we do, if this view is true?  Can we change human nature?  Kate (my wife) suggested that perhaps a better and shorter title for Dilworth’s book is We’re Toast.  Dilworth himself, in this YouTube video, seems to think that humankind is headed for near-term extinction.

Craig Dilworth on the future of humankind (YouTube)

I don’t think that the acceptance of Dilworth’s theory necessarily means that this is “the end.”  Rather, it helps us to identify what the problem is and what therefore needs to be done (if anything).  Specifically, we should stop worrying about coming up with better solar panels or more efficient car engines, because that doesn’t address the real problem. It’s with the exploitation of the surplus that is the result of our inventiveness.

One possibility is that this is the end of homo sapiens, but that a biological successor or relative of homo sapiens might come along that could restrain its urge to deplete resources.  I have no idea how this might happen or how much and what kind of genetic modification would be necessary.  Something like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” maybe?  There is a science fiction novel, The Windup Girl, in which there are genetically modified humans who are created as a servant race for humans in a future world of catastrophic global warming and resource depletion. The heroine of the novel (and “title character”), in fact, is just such a human. At the end of the novel, it is suggested that these genetically modified humans may actually be more fit than the original “natural” version.

The second possibility is that while our tendency to deplete resources is part of our genetic makeup, there are other aspects either of culture or biology that could override it. There are many things which are part of our nature, which circumstances can override.  One interesting example is population control. As Dilworth points out, as well as Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, infanticide was the primary method of population control until very recently.  Now you know that killing your own infant child has to be a terrible thing, and the instinct to protect one’s own children has to be very strong for straightforward evolutionary reasons.  Yet this primitive and natural urge can be overridden by external factors.

So if we can override the basic instinct to take care of our young, why can’t we override the basic instinct to tinker and consume resources?  Clearly this wouldn’t be easy.  It’s likely that there would need to be some traumatic event to trigger such a modification to our social structure and spread it over the entire world.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible, and we might want to devote some thought to what this would mean and how it could be carried out. In fact, it could be argued that this is just what “ecological economics” is trying to do. Perhaps Dilworth’s next book, which he says will be titled “Simplicity,” will give us some further insights.

Thanks for writing this, Dr. Dilworth.

And yet there is only minimal awareness of “peak oil” in the general public, and zero political discussion.  Why isn’t “peak oil” catching on?

Maybe it is catching on . . .

Some people, of course, argue that peak oil is catching on.  James Schlesinger, the first U. S. Secretary of Energy under President Carter, said in 2007 that the peak oil debate is over, and that the “peakists” have won.  Kurt Cobb recently wrote an article arguing that the peak oil debate is (almost) over.  He cited the aphorism, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.”  Cobb argues that we have gone through the first two stages (silence and ridicule) and are now in the third stage.

Well, peak oil is catching on to a certain extent, depending on the audience.  There are roughly three levels of debate about peak oil: the experts, the informed public, and the general public.  Schlesinger’s comments apply to the experts; there is no real debate here.  Cobb’s comments apply to the informed public; probably in a few years, opinion pieces in major newspapers will turn decisively in favor of the peak oil theory.

But that still leaves us with the general public and the political process, where progress is agonizingly slow.  In the long run awareness of peak oil is inevitable, but I wish to suggest three key factors which are retarding awareness.  These are:

Peak Oil isn’t Palpable

Oil supplies have not yet started declining.  They have stopped growing, even though there is a desperate demand for oil.  Most in the peak oil community expected that the peak, whenever it came, would be relatively “sharp”: one year oil production would be increasing, the next year it would be decreasing.  Instead, there has been a long plateau since 2005 in which oil supplies have only marginally budged in either direction.  It is significant, though, that oil supplies are not increasing, either, despite record high prices, indicating to rational minds that we have run into a fundamentally new reality.

No Plan to Deal with Peak Oil

There is no agreement on any plan to deal with peak oil.  Opinion even within the peak oil community is all over the place. It is interesting, also, that “peak oil” attracts people on both sides of the political spectrum.  Most are politically on the left, but there are significant conservatives like Roscoe Bartlett, a Republican Congressional representative from Maryland.

Perhaps the “conventional” peak oil view is for heavy development of solar and wind, conservation, and sometimes nuclear. But Robert Hirsch argues for coal-to-oil and developing the tar sands.  The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) and Herman Daly argue for a radical transformation of society into a “steady state” economy at a lower level of consumption.  Others foresee a collapse to the pre-industrial levels of the 18th century (Gail Tverberg), or to an even more primitive, agrarian communal lifestyle (Derrick Jensen).

The lack of a plan does not stop awareness of peak oil, it just holds it back.  The impact is psychological.  Thomas Kuhn noted in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that an old scientific paradigm is not replaced just because the facts contradict the old paradigm.  It is only replaced when there is a new paradigm, which does explain the facts, to replace it.  This new paradigm is what we do not have.

Peak Oil is part of “Limits to Growth”

The real problem actually is not peak oil at all, but limits to growth.  This is strongly related to the previous point; the reason that no consensus even within the peak oil community has emerged is largely because the peak oil community itself has not fully digested the implications of the Limits to Growth hypothesis, first put forward in a book of that name in 1972.

That the real problem is limits to growth, doesn’t mean that we don’t have a problem with peak oil.  We do indeed.  It is just to say that oil is not the only problem, but just the most obvious and unavoidable problem.  If oil were the only resource problem, it would be much easier to face.  But there are impending shortages of a lot of different things, due to the fact that our economic system depends on natural resources which are sorely being overused.  Climate change is a form of the “limits to growth” problem; we have run out of storage space for the waste products of our fossil-fuel burning activity, which currently are dumped into the atmosphere.

Many forms of renewable and alternative energy, such as wind turbines, solar PV, and electric cars, depend on the “rare earth” metals.  But these “rare earth” metals are themselves in short supply.  Moreover, even if we could wave a magic wand and solve oil depletion, we would still face the issue of climate change.  Even if we waved a second magic wand and solved climate change, we would still face the realities of massive soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and deforestation.  All of these are undermining the basis of agriculture on earth, and all of these beg for the rapid transition to a largely vegetarian or vegan diet.

It is the combination of these three factors which is responsible for holding back the spread of awareness of peak oil.  If we had a palpable and undeniable fall in oil production, or if the peak oil community was united around a single plan to deal with the problem, or if oil were the only resource problem we faced, awareness would be a lot quicker in coming.  When oil supplies will start to fall (the first factor) is unknown.  But we can work towards a plan to deal with peak oil, and spread awareness of the more general problem of limits to growth, to alleviate the second and third factors.  If we do this, we will promote and accelerate knowledge of peak oil and its critical impact on human existence.

A book about the disciples of Jesus would typically start with Jesus himself: first there was Jesus, then he had disciples.  This book suggests a fundamentally different story: first there was a movement, then Jesus emerged as its leader. This movement is known to history as “Jewish Christianity” — Jews who followed both the Jewish law, as they understood it, and also followed Jesus, as they understood him, and persisted in this even after the rest of Christianity became a gentile religion.

Vegetarianism is an integral part of this story.  One key belief of Jewish Christianity, dropped by the later church, was its objections to the Jerusalem temple.  They saw the practice of animal sacrifice in the temple as a bloody and barbaric business.  In their view, Jesus gave his life when he disrupted the temple business during Passover week.  Instead of animal sacrifice, they practiced an alternative ritual, baptism in flowing water, and were vegetarians.

However, it was just this issue which was the most divisive in the early church.  The upshot was that there was a split in the church between Paul and gentile Christianity on the one hand, and the Jerusalem Church under the leadership of James on the other.  The church has essentially never recovered from this split.

Jewish Christianity interacted with a number of different groups in the ancient world, and took a variety of different forms. Some of these groups are well known to the public, like the Essenes, but some of them are quite obscure, like the Elkasaites and Mandaeans.  The chief Jewish Christian group was known as “Ebionites,” derived from the Hebrew ebionim, meaning “the poor,” and much of the book concerns the Ebionites and their history and literature.  One of the most fascinating sub-plots of Jewish Christianity concerns tracing the influence of Jewish Christianity in gnosticism, Islam, and in Eastern religion.

There are many things about Jewish Christianity that we do not know.  But Disciples shows that we can know a great deal about this group so critical in the formation of Christianity: its origins, its key ideas, and its most palpable influences.  In short, we can know its history, a history which Disciples tells in an accessible way for the first time.

Here’s the outline:

Preface

Part I.  The Problem of Jewish Christianity

1. What is Jewish Christianity?
2. How Other Christians saw Jewish Christianity
3. How the Jewish Christians Saw Themselves

Part II. Jewish Christianity Before Jesus

4. The Prophets, the Lost Tribes, and Galilee
5. Ebionite Mythology
6. The Pythagoreans
7. The Essenes

Part III.  The Coming of the Christ

8. The Nazoraeans
9. John the Baptist
10. Jesus
11. Pentecost

Part IV. The Apostolic Age

12. The Family of Jesus
13. Paul and the Table of Demons
14. Paul and the Poor
15. Paul’s Visits to Jerusalem
16. The Apostolic Council
17. The Church Divides
18. The Destruction of the Temple

Part V. The History of the Ebionites

19. The Origin and Geography of the Ebionites
20. Our Knowledge of the Ebionites
21. Ebionite Theology in a Nutshell
22. Ebionite Demonology and the Problem of Evil

Part VI. The Influence of Jewish Christianity

23. Gnosis and Christ
24. The Revelation of Elxai
25. The Mystery of the Mandaeans
26. Into the East
27. Significance of the Ebionites

- – - – - – - – - – -

There have been some new developments in the Spencer Museum’s proposal to slaughter five chickens as part of an art project in Lawrence, Kansas.

The Lawrence Journal-World and the Kansas City Star have both published articles on the controversy. The KC Star reports that killing chickens for food within Lawrence city limits is actually illegal!  Also, the restaurant “715″ which was originally slated to serve the chickens as a meal after their slaughter has now withdrawn from the project.  The KC Star also quotes Kate Lawrence, who has written an excellent blog on the subject giving her open letter to the Spencer Museum.

United Poultry Concerns has posted articles urging people to tell Rocket Grants (which is funding the project) not to support this project, to tell the Percolator (where the chickens are scheduled to be slaughtered) that they should end their participation, and to write to the individuals on the Percolator’s board of directors.

In other backyard livestock news:

The National Association of Realtors is raising the issue of backyard chickens on their website, questioning whether backyard chickens will affect property values.

E Magazine also discusses whether the spread of backyard livestock is leading to homeless chickens and goats.

The Toronto Star reports that Toronto, Canada recently decided to continue its ban on backyard chickens.

Blessed is a lion that a man eats,
because that lion will become human.
Cursed is a man that a lion eats,
because that lion will become human. (Gospel of Thomas 7)

The Gospel of Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi, doesn’t contain anything obviously vegetarian.  In saying 12 Jesus advises the disciples to follow “James the Just” after he is gone.  Saying 71 has Jesus saying, “I will destroy this house,” which reminds us of the gospel sayings about the temple being destroyed.  Both of these hint indirectly at vegetarianism.  James, the first leader of the church after Jesus, did not eat meat or drink wine, and in fact was raised a vegetarian.  The temple was the place where animal sacrifices were offered, therefore if Jesus was trying to destroy it, he may have been against animal sacrifices.  Besides these vague hints, though, Thomas doesn’t seem to say anything that could give comfort to vegetarians; certainly there isn’t anything along the lines of “thou shalt go vegan.”

However, in his book The Gospel of Thomas, translated and edited by Stevan Davies (Shambala Publications, 2002), Davies argues that vegetarianism can be found in the Gospel of Thomas.  He points to sayings 7, 11, 87, and 111.  His translation isn’t radically different from other translations; it’s his insightful analysis which really stands out.

When I first read saying 7 above (“Blessed is a lion that a man eats”), I have to say that I did not extract any particular vegetarian message at all.  It sounds like Jesus is telling us to go out into the jungle, hunt lions, kill them, and eat them — and the lion will benefit!  But if a lion (which, unlike a human, is a natural carnivore) chances to eat a man, well, too bad for the lion. Jesus seems to be promoting an extreme form of carnivorism.

Davies points to several passages in Thomas which put this saying in a new light.  First, if you eat things, the things you eat become alive.  Saying 11 contains this: “When you ate dead things, you made them alive.”  (This is repeated in saying 111.)  How do you make them alive?  Through digesting and metabolizing them.  Saying 87 says, “wretched is a body depending on a body.”  How does a body depend on a body?  If the body eats the other body.  Therefore, Davies concludes, Thomas is not saying that all bodies are wretched, only bodies which depend on other dead bodies (i. e., meat) for food.  These sayings contain a “vegetarian criticism of meat-eating,” and imply a “vegetarian perspective,” according to Davies (p. 10, 90).

We can now go back to saying 7.  Yes, literally considered, this implies that we are going in search of lions to eat.  But even if Jesus wanted to promote meat-eating, this saying wouldn’t make sense. No one, today or in ancient times, hunted lions for food.  This saying has to be symbolic.  I mean, after all, it is the Gospel of Thomas, which is announced as a book of “hidden sayings,” with some pretty obscure and mysterious sayings which sometimes resemble some of the koans of Zen Buddhism.

So if we consider saying 7 as symbolic, when Thomas talks about “the lion becomes man,” what does he mean?  This refers to the process of digestion; if you eat and digest something, what you digest then “becomes” you.

And what could the “lion” stand for?  Davies argues that it is a metaphor for ignorance, but I have another idea.  Most likely, it stands for the lion-like attributes within all of us. What are lion-like attributes?  They involve courage, conflict, battle, and domination.  Our lion-nature includes meat-eating, but it is more than that; it is the whole process of desiring domination which includes meat-eating as one of its consequences.

So what this saying means is: if you conquer, kill, and consume your lion-like attributes, then you becomes a higher being.  Infused with knowledge, your lion-like attributes are metabolized into a higher purpose.  You go forth into the world using your “aggressive” tendencies for good rather than for violence.  But if your lion-like attributes consume you, you give your lion-like attributes a terrible form.  You put your human attributes at the service of your lion-nature, which results in tremendous human intelligence turned towards wars of aggression, exploitation of the earth, and factory farms. In both cases, “the lion becomes man,” it’s just a question of who is digesting what.

I highly recommend Davies’ book.  Thomas is one of the oldest of the gospels; many have argued that it is older than the canonical gospels.  Thomas gives vegetarians looking for vegetarian sayings in the gospel some new insights into the spirituality of the early church which include the practice of ethical vegetarianism.

A beautiful creature

“The Story of Chickens — a Revolution” is an art project sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.  The stated purpose of the project is “to transform the contemporary view of chickens as merely ‘livestock’ to the beautiful and unique creatures they are, while promoting alternative and healthy processes of caring for them.”  So far, so good!  This is something I might actually be able to get behind.

The kicker, though, comes at the end: the chickens will be publicly slaughtered, and then fed to participants at a potluck.

Say what?  Slaughter is now considered “art”?

Here’s the basic problem that I have with this project.  Slaughter is not art. There is actually a social consensus, right now, that the slaughter of animals is something which is disgusting, even if it is totally necessary.  Funding this project breaks this social consensus.

As someone who regularly puts forward unpopular views himself, I’m a bit sensitive to free speech issues.  But here’s the problem: this project does not advocate putting slaughter into the public arena.  It actually puts slaughter into the public arena.

What is this about?

It is certainly objectionable that five beautiful creatures will be ritually slaughtered.  Just by itself, though, even vegans would probably not do much more than roll their eyes at this action.  Hundreds of chickens are slaughtered for food every second.  What is really objectionable here is that it is considered art. If it is art, it is beautiful, affirmative, and positive.

For anyone familiar with the “backyard livestock,” issue, the political context of the project should be obvious.  There is an energetic class of people who are promoting the keeping of livestock in backyards and even slaughtering it in backyards.  The basic idea is that industrial agriculture is not sustainable, but that backyard livestock agriculture is.  They actually think they are doing the vegans a favor: look, isn’t this better than factory farms?

From the facile responses coming from the sponsors, it appears that the issue of the effects of public violence have not entered the brains of the people approving this project.  Their responses are only at the level of talk about “freedom of speech” and “unpopular views have a right to be expressed.”  We are not talking about the effects of publicly advocating violence, but about the effects of legitimizing actual public violence.

The key issue here in the question of whether this is “art” is the question of what is public and what is private.  Slaughter is a fact of life, but even when necessary, it is also disgusting and repulsive.  These two facts, accepted by consensus, are basically what holds civilization together and keep us out of the Middle Ages.

The danger of this project is that it alters, without debate, our current social consensus that killing things is disgusting, even when necessary.  By making the slaughter public and endorsing it as “art,” slaughter enters the public space.  This isn’t talk about slaughter, discussions of slaughter, or depictions of slaughter, but slaughter itself.

This cannot help but desensitize the public to violence.  This isn’t just a vegetarian issue.  There are plenty of things which are disgusting, which actually have to be done, which we do not do in public.  I need my car repaired, but I don’t want an auto repair shop next door, and if someone undertakes to turn their front yard into an impromptu car shop, I have a right to object.  You may need to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want to have to see you do it in public, thank you very much.  This agreement on what is disgusting is a separate debate from what is good, bad, or indifferent in private.

Similar Debates in the Past

This of course raises a lot of questions about free speech, and the eternal question, “what is art?”  Don’t we have the right, sometimes, to do disgusting things as a form of advocacy?  Well, perhaps, but you need to think about this a bit more than the Spencer Museum has.

The issue is not whether slaughter is good, bad, or indifferent.  The question is whether slaughter itself should enter the public sphere, and this is why this otherwise obscure project has elicited such a visceral and negative response.  We’ve actually had these debates before, and to illustrate, here are some cases in point.  These cases are not all clear-cut, by the way; but they illustrate the terrain we are looking at.

1. What about bullfighting? Is bullfighting an art, is it culture?  Many years ago, as a teenager, I read Ernest Hemingway’s book Death in the Afternoon, which is basically a glorification of bullfighting.  If I recall correctly, Hemingway even made the point that the fate of the bull in a bull fight is hardly worse than its fate in a slaughterhouse and may in fact be better.  So don’t object to bullfighting, the implication was, just because of concern for the bull.

Hemingway’s book may be art.  But is bullfighting itself an art?  This was decades before I became a vegetarian. Hemingway’s prose was great, but I wasn’t convinced that I wanted to go to a bullfight, and in fact, the idea made me a bit uneasy.  Bullfighting was prohibited in Catalonia in Spain in 2010, and one slogan used by opponents of bullfighting has been “Torture is not Art, Torture is not Culture.”

2. Political protest may also become art.  In 1967, on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, someone created a sensation by threatening to burn a dog on campus to protest the Vietnam War.  The purpose was to make those aware of what happens to people when they are hit by napalm.  The dog, we were assured, was one who was going to be euthanized anyway.  This was decades before the days of animal liberation, but even then, there was predictable outrage, including from a number of anti-war radicals.

In the end, no dogs were killed during this protest.  The guy finally withdrew his threat.  As I recall, he then went on to become a regular columnist for the Vanderbilt Hustler.  He said something along the lines that he was just trying to shake people out of their intellectual lethargy, and that he never had any intention to burn a dog.

3. Sometimes art can be used to express viewpoints which we find repulsive.  “Triumph of the Will,” by Leni Riefenstahl, is a Nazi propaganda film which, nevertheless, is very well done.  (Actually, it was too long, and too many speeches; she could have made it more effective if she had cut 30 to 45 minutes out of it. Maybe it’s a good thing she didn’t.)

This is a more complicated case because no animals or humans were harmed in the making of “Triumph of the Will.”  In that respect, it’s actually not as bad as “The Story of Chickens.”  But the acceptance of these views by a sufficient number of Germans in politically important places, even though the Nazis never got a majority vote in a fair election, eventually killed millions of people.  This is another dimension that we also have to think about when considering art.

Glorifying Slaughter

If the Spencer Museum really thinks this project is “art,” then how about burning a dog to protest war?  How about staging a bullfight?  How about a showing of an edited-down version of “Triumph of the Will,” following by a community discussion of propaganda techniques and how today’s directors might be able to do a better job?  Even the Spencer Museum should be able to see that these projects, no matter how skillfully done, would have effects that go far beyond the mere free-speech value of permitting people to defend their point of view publicly.  The mere fact that something is disgusting doesn’t necessarily mean that it should always be prohibited in public.  But there is a dimension to this debate of which the Spencer Museum does not seem to have a glimmer.

Our social order depends on slaughter being disgusting.  We’re in luck, too — for the vast majority of non-psychopathic individuals, it is disgusting. You have to get used to killing. Being a slaughterhouse worker is one of the lowest paid and most dangerous occupations in America.  If slaughter becomes something desirable or attractive, something that anyone can do in their backyard, something beautiful to behold, then you unleash violent forces that no one will be able to control.

Many people find it repugnant to watch slaughter even when they believe it to be necessary.  It is a natural psychological defense mechanism; cruelty to animals is often a precursor to violence against humans.  If it wasn’t horrible, we’d get a lot more practice, and be a lot better at it.

There is also a fairly simple modification to this project which would alleviate its visceral and inflammatory nature.  Just slaughter the chickens in private.  I don’t want to see it, I don’t want it to enter the public sphere.  Even if they were slaughtered in private, this project would still serve to desensitize people to violence that is instinctively repulsive.  But at least it would decrease the chances that this whole so-called art project will end badly.

People exposed to violence, either as victims or as perpetrators, experience stress.  So will people exposed to things which are disgusting.  Too much stress, and society will explode.  That’s one reason we don’t have public executions, even though the killing itself is regarded, by society, as necessary and good.

Leo Tolstoy said, “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields,” and there is a strong intuitive understanding of the nature of violence here.  Whatever needs to be done on a large scale, must first be perfected and practiced on a small scale.  Before Vietnam, most soldiers in American wars, even in battle, would often not fire directly at the enemy or not fire at all. Soldiers needed to be trained to shoot at targets that actually looked like humans.  Killing another human being, even an enemy, is instinctively repulsive. If we once become accustomed to a thing, we can do it on a large scale and repeatedly.

That is what “The Story of Chickens — a Revolution” is really doing.  It is an invasion of public space, and by practicing a small ritual violence against “beautiful creatures” now, is a rehearsal for much bigger violence later.

Our world does not need this kind of thing.  If you think that violence is necessary, if you think that we have to kill to eat, then fine.  Feel free to advocate your point of view, compose great art to defend it, and write volumes of poetry in its defense.  But let’s not pretend that slaughter is art.

In 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations had said that livestock contribute about 18% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) — which isn’t anything to be sneezed at.  But, actually, argue Goodland and Anhang, the real figure is even higher; at least 51% of all human-caused GHG emissions are due to livestock.  More than half of all GHGs due to livestock?  This totally changes the climate change debate.

UNESCO described this as “what may be a large-scale paradigm shift” in the whole subject of dealing with climate change.  The FAO has twice invited Robert Goodland to Europe to talk about their paper, and the article has started popping up on numerous university reading lists.  Even Sir Paul McCartney added a reference to this article in the production of a video for his web site.

The latest bit of attention has been, amazingly, in perhaps the last place you’d expect it: the journal Animal Feed Science and Technology.  Their contribution was a response to an article written as a critique of the “Livestock and Climate Change” hypothesis.  It is very much worth reading both the original critique and the response by Goodland and Anhang to see how far the “Livestock and Climate Change” hypothesis has come.  Both articles are a bit technical but fairly short, and Goodland and Anhang have very helpfully structured their response to correspond section-by-section with the original article.

To cut to the chase, Goodland and Anhang have pretty much demolished the criticisms, and in the meantime shown some further problems with the original FAO report.  Our climate change crisis is not just a crisis about fossil fuels.  Climate change is being driven by the massive use of land on the planet’s surface to support livestock — nearly half of the world’s land area, even after including places like Siberia and the Sahara Desert.

While we should certainly worry about cars, trucks, and other burning of fossil fuels, the single most important thing we can do to fight climate change is to decrease consumption of animal products.  Goodland and Anhang suggest a modest 25% reduction in livestock products worldwide, pointing out that such actions could have a much greater effect — and much quicker, too — than trillions and trillions of dollars in alternative energy investments.

We can get an important clue as to what they are doing in the New Testament if we take a quick look at what their effect is and has been.  From the point of view of a meat-eater, these fish stories are very convenient.  Jesus ate fish, therefore eating meat must be all right.  The letters of Paul, which predate the gospels by decades, also explicitly reject ethical vegetarianism at several points.  “Eat whatever is sold in the meat-market without raising questions of conscience” (I Corinthians 10:25).

Whatever we say about the historical authenticity of these references to eating meat, it’s clear what the effect has been: it has been to make ethical vegetarianism a heresy.  You can be vegetarian for your health, if you want, but not for ethical reasons.  During the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in the middle ages, suspected heretics were given an animal to kill. If they refused, they were determined to be heretics.

1. Let’s start with the one case where Jesus actually eats fish, after his resurrection.  (There is a similar passage in John 21:4-13, but in John, Jesus only distributes the fish, he doesn’t eat it.)

And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do questions rise in your hearts?  See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.”  And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”  They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.  (Luke 24:38-43, emphasis added)

Historically this passage is suspect right at the outset; the resurrection stories are the latest in the tradition and wildly contradictory to each other. This particular passage in Luke is especially suspect, because Jesus talks to his disciples and wants to convey that he is not a mere spirit (just as in the case of his appearance to “doubting Thomas”).

Anyone familiar with the history of early Christianity can immediately see the problem.  Some, such as the famous second-century heretic Marcion, had exactly the belief to which Jesus is “replying” — that Jesus never existed on a physical plane, but was just a spirit or ghost.  Most likely, this verse was penned as a specific response to Marcionism, which didn’t even become an issue until many decades after Jesus and the original disciples had all passed from the scene.  Jesus says he isn’t a spirit, and when the disciples still don’t believe, only then does he eat the fish, something a ghost could not do.  This passage can’t be taken seriously as real evidence about the historical Jesus.  It is likely written as a response to Marcion and those like him.

2. What about the feeding of the multitudes with bread and fish (Matthew 14:13- 21, 15:32-38 and parallels)?  There are many parallel versions of this basic story.  Not only is it in the Bible, it is mentioned several times by early church fathers.  Ireneaus twice states that Jesus fed the multitudes with bread alone (Against Heresies 2.22.3, 2.24.4).  Arnobius also describes this incident without mentioning fish (Against the Heathen 1.46) as does Eusebius (Proof of the Gospel 3.4).  Indeed, even Jesus himself, when referring back to this miracle (Matthew 16:9-10), mentions bread but doesn’t mention fish.

The bread is everywhere present, but the fish only sometimes.  This strongly suggests that the original tradition was about distribution of bread, not bread and fish.  In the case of Matthew 16:9-10, the insertion of fish becomes obvious, because the editors of Matthew changed the original story to include fish but forgot to change Jesus’ backward reference.

3. “Fish” was a well-known mystical symbol in early Christianity, because the Greek word for “fish” is transcribed “ichthys” or “ichthus,” which is an acronym (in Greek) for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”  Many early writers speak of fish in a clearly symbolic way, e. g. Tertullian On Baptism 1.  Because of this, it isn’t clear that the original “fish stories” were even intended to be literal accounts of actual events, but were allegories about the distribution of the sacred message.  Jesus wasn’t distributing physical fish, but rather himself and his message as spiritual food.

So what is the real origin of these fish stories?  Rather than fight this issue out on the terrain of historical criticism, I’d suggest that curious students look at the whole controversy about vegetarianism in the early church.  We are blessed in this respect: unlike the gospel accounts, where we have second-hand or third-hand stories warmed over and heavily edited, in the authentic letters of Paul we have first-hand accounts from one of the key participants in this dispute.  Romans 14, I Corinthians 8 – 10, and Galatians 2 all give accounts of a divisive dispute between Paul and the Jerusalem church (James, Peter, and John) over food.  This left Paul isolated from the rest of the church; “even Barnabas was carried away,” Paul ruefully admits.

We know that the leader of the early church, James the brother of Jesus, was not only a vegetarian, but was raised a vegetarian, and didn’t drink alcohol either (Hegesippus, quoted in Eusbius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.5-6).  It is clear from this and other evidence (discussed in depth in my book, The Lost Religion of Jesus) that there was a group of people in the early church who thought that eating meat was an issue of conscience, and that we should be vegetarians.  Otherwise, why would Paul feel the need to “refute” these views? When Paul stresses the need not to offend those who do not eat meat or drink wine (Romans 14:20-21), he is likely referring to James or people like him.

These passages in the New Testament were not just an impartial record of historical events; they were a belated effort to settle a divisive dispute in the early church by incorporating fish stories into the original gospel.  In this they were unfortunately rather successful, but as historical evidence it’s pretty transparent what their origin was.

Ethical vegetarianism as a “heresy” has survived in numerous forms, all the way from the Jewish Christian Ebionites, down to modern Christian thinkers such as Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (founders of Unity) and Ellen White (founder of the Seventh-day Adventists).  If you trace this “heresy” back to its origins, it becomes clear that it comes from Jesus himself, who was killed after entering the temple and disrupting the animal sacrifice business there.