Going (just a little bit) Vegan
My foray into veganism lasted about a week. Things were going well; I had successfully cut out the pizza in Berkeley’s newly renovated dining hall, replaced my coffee cream with soy milk, and resisted the temptation of the grass-fed, hand-shaped cheeseburger. I had even begun to find my newly adopted diet — comprising mainly fruits and vegetables — to be noticeably more appealing than when I had started. But ultimately, I was unable to stop myself when, in a moment of weakness, I had the opportunity to order my favorite (and remarkably non-vegan) late night meal: a chicken burrito.
I quickly realized during my brief stint as a vegan that, at Yale, such a lifestyle can be difficult to maintain properly. This realization was troubling to me, fully aware as I was of the positive environmental and health impacts that such a diet can have. With the dearth of vegan options, the ubiquity of meat, and the wide disparity in quality between vegan and non-vegan options, Yale dining creates significant barriers to adopting a vegan diet. In so doing, it fails to accommodate students attempting to individually effect social good, but worse than that, it misses an opportunity to facilitate significant positive change using its influence as an institution. As the provider of meals to thousands of students, Yale occupies a unique position to advocate and facilitate the adoption of a vegan diet, and it should take its role seriously if it cares about issues of public health, the environment, and antibiotic resistance.
It’s no secret that what you eat can have tremendous bearing on your quality of life. Popular media has recently seen the emergence of numerous books and documentaries that expound all the harm that an excess of animal products can cause the human body, ranging from dandruff to diabetes to cancer. Environmentalists have become equally committed to the meatless movement, attempting to mitigate the tremendous amount of carbon and methane that the meat and dairy industries release into the atmosphere. And any conversation about veganism would be incomplete without mention of animal rights, or the rising levels of antibiotic resistance caused by overuse of antibiotics in animal feed. The evidence seems to be clear: the normatively best dietary choice that you can make — for you as an individual and for society as a collective — is to become a vegan.
But this conclusion raises the question: if I accept the above, why is it that I could only eat vegan for a week? Don’t I care about my own health and well-being, the environment, animals, or reducing antibiotic resistance? The answer is yes, I do; but still, I was unable to successfully make the transition to veganism. For others, the situation is similar, if not the same: virtually no one will deny, when presented with the relevant evidence, that meat consumption is harmful to our health and the environment. But still, when asked whether they would go vegan, they practically scoff at the idea.
Part of the problem is that the goodness of veganism bears little to no relevance in the everyday lives of most people. Abstract and distant considerations such as future health, the environment, animal rights, or antibiotic resistance take a back seat to the more tangible, more immediate considerations of pleasure, facility, and custom that often accompany meat consumption. Custom makes it difficult to transition to, or even imagine, a life without meat or dairy products, and it is simply too easy to point to the ubiquity and rewarding immediacy of meat and dairy to justify their continued consumption.
It really is no wonder that people are unwilling or unable to give up their omnivorous ways. Even in light of evidence showing that it is the best dietary choice they can make for myriad reasons, there are powerful forces operating to keep people from changing what they eat. This is a problem that needs to be addressed if we’re ever to mitigate significantly the harmful effects that the meat and dairy industries cause. To see real impact, we need to begin evaluating the decisions that we make at an institutional level.
Yale, for its part, could do a much better job than it is currently. Though in the dining halls there are often sufficient vegetarian options, food choices for vegans are severely limited, adding to the difficulty of those who want to maintain a healthy vegan diet and reducing the likelihood that recent converts stick with the lifestyle. First and foremost, Yale should offer more vegan options. This would go a long way in facilitating the transition for those who wish to try out the lifestyle, and it would represent a huge quality of life improvement for those who already are vegan. And as things stand, there is never a meal with hot food that does not have a meat option. Yale should begin providing whole meals without any meat — this would accomplish the dual purpose of reducing the university’s environmental footprint, while simultaneously exposing regular meat eaters to the possibilities of meals without meat.
Some might argue that measures such as these represent a form of dietary imperialism. If people want to consume meat, Yale should not restrict them from doing so by offering only vegetarian or vegan options. But we need to ask ourselves what effects we cause by insisting on the perpetual guarantee of a meat option. Just how much carbon and methane are released to provide us with burgers at every meal? How many antibiotics are used to raise the chickens that are constantly present in the servery? The potential to effect positive change far outweighs anyone’s claim to always have the choice to eat meat.
And even if people insist that they be able to eat meat at every meal, Yale could choose to offer a meat option in half of the dining halls while offering none in the other half. There is already precedent for such divergence between dining halls with the introduction of the new colleges and their accompanying menus. Reducing a meal’s meat usage by half would still go a long way towards exposing people to the possibilities of a meatless diet and reducing Yale’s climate impact.
These changes may seem small, but they represent real steps towards ends that we all seek. It’s simply not feasible to ask people to go vegan en masse, but it is feasible for our institutions to begin reducing the role that animal products play in our lives.
