thesis for vegetarianism

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Health, environmental, and animal rights motives for vegetarian eating

Christopher j. hopwood.

University of California, Davis, CA, United States America

Wiebke Bleidorn

Ted schwaba, sophia chen, associated data.

Pre-registration, methods, measures, scripts, and supplemental results for samples 1-3 as well as data for samples 1 and 2 are available at https://osf.io/52v6z/ . Data for sample 3 cannot be shared publicly because it is not owned by the authors. It can be requested at https://www.lissdata.nl . Preregistration, materials, and data for sample 4 are available at https://osf.io/9wre4/ .

Health, the environment, and animal rights represent the three main reasons people cite for vegetarian diet in Western societies. However, it has not been shown that these motives can be distinguished empirically, and little is known about what kind of people are likely to be compelled by these different motives. This study had three goals. First, we aimed to use construct validation to test whether develop health, environmental, and animal rights motives for a vegetarian diet could be distinguished. Second, we evaluated whether these motivations were associated with different demographic, behavioral, and personality profiles in three diverse samples. Third, we examined whether peoples’ motivations were related to responses to vegetarian advocacy materials. We created the Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory, a 15-item measure whose structure was invariant across three samples (N = 1006, 1004, 5478) and two languages (English and Dutch). Using this measure, we found that health was the most common motive for non-vegetarians to consider vegetarian diets and it had the broadest array of correlates, which primarily involved communal and agentic values. Correlates of environmental and animal rights motives were limited, but these motives were strong and specific predictors of advocacy materials in a fourth sample (N = 739). These results provide researchers with a useful tool for identifying vegetarian motives among both vegetarian and non-vegetarian respondents, offer useful insights into the nomological net of vegetarian motivations, and provide advocates with guidance about how to best target campaigns promoting a vegetarian diet.

Eating is an important day to day behavior at the interface of individual differences, social dynamics, economics, health, and ethics. Vegetarianism has emerged as a significant dietary movement in Western cultures [ 1 – 3 ]. The benefits of vegetarian diets include improved individual health [ 4 – 8 ], a more sustainable environment [ 4 , 9 – 11 ], and a more humane approach to inter-species relationships [ 12 – 19 ].

Health, environment, and animal rights also appear to represent the primary non-religious motives for a plant-based diet [ 1 , 20 – 24 ]. However, thus far there is very little evidence that these motives can be distinguished empirically, and no existing measures of eating behavior is available to measure health, environment, and animal rights as distinct motives for vegetarian diet. One consequence of this gap in the literature is that relatively little is known about the psychological implications of these different reasons for a vegetarian diet. Initial research suggests that extraverted and sociable individuals tend to be more motivated by health [ 25 , 26 ] whereas factors such as agreeableness, openness, altruism, and empathy may be more related to ethical motivations [ 27 , 28 ]. However, findings are often inconsistent, and a wide range of potentially important correlates have not been examined. Understanding these motives is important for advancing knowledge about this increasingly important behavior, and it may also have practical value in the area of advocacy.

Advocates for plant-based diets typically focus on at least one of these three motives when trying to convince people to adopt a plant-based diet or join a vegan organization [ 20 , 29 – 31 ]. Advocacy campaigns may be more effective to the degree that they target the specific motives of different groups and individuals [ 30 , 32 ] because people are more likely to respond to messages that target their personal needs and interests [ 33 ]. Moreover, focusing on issues that do not resonate with individuals’ motives may negatively impact animal advocacy, such as when the exposure to animal rights advocacy creates an unpleasant emotional reaction [ 34 ] that worsens opinions of vegetarians and animal advocacy [ 31 ]. Thus, it is in the interest of advocacy groups to better understand the kinds of people who are more or less likely to respond to activism that emphasizes health, the environment, or animal rights. From an advocacy perspective, it is particularly important to understand the motives to which non-vegetarians are most sympathetic, given that these are the individuals that are targeted by advocacy campaigns.

The goals of this research were to 1) evaluate the structure of common motives for a vegetarian diet, 2) to use that measure to develop behavioral and psychological profiles of people who would be most likely to adopt a plant-based diet for different reasons, and 3) examine whether this profile predicts responses to advocacy materials.

Motives for a plant-based diet

Many instruments have been developed to assess diet-related motives. Early work tended to focus on specific motives of interest for a particular research topic. For example, Jackson, Cooper, Mintz, and Albino [ 35 ] created a scale focused on eating motives in the context of substance abuse, which included four dimensions: coping, social motives, compliance, and pleasure. While this instrument outlines a useful model of psychological eating motives, it is less suitable for research on vegetarian diet because any of these four motives could lead a person to eat either vegetarian or non-vegetarian food, depending on other considerations.

Several instruments tap eating motives that are more likely to distinguish vegetarian from non-vegetarian eaters. The Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ; [ 36 ]) focuses on nine motives: convenience, price, health, sensory appeal, weight control, natural content, mood, familiarity, and ethical concerns. Renner, Sproesser, Strohbach, & Schupp [ 37 ] developed The Eating Motivations Survey (TEMS), a broad, multidimensional measure of 15 different motives including liking, habits, hunger, health, convenience, pleasure, tradition, nature, sociability, price, visual appeal, weight control, affect regulation, social norms, and social image. These multiscale measures provide a general taxonomy of individual motivations in food choice, but they do not distinguish the three core motives most central to vegetarian diets, and they include a variety of motives that are less relevant for plant-based diets such as mood or affect regulation.

Other measures have focused more specifically on ideological or ethical factors potentially more relevant to vegetarianism. Lindeman and Stark [ 38 ] created a measure with scales designed to distinguish ideological reasons, weight control, health, and pleasure. In a similar project, Arbit, Ruby, and Rozin [ 39 ] crafted the Meaning in Food Life Questionnaire (MFLQ), which has three dimensions, social, sacred (i.e., religious), and aesthetic, that are not relevant to our study, and two that are: moral (which could include animal rights and environmental motives) and health. Lindeman and Väänänen [ 40 ] set out to enhance the FCQ by developing four scales focused on ethical dimensions, including animal welfare, the environment, politics (e.g., human rights related to food production), and religion. However, in their study, the animal welfare and environment scales were so highly correlated that they collapsed into a single factor. Measures focused on ethical motivations for food choice begin to capture variation in motives that might be specific to vegetarian diets, but they tend to collapse different ethical concerns relevant to vegetarian diet into a single factor and don’t always include health. Indeed, distinguishing various ethical factors may be difficult in practice [ 21 , 41 , 42 ], as results from these studies also show that even when items are identified to distinguish moral from health-related motives, it is challenging to distinguish these motives in terms of external correlates. An important exception is the Dietarian Identity Questionnaire [ 2 ], which has scales designed to measure a range of dimensions that link dietary behavior to identity, including the emphasis an eater places on prosocial as opposed to moral concerns when making food choices. This framework has considerable promise for identifying the mechanisms underlying these different motivations for vegetarian diets (e.g., Rosenfeld, 2019 [ 43 ]), but it does not provide scales to directly measure health, environmental, and animal rights motives for a vegetarian diet.

Thus, the first step in our research was to use a construct validation strategy to test whether the three main reasons people might have adopted or be compelled to adopt a plant-based diet—health, animal rights, and the environment—can be distinguished empirically. Given ambiguities in the literature, we focused specifically on differentiating environmental and animal rights factors.

Identifying characteristic profiles of people with different vegetarian motives

Variables related to plant-based eating in general include younger age [ 44 , 45 ], being female [ 1 , 44 , 46 – 49 ], living in urban areas [ 50 – 54 ], and having liberal values [ 45 , 46 , 49 , 52 , 55 – 59 ]. Thus, vegetarians can be reliably characterized, to some degree, in broad strokes.

Yet, different vegetarians can arrive at a plant-based diet for very different reasons. How are people who are primarily motivated by their personal health different from people who are primarily motivated by their concerns about the environment or their compassion for animals? The second goal of this project is to distinguish people who are most likely to pursue plant-based diets for reasons related to their personal health, the environment, or animal rights. Distinct profiles of people with these different motives could help advocacy campaigns reliably identify individuals and groups who are most likely to respond to their message.

Given the limited evidence regarding correlates of different motivations and the fact that there is a wide range of plausible correlates, our overall approach was to include an extensive array of possible attributes with plausible links to vegetarian motives and to use multiple samples and increasingly strict statistical tests to hone in on replicable associations. We included attributes related to demographic characteristics, personality traits, values, hobbies, religious background and behavior, habits, entertainment preferences, and patterns of social media use. We then 1) identified potential correlates in an American undergraduate convenience sample, 2) identified which associations replicate in an American community convenience sample, and 3) tested preregistered hypotheses, based on these replicated associations, about which variables would replicate in a large representative Dutch sample. We reasoned that any associations observed consistently across all three of these samples would be sufficiently robust to be useful for informing research on motives for plant-based eating and for guiding advocacy efforts.

Vegetarian motives and responsiveness to advocacy materials

The motivational complexity of vegetarian behavior implies that advocacy will generally be most effective if it targets the specific motives of its audience. This is presumably why advocacy groups tend to campaign on one of the three main reasons to adopt plant-based diets—health, the environment, and animal rights. But is it true that people with different levels of health, environmental, and animal rights motives will be differentially sensitive to advocacy materials that target their primary motives? The third goal of this project was to use the measure we developed to determine whether individual differences in motives for vegetarian eating predict responsiveness to advocacy materials that focus on health, the environment, or animal rights.

This study was approved by the UC Davis IRB #1145613–1 and #1372555–2.

Our first sample consisted of 1006 undergraduates attending a public university in the United States who participated in exchange for course credit. The mean age of these students was 19.80 (SD = 3.33); 822 (81.7%) were female, 180 (17.9%) male, and 4 (0.4%) nonbinary. Racial composition was 485 Asian (48.2%), 22 black (2.2%), 47 Latin American (4.7%), 27 Native American (2.7%), 328 white (32.6%), 94 multiracial (9.3%), and 3 other (0.3%); 252 (25.0%) reported Hispanic ethnicity. Eleven participants self-identified as vegan and 44 as vegetarian.

Our second sample consisted of 1004 Amazon MTurk Workers who completed a survey for financial compensation (prorated at $10/hour). The average age in this sample was 36.46 (SD = 10.99); 471 (46.91%) were female, 532 (53.00%) were male, and 1 (0.1%) was nonbinary. Ethnic/racial composition was 63 (6.7%) Asian, 113 (11.3%) black, 111 (11.1%) Hispanic, 10 (1.0%) Native American, 780 (77.7%) white, 32 (3.2%) multiracial, and 6 (0.6%) other. Participants in this sample were not restricted based on geography. Seventeen participants self-identified as vegan and 25 as vegetarian.

Our third sample included 5478 Dutch participants drawn from the Longitudinal Internet Studies of the Social Sciences (LISS). The mean age in this sample was 51.34 (SD = 18.31); 3,106 (54.0%) were female and 2,642 (46.0%) were male. Sixty-nine participants self-identified as vegan; vegetarian identity was not assessed in the LISS sample.

Our fourth sample consisted of 739 undergraduate participants (mean age = 20.01, SD = 3,60; 615 women (83.0%); 186 Hispanic (25.0%) ethnicity; 178 white (24.0%), 10 black (1.4%), 363 Asian (49.0%), 4 Pacific Islander (0.5%), 84 multiracial (11.4%), and 95 other race (12.9%). Eight people reported vegan diet and 27 reported vegetarian diet.

The only exclusion criterion across samples was being 18 years or older. Participants were not excluded based on dietary habits or preferences.

Instrument development strategies

Based on an initial literature review, we generated 26 items designed to assess health, environmental, and animal rights motives for a plant-based diet. We administered these items to participants in Sample 1 and conducted a series of item-level factor analyses to identify a reduced set of items that loaded onto the three factors with strong pattern coefficients and minimal cross-loadings. We then administered and examined this reduced set of items in Sample 2. We examined the fit of the measurement model within both samples and measurement invariance across both samples using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Items, instructions, and response scales for the final version of the instrument, which we called the Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory (VEMI), are given in Table 1 .

Please rate the importance of each of the following reasons for you to eat less meat or animal products. Please rate these items even if you don’t intend to change your diet.

We translated the VEMI items into Dutch in order to administer it to Sample 3. We first asked a native Dutch speaker who also speaks English to translate the items. We then asked a native English speaker who also speaks Dutch to back translate them. The research team confirmed that the content was retained for all items through this process. We evaluated the fit of the measurement model and measurement invariance using CFA. Items, instructions, and response scales for the Dutch version of the VEMI are available at https://osf.io/wyfgb/ .

Validating measures

We sought to measure a wide range of variables that could plausibly distinguish motives for a plant-based diet. Our main constraint was the measures that already existed in the LISS data (i.e., Sample 3) to whom we would administer the VEMI but whose data collection was otherwise already planned. Overall, we assessed 260 characteristics ( https://osf.io/y8nd5/ ). These characteristics included demographic features, personality traits, terminal and instrumental values, religious beliefs and behaviors, involvement in various organizations and volunteer activities, employment/income, hobbies/interests, online behavior and preferences, social behavior, and habits.

Strategy for identifying correlates of vegetarian motives

Our general approach to identifying specific motive-outcome associations in order to pre-register hypotheses for Sample 3 was to estimate a series of multiple latent regressions using the R package lavaan [ 60 ] in Sample 1 that we then attempted to replicate in Sample 2. First, we estimated six different models separately: one in which all associations between outcome and the three latent eating motives variables were constrained to be equal (model All Equal), one in which all motive-outcome associations were constrained to zero (model All Zero), three in which one motive-outcome association was estimated freely but the other two motives were constrained to have equal associations with the outcome (models Animal Free, Environment Free, and Health Free), and one in which all motive-outcome associations were estimated freely (model All Free).

We then conducted a series of nested χ 2 model comparison tests for each motive-outcome association to identify which of these six models best fit the data. We first compared the fit of model All Equal to model All Zero. If model All Zero did not fit significantly worse ( p < .05), we selected model All Zero as the best fit and concluded that no eating motives were significantly associated with the outcome variable. If model All Zero fit worse than model All Free, we compared the fit of model All Equal to whichever of Animal Free, Environment Free, and Health Free fit best to the data (as these models have equal degrees of freedom, they were not nested; the best-fitting model was identified as the one with the lowest χ 2 and BIC values). If none of these models fit significantly better than model All Equal, we selected model All Equal as the best fit and concluded that the three eating motives were not differentially associated with the outcome variable. However, if Animal Free, Environment Free, or Health Free models fit significantly better to the data than model All Equal, we compared the fit of that model versus the fit of model All Free. If model All Free fit significantly better, we concluded that eating motives were differentially associated with the outcome variable. If All Free did not fit significantly better, and Animal Free, Environment Free, or Health Free was the best fitting model, we concluded that one specific motive was differentially associated with the outcome variable. The R code used to perform these analyses is available at https://osf.io/49shv/ .

Next, we examined whether any patterns of non-zero motive-outcome associations replicated in the MTurk sample. To do this, we estimated two multiple-groups models in lavaan. In the first model (model Replication), motive-outcome associations from the best-fitting model identified in Sample 1 (model All Free, Animal Free, Health Free, Environment Free, or All Equal) were imposed to be equal across both samples. In the second model (model Nonreplication), motive-outcome associations in Sample 1 were constrained to the best-fitting model, while motive-outcome associations in Sample 2 were freely estimated. We compared the fits of these two nested models using a χ 2 model comparison test. If model Nonreplication fit the data significantly better ( p < .05), we concluded that the pattern of associations did not replicate across samples. Otherwise, we concluded that the pattern of associations in Sample 1 replicated in Sample 2.

Although the aforementioned steps described our primary procedure, it had two important limitations. First, inspection of the path coefficients revealed instances when very similar effect sizes across samples were classified as non-replications. Second, because these analyses used multiple regressions, they were also prone to suppression effects. We therefore contextualized these initial results with two additional rules. First, to restrict our interpretations to meaningful effects, we examined whether any moderate-or-stronger associations between specific eating motives and outcomes replicated across samples. To do this, we first identified all outcomes for which one or more motive-outcome associations was stronger than Beta weights = |.15| in both samples. We only retained variables with an effect of |.15| or larger. Second, to avoid interpreting effects that were only present due to statistical suppression, we examined the bivariate correlations for each replicated motive-criterion association in the first two samples and discarded the cases in which the regression coefficient and bivariate correlation were of opposite signs or in which the bivariate correlation was < |.15|.

Vegetarian motives and responsivity to advocacy flyers

We conducted a pre-registered validation study to test the sensitivity of the VEMI scales to attitudes about advocacy flyers specifically appealing to health, environmental, and animal rights motives for a plant-based diet (see https://www.vegansociety.com ). Participants answered six questions about each flyer (e.g., this flyer made me want to be vegan) on a scale from 1–7. Internal consistencies were above .90 for these sets of questions for all three flyers, and an item-level factor analysis provided strong support for a single factor. We predicted that scores on the VEMI motives scales would be specifically associated with positive attitudes about the flyer targeting that motive (e.g., health motives would be related to positive attitudes about the health flyer) as indexed by both significant bivariate correlations and significant Beta weights in regression models in which all three VEMI scales are regressed upon the attitude scales, one at a time.

Pre-registration, methods, measures, scripts, and supplemental results for samples 1–3 as well as data for samples 1 and 2 are available at https://osf.io/52v6z/ . Data for sample 3 can be requested at https://www.lissdata.nl . Preregistration, materials, and data for sample 4 are available at https://osf.io/9wre4/ .

Developing the Vegetarian Motives Inventory (VEMI)

Fifteen items were chosen from the original pool of 26 ( Table 1 ) based on exploratory factor analyses in Sample 1. The model fit the data well and was invariant across all three samples ( Table 2 ). It was also invariant across men and women and across white vs. non-white participants in samples 1 and 2 ( Table 2 ). Cronbach’s alpha estimates of internal consistency across the three samples, respectively, were .88, .91, and .89 for the health scale, .90, .94, and .92 for the environment scale, and .93, .96, and .94 for the animal rights scale. Latent correlations between these scales in the three samples, respectively, were .33, .40, and .43 between health and environment, .27, .35, and .49 between health and animal rights, and .57, .70, and .59 between environment and animal rights.

df = degrees of freedom. CFI = Confirmatory Fit Index. RMSEA = Root Mean Square Error of Approximation. We used model comparison tests based on fit indices to examine measurement invariance. We established measurement invariance (all ΔCFI < .01 or all ΔRMSEA < .01; cf. Cheung & Rensvold, 2002). That is, we were able to constrain configuration, factor loadings, intercepts, and latent means across groups without a significant decrease in model fit.

VEMI scale means across our first three samples are given in Table 3 . In general, people tended to respond above the raw midpoint of 4, indicating that health, the environment, and animal rights are all considered to be generally compelling reasons to adopt a plant-based diet. This was particularly the case for the health scale, for which the mean approached 6 (out of 7) in all three samples. As a validity check, we also asked participants in Samples 1 and 2 to rank the main reason they would choose to adopt a plant-based diet. Of the 1826 participants who responded to this question, the standardized means for corresponding VEMI scales were consistently ranked as the most important reason (e.g. people who rated Health highest on the VEMI scale also tended to rank Health as their main reason to adopt a plant-based diet). Again, these results showed that health is the most common reason among this primarily non-vegetarian sample to consider eating less meat, as 75% of respondents ranked this motive first. Finally, large effects distinguished the 97 vegans across all three samples from non-vegan respondents for the health (d = .51), environment (d = 1.29), and animal rights (d = .97) scales (all p < .001; Table 4 ).

Identifying correlates of plant-based eating motives

Based on an initial examination of criterion variable distributions, the following variables were log-transformed in order to normalize distributions: gross monthly income, all values, weekly hours volunteering, weekly hours spent watching sports, weekly hours watching tv, weekly hours listening to the radio, number of books read in the last 30 days, frequency of social media use, and hours per week spent online. We also log-transformed these variables in Samples 2 and 3. We excluded 49 binary variables with insufficient variance in either Samples 1 or 2 (i.e., less than 50 participants responding either “no” or “yes”) and 4 continuous variables with no variance in Samples 1 or 2. We did not consider any other variables in the LISS sample that were not also assessed in Samples 1 and 2. Given these exclusions, we examined associations between VEMI scales and 207 remaining criterion variables.

We first computed bivariate correlations between VEMI scales and the 207 criterion variables. The 56 criterion variables with replicated associations (p < .01) across all three samples are presented in Table 5 . Among those, most variables correlated with all three motives, with health motives uniquely, or with both health and animal rights motives.

Significant correlations ( p < .01) in bold.

As described above, our primary analytic approach used a regression-based strategy in a latent-variable framework to test preregistered predictions in sample 3 based on results from samples 1 and 2. Among the207 criterion variables, we identified 33 that were significantly associated with at least one VEMI scale in both of the first two samples. Table 6 shows the results of the best-fitting models for those criterion variables. We based predictions for Sample 3 based on two criteria from analyses of data from samples 1 and 2.: a positive standardized path coefficient of |.15| or larger and a bivariate correlation of |.15| or larger. Based on these results, we predicted that a) valuing peace would be related to all three motives (in this case we relaxed our rule somewhat; although the regression coefficient for animal motives was .14 in the second sample, bivariate correlations were virtually identical across variables), b) agreeable personality, valuing truth, responsibility, hard work, forgivingness, courage, helpfulness, lovingness, self-control, independence, instrumental happiness, intellect, family security, freedom, self-respect, terminal happiness, wisdom, national security, salvation, friendship, accomplishment, harmony, comfort, and mature love would have specific associations with health motives, c) being involved with an environmental organization would have a specific association with environmental motives, and d) caring for plants or animals would have a specific association with animal rights motives. Seven variables with standardized regression coefficients above our threshold in both samples did not have bivariate correlations < |.15| and thus we predicted they would not be related to any plant-based eating motives in the LISS data. The preregistration document for Sample 3 based on these findings can be found at https://osf.io/rk4en/ . We mistakenly made predictions about three variables based on results in sample 1 and 2 that were not available in LISS—being vegetarian, eating meat, and being involved in an animal organization.

Coefficients represent beta weights from Structural Equation Models.

Associations that met the replication criteria described in the preceding paragraph are given in Table 7 . Overall, 16 variables were related specifically and positively to health motives, including the personality trait agreeableness and a number of different values. The only variable that was related specifically to environmental motives was participation in an environmental organization. No variables were related specifically to animal rights motives.

Coefficients represent beta weights from Structural Equation Models. Variables were included in this table if they replicated results from the first two samples.

Participants from Sample 4 completed the VEMI and answered questions about advocacy flyers targeting health, environment, and animal rights motives created by The Vegan Society. We used these data to test pre-registered hypotheses about the specificity of correlations between the VEMI scales and attitudes about flyers targeting health, environment, and animal rights motives ( https://osf.io/9wre4/ ). Table 8 shows that all bivariate correlations between motives and responses to flyers were statistically significant ( p < .05). As predicted, the strongest correlate of the environment flyer was the VEMI environment scale and the strongest correlate of the animal rights flyer was the VEMI animal rights scale. Inconsistent with our hypotheses, both the environment and animal rights scales were also more strongly correlated with responses to the health flyer, suggesting that people who are motivated by health are not particularly impacted by vegetarian advocacy, in general.

* p < .05

Regression models confirmed primary associations between the environment motives and responses to the environment flyer and animal rights motives to the animal rights flyer. The VEMI environment scale emerged as the only significant predictor in the regression model for the health flyer. These preregistered regression models tested associations between vegetarian motives and responses to the flyers, controlling for other vegetarian motives. We conducted exploratory analyses in which we reversed the independent and dependent variables in our regression analyses, to test whether flyers would have specific relations with motives, controlling for the responses to other flyers. In those models, responses to the health flyer emerged as the only significant predictor of the VEMI health scale (β = .15). Likewise, responses to the environment and animal rights flyers were the only significant predictors of the VEMI environment and animal rights scales, respectively. This pattern indicates that, controlling for general motives to be a vegetarian, there are no specific links between health motives and responses to health-focused advocacy, whereas controlling for general responsivity to advocacy, there may be specific links between health-focused advocacy and health-related vegetarian motives. Overall, the results support the utility of targeting advocacy based on the environment or animal rights to people most likely to care about those issues, and provide weak to mixed support for targeting advocacy based on health motives.

The variety of pathways that can lead a person to vegetarian diet raises the possibility that people who select different pathways are also different in other ways, but little is known about these differences or their importance for eating behavior. Thus, the purposes of this study were to develop a measure of health, environmental, and animal rights motives for vegetarian eating, examine the correlates of these dimensions, and test whether motives differentially predict responses to advocacy materials.

Vegetarian eating motives inventory

Our first step was to develop the Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory (VEMI), a measure that reliably distinguishes between health, environmental, and animal rights motives for plant-based diets. The scales of this brief instrument were internally consistent and demonstrated a robust factor structure, including measurement invariance across three samples in two languages, men and women, and white and non-white participants. This measure has considerable promise for future research on the motivations for plant-based eating in Western cultures. Moreover, although our goal was to develop the VEMI to assess the potential motives of non-vegetarians in a general population, it can be easily adapted for research among vegans, vegetarians, flexitarians, reducetarians, and other groups. It could also be used at an individual level to better understand the kinds of factors that might be most influential for a particular person. The VEMI thus provides researchers and advocates with a well-validated and flexible measure for assessing the primary motives for plant-based eating among various individuals and groups.

Eating motivation profiles

We next used the VEMI scale to identify profiles of individuals who are most sympathetic to different reasons to be vegetarian. Overall, findings from three diverse samples suggested that health motives are the most common reason to consider adopting a plant-based diet in general and that health motives have the broadest array of correlates.

A number of criteria reliably correlated with plant-based motives across samples. By this standard, 21 variables correlated with all three motives. The common thread in this list seemed to be a communal orientation to life (e.g., agreeableness, loving, and valuing peace). The profile of people motivated by health was more conventional, as defined by 20 variables (e.g., male, hard-working, obedient, life satisfaction, and religiosity). The only variables that correlated uniquely with environmental motives were openness to experience and having visited a museum. Being involved in a religious organization and doing crafts were uniquely related to the animal rights motive. Valuing intellectual pursuits was related to both health and environmental motives, whereas being involved in a humanity organization was related to both environmental and animal rights motives. Finally, nine variables were related to both health and animal rights motives. As a group, they seemed to involve morality (e.g., conscientiousness, valuing truth, being self-controlled).

In our primary analytic approach, we used a more restrictive strategy with latent variables to account for measurement error and regression models to identify unique associations with each of the plant-based motives. Based on this approach, people who were primarily motivated by their health tended to be more agreeable, to have instrumental values (i.e. preferred means of achieving goals) involving hard work, courage, love, self-control, being happy, and to have terminal values (i.e., desired end states) involving family security, self-respect, happiness, national security, salvation, friendship, accomplishment, harmony, comfort, and mature love. This pattern paints a picture of a fairly conventional person who views working hard and getting along with others as the formula for a good life. In general, people whose main motives for considering a vegetarian diet are related to their health were not particularly compelled by vegetarian flyers, regardless of their content.

The only criterion uniquely and reliably related to environmental motives was participation in an environmental rights organization. No criteria were reliably related to animal rights motives across all three samples based on our primary analytic strategy. These circumscribed findings for the environment and animal rights scales surprised us given the large number of correlates we examined. This could have to do with our relatively conservative analytic approach, given the larger number of findings based on bivariate correlations that were significant at p < .01. However, by and large these results suggest that few traits, values, hobbies, habits, or demographic characteristics correlate in a way that is both robust and specific to the two major ethical motives for plant-based eating. This may suggest that “ethical vegetarianism” is a moral issue with relative specificity, as exemplified by the large numbers of people who actively promote social justice and environmental protection yet continue to eat animals. While there was some specificity between animal rights/environmental motives and responsivity to animal rights/environmental flyers, a more general finding is that people with ethical motives to consider a vegetarian diet were more responsive to advocacy flyers, including one that emphasized health benefits.

Implications for targeted advocacy

This pattern of results presents a kind of paradox for targeted advocacy. The most common reason people say they would consider being vegetarian has to do with health, and this study identified factors that could be used to identify those people. However, people driven primarily by health motives are least likely to respond to vegetarian advocacy. One interpretation of these results is that most people care about their health, but most people don’t connect health to vegetarian diet because the connection is indeed tenuous empirically. The fact that the most common reason people cite for considering a vegetarian diet is also the least compelling may help explain why there continues to be relatively few vegetarians, and why people motivated by health are also least strict [ 41 , 45 , 61 – 63 ] and compliant [ 1 , 64 , 65 ] with a vegetarian diet. Our data also supports this view somewhat, in that being vegan was more strongly associated with animal and plant motives than health motives in all three samples, although it did not surpass our cutoff in Sample 1 (correlations were .12 with both the animal and environment scales).

Conversely, people who are sympathetic to the ethical arguments for a vegetarian diet cannot easily be distinguished in other ways, but they are most likely to respond to vegetarian advocacy. The one exception is the relatively unsurprising finding that people affiliated with environmental advocacy groups are most likely to respond to an environmental argument supports the idea of encouraging individuals motivated by such concerns to see the connection between plant-based diets and climate change (e.g., [ 66 ]). Indeed, it is likely that many individuals who are passionate about this issue are not fully informed about the negative environmental impact of eating meat [ 67 ], and this information gap could be usefully exploited by animal advocacy groups who target individuals with a demonstrated interest in environmental activism.

However, overall these results do not seem to support the utility of selecting advocacy materials based on the kinds of people those materials would target. Instead, these results provide important information about ways in which targeted advocacy might not be productive. For instance, none of the demographic features that are known to be associated with plant-based eating in general, such as being young [ 44 , 45 ], female [ 1 , 44 , 46 – 49 , 63 ] and liberal [ 45 , 46 , 49 , 52 , 55 – 59 ], were differentially associated with health, environmental, or animal rights motives. The higher rates of vegetarianism among such individuals suggest that they represent fruitful targets for advocacy in general, but the results of this study do not provide guidance about which motives to appeal to among them, in particular.

It is worth noting that approaches to advocacy may depend on the end goal and beliefs about the best way to achieve that goal. Animal rights advocates [ 29 , 68 ] have argued that vegetarian advocacy should always focus on ethical motives. The more practical sector of plant-based diet advocacy (e.g., Leenaert, 2017; Joy, 2008 [ 30 , 31 ]) may be relatively more receptive to emphasizing health as a potential first step in reducing meat consumption. Our results about the specific correlates of health motives may help guide this step. Ultimately, evidence that links motives, advocacy approaches, and behavior change will determine the best way to reduce meat consumption in general, and we suspect that a multipronged approach may prove most effective [ 69 ].

Limitations and future directions

Although we examined a large number of criteria, we were constrained by the data collected by LISS and it is likely that we missed important unmeasured variables that would specifically correlate with different vegetarian motives. Likewise, while health, the environment, and animal rights are the most common motives for plant-based diets in Western societies, certain individuals may have more specific reasons that are not sampled on the VEMI, such as those related to religion or taste. Specificity may also be required to better understand the resistance to vegetarian diets. For instance, concerns have been raised about the difficulties poorer people have in finding healthy plant-based food, and this poses a considerable challenge to plant-based diet advocates for whom positioning one form of social justice (i.e., animal rights) against another (i.e., opportunities for the underprivileged) does little good.

A second major limitation is that the current results do not inform specific strategies to encourage people with different motives to change their diets in practice. For instance, some research suggested that people change their behavior upon becoming more aware of the impacts of eating animals [ 34 , 65 , 70 – 72 ], whereas other research suggested that increasing people’s awareness alone may not be sufficient to effectively change their behavior [ 31 , 73 ]. This issue sits downstream from the goals of our work, but it is equally critical for the ultimate goals of understanding the transition to vegetarian diets.

Third, in this study we exclusively employed self-report measures because we were interested in consciously accessible motives. However, future work examining attitudes that may be outside of peoples’ conscious awareness as well as directly behavioral outcome variables would be a useful extension of the current studies. Fourth, further work could be done to understand the underlying mechanisms of different attitudes towards plant-based dieting and animals [ 74 ]. Fifth, we focused in this study on distinguishing among the three major non-religious motives for vegetarian diet, because research suggests that these are the most common motives in general and because advocacy focuses almost exclusively on these three reasons to avoid meat. However, our results suggest that the VEMI scales could be combined into an overall composite useful for examining motives for vegetarian diet in general, in that the scales were intercorrelated and each distinguished vegan from non-vegan respondents. Moreover, there may be considerable value in assessing motives beyond those measured by the VEMI.

Finally, different approaches to the one taken here may be useful for identifying profiles of people who will tend to respond to different forms of activism. For example, machine learning approaches can be used in very large samples of users to identify an array of online behaviors that may be related to different motives for plant-based diets. This is a powerful tool that may have applicability, for instance in sampling online behavior to produce algorithms that can target specified audiences from within social media platforms [ 75 ]. Another is that considering the motives in favor of meat-eating [ 76 ] may prove useful in identifying the best way of encouraging plant-based diets. In a previous, preliminary study, we found that health motives were unrelated to motives for eating meat, whereas the environmental and animal rights motives were negatively related to seeing meat eating as “normal” or “nice” [ 77 ]. Future work that examines the links between motives to avoid meat and motives to eat meat would accordingly be informative.

In this study, we developed the Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory (VEMI), a brief and psychometrically robust measure of the three main motives for adopting a plant-based diet: health, the environment, and animal rights. We used this measure to identify profiles of people most likely to respond to appeals to these different motives and to test whether motives predict responses to advocacy materials. In a general populati0n, health motives are the most common and have the widest array of correlates, which generally involve agentic and communal values. However, people who cite health motives were relatively unresponsive to advocacy materials compared to people who cite environmental or animal rights motives.

Funding Statement

Funding was provided to Christopher J. Hopwood and Wiebke Bleidorn by Animal Charity Evaluators ( https://animalcharityevaluators.org ). The funding agency advised on study design issues prior to data collection; all decisions about study design were determined by the authors.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2020; 15(4): e0230609.

Decision Letter 0

12 Feb 2020

PONE-D-19-35075

Health, Environmental, and Animal Rights Motives for Vegetarian Eating

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

I have now received a very detailed review from one expert in the field. The review is largely positive, but suggests a number of minor revisions. Therefore, I would like to invite you to revise your work following these comments. Moreover, your result that love, happiness, and other emotions, are correlated to vegetarianism, made me think about the recent result that priming emotion makes people less anthropocentric speciesist (Caviola & Capraro, Social Psychological and Personality Science, in press). I was wondering whether there is a relationship between these two results. Of course it is not a requirement to cite this in the paper, but I am mentioning because it might be an idea worth thinking about.

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: This is an interesting and well-conceived/executed manuscript with the relevant aim of developing a questionnaire measure (Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory) to assess the importance attached to (often cited) reasons for choosing a vegetarian or meat reducing diet. The design and the statistics/analysis is in general very high level. Although the paper primarily is a developmental one, there are some interesting results as well. The authors also have a number of points about the ramifications in a general population (where I think they should be a bit more cautious, cf point 10 below).

I have a number of suggestions.

1) You could specify more concretely in the abstract which population the Inventory is for. Only for vegetarians and vegans? Only for meat reducers or the general meat consuming population (which will make the use of the measure more clear for future interested researchers). I liked the paragraph in the Discussion (p 15) which perhaps could be used in a shorter format in the abstract? (“This measure has considerable promise for future research on the motivations for plant-based eating. Moreover, although our goal was to develop the VEMI to assess the potential motives of non-vegetarians in a general population, it can be easily adapted for research among vegans, vegetarians, flexitarians, reducetarians, and other groups.” )

2) Related to point 1: could be pointed out more clearly that, since the inventory exhibits invariance, it is likely to function well throughout Western societies (however, see point 6)

3) It is fine that it is stated that the inventory examines three most dominant reason in Western societies. You could mention already in the Intro that you exclude non-religious motivations that also exists in Western societies (e.g. regligous, hindus).

4) It is know from studies that some vegetarians/vegans develop meat disgust/distaste over time (see for instance your own ref 63). At some point this becomes an important motivation. You should probably mention that this was excluded from the Inventory in the Limitations and Future Directions section. It makes perfectly good sense to me that you excluded it, as you were interested in non-vegetarian converters (that arguably have not developed disgust).

5) For all samples, it should described whether there were exclusion criteria in general and owning to diet specifically (could any type of diet (meat eating status) participate?). The geographical and/or national composition of all samples should be specified directly in the Methods section (can only see that Sample 3 is Dutch). Also, considering the nature of your research endeavor, it would also be a good idea to report in the Method section how many vegetarians, vegans, meat reducers there were in each sample.

6) Your claim of invariance could be strengthened and improved if further multigroup measurement invariance assessments were carried out. You could look at gender (in all samples), age (in sample 2 and 3 where there is much age variation). For sample 1 you could also determine “broader cultural” invariance. Thus, you have students with nonwestern heritage (sample 1: 485 Asians). The analysis may not be strictly necessary, but it seems just as important to look at invariance related to actual empirical differences and not only sample differences.

7) I like the introduction and motivation for developing the inventory very much – it is clear and to the point. Many relevant former measures are discussed.

On page 3: you write “ a more ethical approach to inter-species relationships”. What is meant with a more ethical approach? This appears too normatively motivated. An anthropocentric ethical approach is just as ethical as an animal rights approach. Just another kind of ethics. Please reformulate to the specific ethics approaches (animal rights or whatever) that the references suggest.

You could say that you also collected a sample 4 in the latter paragraph before the method section (p7), since you also reported about the three other samples in the Intro.

Table 5: please add notes to the tables specifying a) what the numbers in the table indicate (betas?), b) for each row whether it was just one or all of the scales that had to be significant for the association to be reported in the table, and 3) type of analysis (distributional-wise (logit, linear or whatever)) the table reports from.

Table 6: please add notes to the tables specifying a) what type of correlational test that is reported (pearson, spearman, etc).

The table 7 note: “association predicted in LISS” should be phrased to “prediction of associations to be tested in LISS” to avoid confusion.

9) In the limitation section (p 20) you mention that a useful extension could be to study motivations outside of peoples’ conscious awareness. I am not sure they are motivations anymore when they move away from awareness, but maybe implicit attitudes. This has been studied for meat eaters actually. Anyway, another way to look at it, and that you might consider including as a future research avenue, could be to prompt people for what is most important (best-worse scaling)

10) The design of the correlational analyses:

My primary concern of the study relates to the methodology of the correlational analyses. You

i) use two convenience samples (from different populations) to determine the Correlates that are looked for in the Plant-Based Eating Motives in Sample 3 (LISS).

ii) Following exclusions on basis of i) and what could be replicated in the LISS sample, you conclude quite much about relevant criterions (p17 “The only criterion reliably related to environmental motives was participation in an environmental rights organization. No criteria were reliably related to animal rights motives across all three samples. These circumscribed findings for the environment and animal rights scales surprised us given the large number of correlates we examined” and later that (p 21) “health motives have the widest array of correlates, which generally involve agentic and communal values.”).

This makes me wonder whether you may be relying too much on the two convenience samples to exclude possible relevant findings (and ACTUAL population differences) from sample 3?

In general, I think that the idea about determining “relevant/valid” criterion variables through three samples need more clarification. There are a number of questions that I am left with:

A) First of all, why did you choose to do three samples to determine the final (potential) relevant criterions? Why not five? Or ten?

B) Is is valid to study this with varying populations (students, Americans (I suppose, in sample 2), and people from the Netherlands). Any of the correlations (or non-assiciations) that could not be replicated in sample 2 and 3 could be a consequence of actual associational differences in the populations compared to the baseline in sample 1 (sample 1 consists of soon to be highly educated and young individuals – and many women that also could have a big impact).

In short, I do not think that the preregistration procedure related to the Sample 3 analysis is particular useful considering the aim of detecting relevant associations in a general population because of the aforementioned points A and B. I realize that you have put much effort into this part of the analysis and I am not asking you to remove this (you may also disagree with my remarks). But you could at least consider mentioning some of these limitations in your discussion (and rebut them if you disagree). But your claims about the general population (returning to point ii above) also rest on this procedure and you should as a minimum state in the Conclusion that the population results (your array of correlates) may be incomplete because of the measure developmental character of the paper and that future studies should examine this further.

11) Following up on the former: you mention “large effects distinguished the 97 vegans across all three samples from non-vegan respondents for the health (d = .51), environment (d = 1.29), and animal rights (d = .97). But you report no significant correlations with vegans in sample 3 - LISS data Table 7. Because there was a little correlation in sample 1 (r 0.12). Could this be because of too few vegans in sample 1 so the small correlation is by chance? Related to this: I cannot understand that you mention that you excluded correlational candidate variables in sample 1 and 2 if “less than 50 participants responding either “no” or “yes” – p 13.) But if you had an inclusion criteria of 50 in the two first samples and there only are in total 97 vegans in all three samples I cannot see how vegans should be included in the pool of correlational variable in the first place.

Could you please explain (I may be overseeing something)?

12) It seems that you excluded “All zero” from the subsequent follow-up correlation identification. Why? It seems just as important to show that non-associations replicate (this is a case of discriminant validity). Please explain why you were conceptually interested only in replications of significant associations.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Submitted filename: review PLOSONE Health....docx

Author response to Decision Letter 0

27 Feb 2020

1. Your result that love, happiness, and other emotions, are correlated to vegetarianism, made me think about the recent result that priming emotion makes people less anthropocentric speciesist (Caviola & Capraro, Social Psychological and Personality Science, in press). I was wondering whether there is a relationship between these two results. Of course it is not a requirement to cite this in the paper, but I am mentioning because it might be an idea worth thinking about.

Thank you for mentioning this paper which we read with interest. We had a difficult time connecting the two findings directly, though. Caviola and Capraro found that priming emotion makes people less speciesist – a really interesting finding. We found that love and some other values (as opposed to emotions) were related to the health motive to consider being vegetarian. In some sense, this motive is the least “vegetarian” in that it does not seem to be driven by ethical concerns, and overall the pattern of correlates makes it seem like the most conventional of the three motives. Basically, most people want to be healthy whereas fewer people care about the environment and even fewer about animal rights, so health motives correlate with a lot of other fairly normative variables. However, we do think that it would be interesting to do experimental work with vegetarian motives, and in particular to see how affect intersects with cognitive and motivational dynamics. Thus, we have included this reference and the value of future experimental work in this area as a future direction in the Discussion.

This is an interesting and well-conceived/executed manuscript with the relevant aim of developing a questionnaire measure (Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory) to assess the importance attached to (often cited) reasons for choosing a vegetarian or meat reducing diet. The design and the statistics/analysis is in general very high level. Although the paper primarily is a developmental one, there are some interesting results as well. The authors also have a number of points about the ramifications in a general population (where I think they should be a bit more cautious, cf point 10 below). I have a number of suggestions.

Thank you for your positive comments and your very helpful suggestions below.

This is a good idea. We have added this to the abstract.

We now mention this in the Discussion.

We now mention this in the Introduction.

We now mention taste as an alternative motive in the Discussion section.

We now provide this information in the Methods section.

We now test invariance across men and women in the first three samples as well as white vs. non-white in the first two (predominately North American) samples.

Thank you for this positive comment.

8) On page 3: you write “a more ethical approach to inter-species relationships”. What is meant with a more ethical approach? This appears too normatively motivated. An anthropocentric ethical approach is just as ethical as an animal rights approach. Just another kind of ethics. Please reformulate to the specific ethics approaches (animal rights or whatever) that the references suggest.

This is a good point – we have changed this word to “humane”.

9) You could say that you also collected a sample 4 in the latter paragraph before the method section (p7), since you also reported about the three other samples in the Intro.

We now state this in the Introduction.

We have made each of these corrections to the Table notes, titles, and/or Methods/Results sections.

We have modified our language around this issue in the Limitations section.

This is a good point, and one that we struggled with during our preregistration and in interpreting the results and preparing the manuscript. We agree with the reviewer’s general concern that our approach was perhaps too conservative. We of course want to leave the preregistered results in the paper, but we have now supplemented them with a much less conservative approach, in which we simply retain results that have replicated as bivariate correlations (as opposed to regression weights) across samples. This leads to a much larger number of significant findings. Of course, this might be critiqued as too liberal, but now the reader can choose between a liberal or a conservative approach, or perhaps something between. Given that we preregistered one approach, we continue to lean most heavily on those results in interpreting study findings.

11) Following up on the former: you mention “large effects distinguished the 97 vegans across all three samples from non-vegan respondents for the health (d = .51), environment (d = 1.29), and animal rights (d = .97). But you report no significant correlations with vegans in sample 3 - LISS data Table 7. Because there was a little correlation in sample 1 (r 0.12). Could this be because of too few vegans in sample 1 so the small correlation is by chance? Related to this: I cannot understand that you mention that you excluded correlational candidate variables in sample 1 and 2 if “less than 50 participants responding either “no” or “yes” – p 13.) But if you had an inclusion criteria of 50 in the two first samples and there only are in total 97 vegans in all three samples I cannot see how vegans should be included in the pool of correlational variable in the first place. Could you please explain (I may be overseeing something)?

We did not compute correlations for these variables in samples 1 and 2 because fewer than 50 people endorsed being vegan. That is why, across all three samples, there were only 97 vegans total. We did not have enough power to test moderation between vegan and non-vegan respondents; we are currently collecting data for that purpose. We included all participants in the absence of evidence for moderation and given that our goal was to assess motives for people in general, regardless of their dietary preferences.

Our strategy was to interpret only those findings that replicated across the first three samples as significant, and all others as not significant (even if they might have been for one or two samples). While we appreciate the reviewer’s point, we think that this makes for a cleaner and more focused presentation, with the comfort that data and scripts are available to any researcher who wished to do this kind of test relatively easily.

Decision Letter 1

PONE-D-19-35075R1

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Acceptance letter

11 Mar 2020

Dear Dr. Hopwood:

I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper at this point, to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .

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85 Vegetarianism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "85 Vegetarianism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/vegetarianism-essay-topics/.

Vegetarianism: The Ethical Perspective

Introduction.

The practice of abstaining from meat has been found in many cultures throughout history , and ethical reasons have been a major motivation behind the choice to eat a vegan or vegetarian diet for centuries. Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism have a long history of vegetarianism. Ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras based their abstention from meat on the idea that transmigration of human souls after death meant that an animal might have the soul that formerly inhabited a human body. The interest in a meatless diet in the West had a rebirth in the 18th and 19th centuries with the Enlightenment. Rationales for adopting a vegetarian diet have changed over time. For some, the concern is over cruelty to animals and a wish to avoid that. Others are concerned that the enormous quantities of grain fed to cattle to be consumed by rich Westerners are contributing to world hunger . Another ethical concern is how the resources required for raising animals for food affects the environment . One other reason commonly cited, especially recently, is for health reasons; this subject will not be treated in this pathfinder although some of the sources cited contain information on vegetarian nutrition and health benefits.

This pathfinder is aimed at undergraduates who are interested in researching various ethical and religious aspects of vegetarianism. The goal is to give an overview of subjects covered by this topic to aid in narrowing the focus of research and a starting point in finding resources. Most resources are available from the UNC Libraries and its website. Some are available from the Chapel Hill Public Library .

Subject headings

These are some useful terms to use when searching for books on ethical vegetarianism in the UNC Library Catalog .

• Animal rights
• Animal rights - moral and ethical aspects
• Animal welfare
• Animal welfare - biblical teaching
• Animal welfare - moral and ethical aspects
• Vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism - biblical teaching
• Vegetarianism - religious aspects
• Vegetarians

Return to resources list .

Bibliographies

Dyer, Judith C. Vegetarianism : an annotated bibliography. N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1982. Davis Z5776.V44 D93 1982

Comprehensive listing of publications on vegetarianism from pre-20th century through 1980. Although more recent material is not included, the wide range of sources covered, including a section on works devoted to philosophical aspects of vegetarianism, make it a useful resource.

Kistler, John M. Animal rights : a subject guide, bibliography, and Internet companion . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Davis HV4708 .K57 2000

Bibliography of post-1985 publications on animal rights. According to ARBA 2001 (American Reference Books Annual), while pro-animal rights materials are predominant, "the annotations for books on both sides of the issue are fair and reasonable." The extensive listings of websites in this book are probably not going to be the most useful feature given their ephemeral nature.

Fox, Michael Allen. Deep vegetarianism . Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1999. Davis TX392 .F79 1999 Overview and analysis of the debates over ethical vegetarianism. Includes a section on arguments against vegetarianism and an extensive bibliography.

George, Kathryn Paxton. Animal, vegetable, or woman? : a feminist critique of ethical vegetarianism . Albany : State University of New York Press, c2000. Davis TX392 .G46 2000 Challenges the arguments made by contemporary theorists on ethical vegetarianism such as Carol Adams, Tom Regan, and Peter Singer.

Lappé, Frances Moore and Lappé, Anna. Hope's edge: the next diet for a small planet . New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002. UL GE42 .L364 2002 As in her classic, Diet for a small planet , Lappé outlines a ethical rationale for vegetarianism from the perspective of ending world hunger. Hope's edge takes into account all the changes that have occurred in the 30 years since her groundbreaking work was published such as genetically modified organisms and the increasing corporatization of agriculture.

Marcus, Eric. Vegan: the new ethics of eating . Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press, c2001. Davis RM236 .M37 2001 Outline of the reasons for choosing a vegan diet. Includes a long list of resources. The reader should be cautioned that this book is by no means objective. This book is also available for free as a pdf file at the author's website, http://www.vegan.com/

Scully, Matthew. Dominion : the power of man, the suffering of animals, and the call to mercy . New York, N.Y. : St. Martin's Press, 2002. Davis HV4708 .S38 2002 Library Journal describes this as "one of the best books ever written on the subject of animal welfare." Interestingly, Scully's political perspective is that of a conservative Christian

Spencer, Colin. Vegetarianism : a history . London : Grub Street, 2000. Davis TX392 .S72 2000 This revised and updated edition of The Heretic's Feast is exactly what its title states. The focus is primarily on the history of vegetarianism in the West and the religious, health, and social motivations for the choice to abstain from meat, beginning in 2400 BC.

Walters, Kerry S. and Lisa Portmess, eds. Ethical vegetarianism: from Pythagoras to Peter Singer . Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. http://www.netlibrary.com/ebook_info.asp?product_id=7849 Excerpts from writings by major thinkers on the subject of ethical vegetarianism from ancient Greeks to present-day philosophers and theorists. Also included are appendices with arguments against ethical vegetarianism and anti-vegetarian sources.

Walters, Kerry S. and Lisa Portmess, eds. Religious vegetarianism : from Hesiod to the Dalai Lama . Albany : State University of New York Press, c2001. Davis BL65.V44 R45 2001 Excerpts from writings on religious vegetarianism from ancient Greeks to modern-day Christians and Buddhists with a focus "on spiritual questions raised by the slaughter of animals for food."

Young, Richard Alan. Is God a vegetarian? : Christianity, vegetarianism, and animal rights . Chicago: Open Court, c1999. Davis BT749 .Y68 1999 Examines biblical scholarship to explore the question of whether Christians should be vegetarians. Both Choice and Christian Century describe this book as accessible.

Databases and Indexes

Academic Search Elite http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=74 Academic Search Elite includes articles from a wide variety of disciplines. For the most part, it indexes scholarly journals and also has coverage of national newspapers like the New York Times. It includes full text articles.

ATLA Religion Database http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=672 ATLA is an excellent source for articles on religion. It does not include full text articles.

BioethicsLine (via PubMed) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=uncchlib Although the primary focus of PubMed is medicine and related areas of science, it also indexes citations which would formerly have been included in BioethicsLine. Full text articles are not included.

Expanded Academic ASAP http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=181 Expanded Academic ASAP is also multidisciplinary. It indexes scholarly, trade, and general-interest publications, and many articles are full text.

Issues and Controversies http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=364 Issues and Controversies is a good source for basic overviews on unfamiliar subjects. The articles discuss both pro and con sides of issues.

Philosopher's Index http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=230 As one might expect, Philosopher's Index indexes books and journals on philosophy; it also covers ethics, useful for this subject, and other related areas of study. Full text articles are not included in this database.

Encyclopedias

Akers, Keith. A vegetarian sourcebook . Denver, CO: Vegetarian Press, 1983. UL TX392 .A425 1983

According to the WomanSource Catalog and Review , this book's overview of vegetarian ethics offers "well-researched information." It also has a useful bibliography. The 1993 edition is also available at the Chapel Hill Public Library (615.362 Ake).

AnimaLife http://www.envirolink.org:80/arrs/AnimaLife/ Electronic serial produced by Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that bills itself as a "forum for discussion, information, and education about animal rights and liberation issues."

Animals' agenda Davis HV4701 .A5 Published by the Animal Rights Network for the purpose of providing information, news, and opinion on animal rights. Selected articles are available online at http://www.animalsagenda.org/

Vegetarian Journal http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=397 Published by the Vegetarian Resource Group , "a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public on vegetarianism and the interrelated issues of health, nutrition, ecology, ethics, and world hunger." Full text articles from this journal from July, 2000 to the present are available from InfoTrac OneFile, a database available through the UNC Libraries' website. Selected articles from the journal from 1993 to the present are available on their website at http://vrg.org/journal/index.htm

Vegetarian Times http://eresources.lib.unc.edu/eid/description.php?EIDID=139 Monthly magazine primarily focused on vegetarian diet and nutrition but which also publishes some articles on ethical aspects of vegetarianism. Full text articles from this publication from October, 1996 to the present are available in Masterfile Premier, a database available through the UNC Libraries' website.

Web resources

American Meat Institute http://www.meatami.com/ The American Meat Institute, a meat industry trade association, offers an opposing viewpoint on vegetarianism and animal welfare on its website.

Animals and Ethics http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/anim-eth.htm Article from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy that presents differing theories on the status of animals in relation to humans. Written by Scott Wilson, a graduate student in philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Animal Consciousness http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/ Article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Colin Allen, a philosophy professor at Texas A & M, describing arguments for and against animal consciousness.

Christian Vegetarian Association http://www.christianveg.com/ The Christian Vegetarian Association is an "international, non-denominational ministry of believers dedicated to respectfully promoting healthy, Christ-centered and God-honoring living among Christians." Many of the members of their board of directors are authors of well-regarded books on vegetarianism and ethics. Their site is hosted by vegsource.com

Jewish Veg http://www.jewishveg.com/ This site addresses vegetarianism from a Jewish perspective. It is also hosted by vegsource.com

Religion and Vegetarianism http://www.ivu.org/religion/ The International Vegetarian Union 's page on religion and vegetarianism includes links to information on Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and other perspectives on vegetarianism.

Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/arights/

The Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive is a fabulous resource for anyone interested in researching ethical aspects of vegetarianism. Tom Regan, perhaps best known for his 1983 book, "The Case for Animal Rights," was a professor of philosophy for over 30 years at North Carolina State University. The website lists the "notes, letters, manuscripts and typescripts, books and pamphlets, and audiovisual materials" he donated to the NCSU Libraries as well as a comprehensive list of links on animal rights and related subjects.

Vegsource.com http://vegsource.com/ Although their site is a bit busy, it is full of good information with numerous discussion boards hosted by and columns on vegetarianism by well-regarded academics and writers. A lot of the content relates more to food and nutrition, but there are also many links to sites on animal rights and other ethical concerns. Another nice feature is "Mad Cow Corral" which lists recent headlines relevant to vegetarianism and animal rights.

Return to top .

E-mail questions to Meghan Lafferty at [email protected] Last updated December 11, 2002.

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Vegetarians in modern Beijing: food, identity and body techniques in everyday experience

Wang, Yahong (2020) Vegetarians in modern Beijing: food, identity and body techniques in everyday experience. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

This study investigates how self defined vegetarians in modern Beijing construct their identity through everyday experience in the hope that it may contribute to a better understanding of the development of individuality and self identity in Chinese society in a post traditional order, and also contribute to understanding the development of the vegetarian movement in a non--‘Western’ context. It is perhaps the first scholarly attempt to study the vegetarian community in China that does not treat it as an Oriental phenomenon isolated from any outside influence. Using qualitative data collected from interviews with vegetarians and non vegetarians, observation and text from social media, this study finds that the motivations behind vegetarians in modern Beijing are highly similar to the motivations revealed in studies of vegetarians in other societies. The religious influence may be especially noticeable in the local context and is often combined with other arguments for vegetarianism, such as ethics. Vegetarians in Beijing have developed different strategies to maintain their vegetarian identity in a mostly non vegetarian society, including taking more control of their own diet, using rhetoric to avoid direct confrontation and making certain compromises. Vegetarianism related organizations are important in forming the vegetarian community, yet a general depoliticisation of vegetarianism in China makes it difficult to strive for more rights for vegetarians. The thesis suggests areas for future research about the vegetarian community in China, the global vegetarian movement and how it may contribute to future policy making.

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Moral Vegetarianism

Billions of humans eat meat. To provide it, we raise animals. We control, hurt, and kill hundreds of millions of geese, nearly a billion cattle, billions of pigs and ducks, and tens of billions of chickens each year.

To feed these animals, we raise crops. To raise crops, we deforest and use huge quantities of water. To quench these animals, we use still more water.

In turn, these animals produce staggering amounts of waste, waste that poisons water sources and soil. They produce staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses.

To raise these animals and produce this meat, farmers and slaughterhouse workers labor in conditions from onerous to brutal.

If controlling, hurting, or killing animals is wrong or if the production of these environmental effects or effects on people is wrong or if consuming the meat produced is wrong, then a breathtaking level of wrong-doing goes on daily.

Many fewer than a billion humans are vegetarian, have diets excluding meat. They are vegetarian for various reasons: because it’s healthy, because their parents make them be vegetarian, because they don’t like meat. Some are vegetarian on moral grounds. Moral vegetarianism is the view that it is morally wrong—henceforth, “wrong”—to eat meat.

The topic of this entry is moral vegetarianism and the arguments for it. Strikingly, most contemporary arguments for moral vegetarianism start with premises about the wrongness of producing meat and move to conclusions about the wrongness of consuming it. They do not fasten on some intrinsic feature of meat and insist that consuming things with such a feature is wrong. They do not fasten on some effect of meat-eating on the eater and insist that producing such an effect is wrong. Rather, they assert that the production of meat is wrong and that consumption bears a certain relation to production and that bearing such a relation to wrongdoing is wrong. So this entry gives significant space to food production as well as the tricky business of connecting production to consumption.

§1 introduces relevant terminology and an overview of the main positions. §2 explains meat production, the main moral arguments against it, and some responses to those arguments. That section—like the rest of the entry—focuses on medium-sized land animals. Yet fish and insects are killed in a number that dwarfs the number of land animals killed. Some issues these killings raise are covered in §3.

None of the foregoing is about consuming animals. §4 covers moral arguments from premises about meat production to conclusions about meat consumption. §5 considers some extensions of the arguments in §2. It wonders about which arguments against meat production can, if sound, be extended to show that animal product production or even some plant production is morally wrong. This last idea is relatively new. §6 briefly summarizes some other new issues in the moral vegetarian literature.

1. Terminology and Overview of Positions

2.1 animal farming, 2.2.1 suffering, 2.2.2 killing, 2.2.3 harming the environment, 2.2.4 general moral theories, 3. fish and insects, 4.1 bridging the gap, 4.2 against bridging the gap, 5.1.2 dairy, 5.2.1 plants themselves, 5.2.2 plant production and animals, 5.2.3 plant production and the environment, 5.3 summary of animal product and plant subsections, 6. conclusion: where the debate about vegetarianism stands and is going, other internet resources, related entries.

Moral vegetarianism is opposed by moral omnivorism, the view according to which it is permissible to consume meat (and also animal products, fungi, plants, etc.).

Moral veganism accepts moral vegetarianism and adds to it that consuming animal products is wrong. Whereas in everyday life, “vegetarianism” and “veganism” include claims about what one may eat, in this entry, the claims are simply about what one may not eat. They agree that animals are among those things.

In this entry, “animals” is used to refer to non-human animals. For the most part, the animals discussed are the land animals farmed for food in the West, especially cattle, chicken, and pigs. There will be some discussion of insects and fish but none of dogs, dolphins, or whales.

Primarily, this entry concerns itself with whether moral vegetarians are correct that eating meat is wrong. Secondarily—but at greater length—it concerns itself with whether the production of meat is permissible.

Primarily, this entry concerns itself with eating in times of abundance and abundant choices. Moral vegans need not argue that it is wrong to eat an egg if that is the only way to save your life. Moral vegetarians need not argue it is wrong to eat seal meat if that is the only food for miles. Moral omnivores need not argue it is permissible to eat the family dog. These cases raise important issues, but the arguments in this entry are not about them.

Almost exclusively, the entry concerns itself with contemporary arguments. [ 1 ] Strikingly, many historical arguments and most contemporary arguments against the permissibility of eating meat start with premises about the wrongness of producing meat and move to conclusions about the wrongness of consuming it. That is, they argue that

It is wrong to eat meat

By first arguing that

It is wrong to produce meat.

The claim about production is the topic of §2.

2. Meat Production

The vast majority of animals humans eat come from industrial animal farms that are distinguished by their holding large numbers of animals at high stocking density. We raise birds and mammals this way. Increasingly, we raise fish this way, too.

Raising large numbers of animals enables farmers to take advantage of economies of scale but also produces huge quantities of waste, greenhouse gas, and, generally, environmental degradation (FAO 2006; Hamerschlag 2011; Budolfson 2016). There is no question of whether to put so many animals on pasture—there is not enough of it. Plus, raising animals indoors, or with limited access to the outdoors, lowers costs and provides animals with protection from weather and predators. Yet when large numbers of animals live indoors, they are invariably tightly packed, and raising them close together risks the development and quick spread of disease. To deal with this risk, farmers intensively use prophylactic antibiotics. Tight-packing also restricts species-typical behaviors, such as rooting (pigs) or dust-bathing (chickens), and makes it so that animals cannot escape each other, leading to stress and to antisocial behaviors like tail-biting in pigs or pecking in chickens. To deal with these, farmers typically dock tails and trim beaks, and typically (in the U.S., at least) do so without anesthetic. Animals are bred to grow fast on a restricted amount of antibiotics, food, and hormones, and the speed of growth saves farmers money, but this breeding causes health problems of its own. Chickens, for example, have been bred in such a way that their bodies become heavier than their bones can support. As a result, they “are in chronic pain for the last 20% of their lives” (John Webster, quoted in Erlichman 1991). Animals are killed young—they taste better that way—and are killed in large-scale slaughterhouses operating at speed. Animal farms have no use for, e.g., male chicks on egg-laying farms, are killed at birth or soon after. [ 2 ]

Raising animals in this way has produced low sticker prices (BLS 2017). It enables us to feed our appetite for meat (OECD 2017).

Raising animals in this way is also, in various ways, morally fraught.

It raises concerns about its effects on humans. Slaughterhouses, processing this huge number of animals at high speed, threaten injury and death to workers. Slaughterhouse work is exploitative. Its distribution is classist, racist, and sexist with certain jobs being segmented as paupers’ work or Latinx work or women’s (Pachirat 2011).

Industrial meat production poses a threat to public health through the creation and spread of pathogens resulting from the overcrowding of animals with weakened immune systems and the routine use of antibiotics and attendant creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Anomaly (2015) and Rossi & Garner (2014) argue that these risks are wrongful because unconsented to and because they are not justified by the benefits of assuming those risks.

Industrial meat production directly produces waste in the form of greenhouse gas emissions from animals and staggering amounts of waste, waste that, concentrated in those quantities, can contaminate water supplies. The Böll Foundation (2014) estimates that farm animals contribute between 6 and 32% of greenhouse gas emissions. The range is due partly to different ideas about what to count as being farm animals’ contributions: simply what comes out of their bodies? Or should we count, too, what comes from deforestation that’s done to grow crops to feed them and other indirect emissions?

Industrial animal farming raises two concerns about wastefulness. One is that it uses too many resources and produces too much waste for the amount of food it produces. The other is that feeding humans meat typically requires producing crops, feeding them to animals, and then eating the animals. So it typically requires more resources and makes for more emissions than simply growing and feeding ourselves crops ( PNAS 2013.

Industrial animal farming raises concerns about the treatment of animals. Among others, we raise cattle, chickens, and pigs. Evidence from their behavior, their brains, and their evolutionary origins, adduced in Allen 2004, Andrews 2016, and Tye 2016, supports the view that they have mental lives and, importantly, are sentient creatures with likes and dislikes. Even chickens and other “birdbrains” have interesting mental lives. The exhaustive Marino 2017 collects evidence that chickens can adopt others’ visual perspectives, communicate deceptively, engage in arithmetic and simple logical reasoning, and keep track of pecking orders and short increments of time. Their personalities vary with respect to boldness, self-control, and vigilance.

We farm billions of these animals industrially each year (Böll Foundation 2014: 15). We also raise a much smaller number on freerange farms. In this entry “freerange” is not used in its tightly-defined, misleading, legal sense according to which it applies only to poultry and simply requires “access” to the outdoors. Instead, in the entry, freerange farms are farms that that, ideally, let animals live natural lives while offering some protection from predators and the elements and some healthcare. These lives are in various ways more pleasant than lives on industrial farms but involve less protection while still involving control and early death. These farms are designed, in part, to make animal lives go better for them, and their design assumes that a natural life is better, other things equal, than a non-natural life. The animal welfare literature converges on this and also on other components of animal well-being. Summarizing some of that literature, David Fraser writes,

[A]s people formulated and debated various proposals about what constitutes a satisfactory life for animals in human care, three main concerns emerged: (1) that animals should feel well by being spared negative affect (pain, fear, hunger etc.) as much as possible, and by experiencing positive affect in the form of contentment and normal pleasures; (2) that animals should be able to lead reasonably natural lives by being able to perform important types of normal behavior and by having some natural elements in their environment such as fresh air and the ability to socialize with other animals in normal ways; and (3) that animals should function well in the sense of good health, normal growth and development, and normal functioning of the body. (Fraser 2008: 70–71)

In this light, it is clear why industrial farming seems to do less for animal welfare than freerange farming: The latter enables keeping animals healthy. It enables happy states (“positive affect”) and puts up some safeguards against the infliction of suffering. There is no need, for example, to dock freerange pigs’ tails or to debeak freerange chickens, if they have enough space to stay out of each other’s way. It enables animals to socialize and to otherwise lead reasonably natural lives. A freerange’s pig’s life is in those ways better than an industrially-farmed pig’s.

Yet because freerange farming involves being outdoors, it involves various risks: predator- and weather-related risks, for example. These go into the well-being calculus, too.

Animals in the wild are subjected to greater predator- and weather-related risks and have no health care. Yet they score very highly with regard to expressing natural behavior and are under no one’s control. How well they do with regard to positive and negative affect and normal growth varies from case to case. Some meat is produced by hunting such animals. In practice, hunting involves making animals suffer from the pain of errant shots or the terror of being chased or wounded, but, ideally, it involves neither pain nor confinement. Of course, either way, it involves death. [ 3 ]

2.2 The Schematic Case Against Meat Production

Moral vegetarian arguments about these practices follow a pattern. They claim that certain actions—killing animals for food we do not need, for example—are wrong and then add that some mode of meat production—recreational hunting, for example—does so. It follows that the mode of meat-production is wrong.

Schematically

X is wrong.

Y involves X . Hence,

Y is wrong.

Among the candidate values of X are:

• Causing animals pain for the purpose of producing food when there are readily available alternatives.
• Killing animals for the purpose of…
• Controlling animals…
• Treating animals as mere tools…
• Ontologizing animals as food…
• Harming humans….
• Harming the environment…

And among the candidate values of Y are:

• Industrial animal farming
• Freerange farming
• Recreational hunting

Space is limited and cranking through many instances of the schema would be tedious. This section focuses on causing animals pain, killing them, and harming the environment in raising them. On control, see Francione 2009, DeGrazia 2011, and Bok 2011. On treating animals as mere tools, see Kant’s Lectures on Ethics , Korsgaard 2011 and 2015, and Zamir 2007. On ontologizing, see Diamond 1978, Vialles 1987 [1994], and Gruen 2011, Chapter 3. On harming humans, see Pachirat 2011, Anomaly 2015, and Doggett & Holmes 2018.

Some moral vegetarians argue:

Causing animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives is wrong.

Industrial animal farming involves causing animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives. Hence,

Industrial animal farming is wrong.

The “while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives” is crucial. It is sometimes permissible to cause animals pain: You painfully give your cat a shot, inoculating her, or painfully tug your dog’s collar, stopping him from attacking a toddler. The first premise is asserting that causing pain is impermissible in certain other situations. The “when there are readily available alternatives” is getting at the point that there are substitutes available. We could let the chickens be and eat rice and kale. The first premise asserts it is wrong to cause animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available substitutes.

It says nothing about why that is wrong. It could be that it is wrong because it would be wrong to make us suffer to raise us for food and there are no differences between us and animals that would justify making them suffer (Singer 1975 and the enormous literature it generated). It could, instead, be that it is wrong because impious (Scruton 2004) or cruel (Hursthouse 2011).

So long as we accept that animals feel—for an up-to-date philosophical defense of this, see Tye 2016—it is uncontroversial that industrial farms do make animals suffer. No one in the contemporary literature denies the second premise, and Norwood and Lusk go so far as to say that

it is impossible to raise animals for food without some form of temporary pain, and you must sometimes inflict this pain with your own hands. Animals need to be castrated, dehorned, branded, and have other minor surgeries. Such temporary pain is often required to produce longer term benefits…All of this must be done knowing that anesthetics would have lessened the pain but are too expensive. (2011: 113)

There is the physical suffering of tail-docking, de-beaking, de-horning, and castrating, all without anesthetic. Also, industrial farms make animals suffer psychologically by crowding them and by depriving them of interesting environments. Animals are bred to grow quickly on minimal food. Various poultry industry sources acknowledge that this selective breeding has led to a significant percentage of meat birds walking with painful impairments (see the extensive citations in HSUS 2009).

This—and much more like it that is documented in Singer & Mason 2006 and Stuart Rachels 2011—is the case for the second premise, namely, that industrial farming causes animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives.

The argument can be adapted to apply to freerange farming and hunting. Freerange farms ideally do not hurt, but, as the Norwood and Lusk quotation implies, they actually do: For one thing, animals typically go to the same slaughterhouses as industrially-produced animals do. Both slaughter and transport can be painful and stressful.

The same goes for hunting: In the ideal, there is no pain, but, really, hunters hit animals with non-lethal and painful shots. These animals are often—but not always—killed for pleasure or for food hunters do not need. [ 4 ]

Taken together the arguments allege that all manners of meat production in fact produce suffering for low-cost food and typically do so for food when we don’t need to do so and then allege that that justification for producing suffering is insufficient. Against the arguments, one might accept that farms hurt animals but deny that it is even pro tanto wrong to do so (Carruthers 1992 and 2011; Hsiao 2015a and 2015b) on the grounds that animals lack moral status and, because of this, it is not intrinsically wrong to hurt them (or kill or control them or treat them like mere tools). One challenge for such views is to explain what, if anything, is wrong with beating the life out of a pet. Like Kant, Carruthers and Hsiao accept that it might be wrong to hurt animals when and because doing so leads to hurting humans. This view is discussed in Regan 1983: Chapter 5. It faces two distinct challenges. One is that if the only reason it is wrong to hurt animals is because of its effects on humans, then the only reason it is wrong to hurt a pet is because of its effects on humans. So there is nothing wrong with beating pets when that will have no bad effects on humans. This is hard to believe. Another challenge for such views, addressed at some length in Carruthers 1992 and 2011, is to explain whether and why humans with mental lives like the lives of, say, pigs have moral status and whether and why it is wrong to make such humans suffer.

Consider a different argument:

Killing animals while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives is wrong.

Most forms of animal farming and all recreational hunting involve killing animals while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives. Hence,

Most forms of animal farming and all recreational hunting are wrong.

The second premise is straightforward and uncontroversial. All forms of meat farming and hunting require killing animals. There is no form of farming that involves widespread harvesting of old bodies, dead from natural causes. Except in rare farming and hunting cases, the meat produced in the industrialized world is meat for which there are ready alternatives.

The first premise is more controversial. Amongst those who endorse it, there is disagreement about why it is true. If it is true, it might be true because killing animals wrongfully violates their rights to life (Regan 1975). It might be true because killing animals deprives them of lives worth living (McPherson 2015). It might be true because it treats animals as mere tools (Korsgaard 2011).

There is disagreement about whether the first premise is true. The “readily available alternatives” condition matters: Everyone agrees that it is sometimes all things considered permissible to kill animals, e.g., if doing so is the only way to save your child’s life from a surprise attack by a grizzly bear or if doing so is the only way to prevent your pet cat from a life of unremitting agony. (Whether it is permissible to kill animals in order to cull them or to preserve biodiversity is a tricky issue that is set aside here. It—and its connection to the permissibility of hunting—is discussed in Scruton 2006b.) At any rate, animal farms are in the business of killing animals simply on the grounds that we want to eat them and are willing to pay for them even though we could, instead, eat plants.

The main objection to the first premise is that animals lack the mental lives to make killing them wrong. In the moral vegetarian literature, some argue that the wrongness of killing animals depends on what sort of mental life they have and that while animals have a mental life that suffices for hurting them being wrong, they lack a mental life that suffices for killing them being wrong (Belshaw 2015 endorses this; McMahan 2008 and Harman 2011 accept the first and reject the second; Velleman 1991 endorses that animal mental lives are such that killing them does not harm them). Animals could lack a mental life that makes killing them wrong because it is a necessary condition for killing a creature being wrong that that creature have long-term goals and animals don’t or that it is a necessary condition that that creature have the capacity to form such goals and animals don’t or that it is a necessary condition that the creature’s life have a narrative structure and animals’ lives don’t or… [ 5 ]

Instead, the first premise might be false and killing animals we raise for food might be permissible because

[t]he genesis of domestic animals is…a matter…of an implicit social contract—what Stephen Budiansky…calls ‘a covenant of the wild.’…Humans could protect such animals as the wild ancestors of domestic cattle and swine from predation, shelter them from the elements, and feed them when otherwise they might starve. The bargain from the animal’s point of view, would be a better life as the price of a shorter life… (Callicott 2015: 56–57)

The idea is that we have made a “bargain” with animals to raise them, to protect them from predators and the elements, and to tend to them, but then, in return, to kill them. Moreover, the “bargain” renders killing animals permissible (defended in Hurst 2009, Other Internet Resources, and described in Midgley 1983). Such an argument might render permissible hurting animals, too, or treating them merely as tools.

Relatedly, even conceding that it is pro tanto wrong to kill animals, it might be all things considered permissible to kill farm animals for food even when there are ready alternatives because and when their well-being is replaced by the well-being of a new batch of farmed animals (Tännsjö 2016). Farms kill one batch of chickens and then bring in a batch of chicks to raise (and then kill) next. The total amount of well-being is fixed though the identities of the receptacles of that well-being frequently changes.

Anyone who endorses the views in the two paragraphs above needs to explain whether and then why their reasoning applies to animals but not humans. It would not be morally permissible to create humans on organ farms and harvest those organs, justifying this with the claim that these humans wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the plan to take their organs and so part of the “deal” is that those humans are killed for their organs. Neither would it be morally permissible to organ-farm humans, justifying it with the claim that they will be replaced by other happy humans. [ 6 ]

Finally, consider:

Harming the environment while producing food when there are readily available alternatives is wrong.

Industrial animal farming involves harming the environment while producing food when there are readily available alternatives. Hence,

A more plausible premise might be “egregiously harming the environment…” The harms, detailed in Budolfson 2018, Hamerschlag 2011, Rossi & Garner 2014, and Ranganathan et al. 2016, are egregious and include deforestation, greenhouse gas emission, soil degradation, water pollution, water and fossil fuel depletion.

The argument commits to it being wrong to harm the environment. Whether this is because those harms are instrumental in harming sentient creatures or whether it is intrinsically wrong to harm the environment or ecosystems or species or living creatures regardless of sentience is left open. [ 7 ]

The argument does not commit to whether these harms to the environment are necessary consequences of industrial animal farming. There are important debates, discussed in PNAS 2013, about whether, and how easily, these harms can be stripped off industrial animal production.

There is an additional important debate, discussed in Budolfson 2018, about whether something like this argument applies to freerange animal farming.

Finally, there is a powerful objection to the first premise from the claim that these harms are part of a package that leaves sentient creatures better off than they would’ve been under any other option.

Nothing has been said so far about general moral theories and meat production. There is considerable controversy about what those theories imply about meat production. So, for example, utilitarians agree that we are required to maximize happiness. They disagree about which agricultural practices do so. One possibility is that because it brings into existence many trillions of animals that, in the main, have lives worth living and otherwise would not exist, industrial farming maximizes happiness (Tännsjö 2016). Another is that freerange farming maximizes happiness (Hare 1999; Crisp 1988). Instead, it could be that no form of animal agriculture does (Singer 1975 though Singer 1999 seems to agree with Hare).

Kantians agree it is wrong to treat ends in themselves merely as means. They disagree about which agricultural practices do so. Kant ( Lectures on Ethics ) himself claims that no farming practice does—animals are mere means and so treating them as mere means is fine. Some Kantians, by contrast, claim that animals are ends in themselves and that typically animal farming treats them as mere means and, hence, is wrong (Korsgaard 2011 and 2015; Regan 1975 and 1983).

Contractualists agree that it is wrong to do anything that a certain group of people would reasonably reject. (They disagree about who is in the group.) They disagree, too, about which agricultural practice contractualism permits. Perhaps it permits any sort of animal farming (Carruthers 2011; Hsiao 2015a). Perhaps it permits none (Rowlands 2009). Intermediate positions are possible.

Virtue ethicists agree that it is wrong to do anything a virtuous person would not do or would not advise. Perhaps this forbids hurting and killing animals, so any sort of animal farming is impermissible and so is hunting (Clark 1984; Hursthouse 2011). Instead, perhaps it merely forbids hurting them, so freerange farming is permissible and so is expert, pain-free hunting (Scruton 2006b).

Divine command ethicists agree that it is wrong to do anything forbidden by God. Perhaps industrial farming, at least, would be (Halteman 2010; Scully 2002). Lipscomb (2015) seems to endorse that freerange farming would not be forbidden by God. A standard Christian view is that no form of farming would be forbidden, that because God gave humans dominion over animals, we may treat them in any old way. Islamic and Jewish arguments are stricter about what may be eaten and about how animals may be treated though neither rules out even industrial animal farming (Regenstein, et al. 2003).

Rossian pluralists agree it is prima facie wrong to harm. There is room for disagreement about which agricultural practices—controlling, hurting, killing—do harm and so room for disagreement about which farming practices are prima facie wrong. Curnutt (1997) argues that the prima facie wrongness of killing animals is not overridden by typical justifications for doing so.

In addition to pork and beef, there are salmon and crickets. In addition to lamb and chicken, there are mussels and shrimp. There is little in the philosophical literature about insects and sea creatures and their products, and this entry reflects that. [ 8 ] Yet the topics are important. The organization Fish Count estimates that at least a trillion sea creatures are wild-caught or farmed each year (Mood & Brooke 2010, 2012, in Other Internet Resources). Globally, humans consume more than 20 kg of fish per capita annually (FAO 2016). In the US, we consume 1.5 lbs of honey per capita annually (Bee Culture 2016). Estimates of insect consumption are less sure. The UN FAO estimates that insects are part of the traditional diets of two billion humans though whether they are eaten—whether those diets are adhered to—and in what quantity is unclear (FAO 2013).

Seafood is produced by farming and by fishing. Fishing techniques vary from a person using a line in a boat to large trawlers pulling nets across the ocean floor. The arguments for and against seafood production are much like the arguments for and against meat production: Some worry about the effects on humans of these practices. (Some workers, for example, are enslaved on shrimpers.) Some worry about the effects on the environment of these practices. (Some coral reefs, for example, are destroyed by trawlers.) Some worry about the permissibility of killing, hurting, or controlling sea creatures or treating them merely as tools. This last worry should not be undersold: Again, Mood and Brooke (2010, 2012, in Other Internet Resources) estimate that between 970 billion and 2.7 trillion fish are wild-caught yearly and between 37 and 120 billion farmed fish are killed. If killing, hurting, or controlling these creatures or treating them as mere tools is wrong, then the scale of our wrongdoing with regard to sea creatures beggars belief.

Are these actions wrong? Complicating the question is that there is significantly more doubt about which sea creatures have mental lives at all and what those mental lives are like. And while whether shrimp are sentient is clearly irrelevant to the permissibility of enslaving workers who catch them, it does matter to the permissibility of killing shrimp. This doubt is greater still with regard to insect mental lives. In conversation, people sometimes say that bee mental life is such that nothing wrong is done to bees in raising them. Nothing wrong is done to bees in killing them. Because they are not sentient, there is no hurting them. Because of these facts about bee mental life, the argument goes, “taking” their honey need be no more morally problematic than “taking” apples from an apple tree. (There is little on the environmental impact of honey production or (human) workers and honey. So it is unclear how forceful environment- and human-based worries about honey are.)

This argument supporting honey production hinges on some empirical claims about bee mental life. For an up-to-date assessment of bee mental life, see Tye 2016, which argues that bees “have a rich perceptual consciousness” and “can feel some emotions” and that “the most plausible hypothesis overall…is that bees feel pain” (2016: 158–159) and see, too, Barron & Klein 2016, which argues that insects, generally, have a capacity for consciousness. The argument supporting honey production might be objected to on those empirical grounds. It might, instead, be objected to on the grounds that we are uncertain what the mental lives of bees are like. It could be that they are much richer than we realize. If so, killing them or taking excessive honey—and thereby causing them significant harms—might well be morally wrong. And, the objection continues, the costs of not doing so, of just letting bees be, would be small. If so, caution requires not taking any honey or killing bees or hurting them. Arguments like this are sometimes put applied to larger creatures. For discussion of such arguments, see Guerrero 2007.

4. From Production to Consumption

None of the foregoing is about consumption. The moral vegetarian arguments thus far have, at most, established that it is wrong to produce meat in various ways. Assuming that some such argument is sound, how to get from the wrongness of producing meat to the wrongness of consuming that meat?

This question is not always taken seriously. Classics of the moral vegetarian literature like Singer 1975, Regan 1975, Engel 2000, and DeGrazia 2009 do not give much space to it. (C. Adams 1990 is a rare canonical vegetarian text that devotes considerable space to consumption ethics.) James Rachels writes,

Sometimes philosophers explain that [my argument for vegetarianism] is unconvincing because it contains a logical gap. We are all opposed to cruelty, they say, but it does not follow that we must become vegetarians. It only follows that we should favor less cruel methods of meat production. This objection is so feeble it is hard to believe it explains resistance to the basic argument [for vegetarianism]. (2004: 74)

Yet if the objection is that it does not follow from the wrongness of producing meat that consuming meat is wrong, then the objection is not feeble and is clearly correct. In order to validly derive the vegetarian conclusion, additional premises are needed. Rachels, it turns out, has some, so perhaps it is best to interpret his complaint as that it is obvious what the premises are.

Maybe so. But there is quite a bit of disagreement about what those additional premises are and plausible candidates differ greatly from one another.

Consider a productivist idea about the connection between production and consumption according to which consumption of wrongfully-produced goods is wrong because it produces more wrongful production. The idea issues an argument that, in outline, is:

Consuming some product P produces production of Q .

Production of Q is wrong.

It is wrong to produce wrongdoing. Hence,

Consuming P is wrong.

Or never mind actual production. A productivist might argue:

Consuming some product P is reasonably expected to produce production of Q .

It is wrong to do something that is reasonably expected to produce wrongdoing. Hence,

Consuming P is wrong. (Singer 1975; Norcross 2004; Kagan 2011)

(The main ideas about connecting consumption and production that follow can—but won’t —be put in terms of expectation, too.)

The moral vegetarian might then argue that meat is among the values of both P and Q : consuming meat is reasonably expect to produce production of meat. Or the moral vegetarian might argue that consuming meat produces more normalization of bad attitudes towards animals and that is wrong. There are various possibilities.

Just consider the first, the one about meat consumption producing meat production. It is most plausible with regard to buying . It is buying the wrongfully-produced good that produces more of it. Eating meat produces more production, if it does, by producing more buying. When Grandma buys the wrongfully produced delicacy, the idea goes, she produces more wrongdoing. The company she buys from produces more goods whether you eat the delicacy or throw it out.

These arguments hinge on an empirical claim about production and a moral claim about the wrongfulness of producing wrongdoing. The moral claim has far-reaching implications (DeGrazia 2009 and Warfield 2015). Consider this rent case:

You pay rent to a landlord. You know that he takes your rent and uses the money to buy wrongfully-produced meat.

If buying wrongfully-produced meat is wrong because it produces more wrongfully-produced meat, is it wrong to pay rent in the rent case? Is it wrong to buy a vegetarian meal at a restaurant that then takes your money and uses it to buy wrongfully-produced steak? These are questions for productivists’ moral claim. There are further, familiar questions about whether it is wrong to produce wrongdoing when one neither intends to nor foresees it and whether it is wrong to produce wrongdoing when one does not intend it but does foresee it and then about whether what is wrong is producing wrongdoing or, rather, simply producing a bad effect (see entries on the doctrine of double effect and doing vs. allowing harm ).

An objection to productivist arguments denies the empirical claim and, instead, accepting that because the food system is so enormous, fed by so many consumers, and so stuffed with money, our eating or buying typically has no effect on production, neither directly nor even, through influencing others, indirectly (Budolfson 2015; Nefsky 2018). The idea is that buying a burger at, say, McDonald’s produces no new death nor any different treatment of live animals. McDonald’s will produce the same amount of meat—and raise its animals in exactly the same way—regardless of whether one buys a burger there. Moreover, the idea goes, one should reasonably expect this. Whether or not this is a good account of how food consumption typically works, it is an account of a possible system. Consider the Chef in Shackles case, a modification of a case in McPherson 2015:

Alma runs Chef in Shackles, a restaurant at which the chef is known to be held against his will. It’s a vanity project, and Alma will run the restaurant regardless of how many people come. In fact, Alma just burns the money that comes in. The enslaved chef is superb; the food is delicious.

The productivist idea does not imply it is wrong to buy food from or eat at Chef in Shackles. If that is wrong, a different idea needs to explain its wrongness.

So consider instead an extractivist idea according to which consumption of wrongful goods is wrong because it is a benefiting from wrongdoing (Barry & Wiens 2016). This idea can explain why it is wrong to eat at Chef in Shackles—when you enjoy a delicious meal there, you benefit from the wrongful captivity of the chef. In outline, the extractivist argument is:

Consuming some product P extracts benefit from the production of P .

Production of P is wrong.

It is wrong to extract benefit from wrongdoing. Hence,

Moral vegetarians would then urge that meat is among the values of P . Unlike the productivist argument, this one is more plausible with regard to eating than buying. It’s the eating, typically, that produces the benefit and not the buying. Unlike the productivist argument, it does not seem to have any trouble explaining what is wrong in the Chef in Shackles case. Unlike the productivist argument, it doesn’t seem to imply that paying a landlord who pays for wrongfully produced food is wrong—paying a landlord is not benefiting from wrongdoing.

Like the productivist argument, the extractivist argument hinges on an empirical claim about consumer benefits and a moral claim about the ethics of so benefiting.

The notion of benefiting, however, is obscure. Imagine you go to Chef in Shackles, have a truly repulsive meal, and become violently ill afterwards. Have you benefit ted from wrongdoing? If not, the extractivist idea cannot explain what is wrong with going to the restaurant.

Put so plainly, the extractivist’s moral claim is hard to believe. Consider the terror-love case, a modification of a case Barry & Wiens 2016 credits to Garrett Cullity:

A terrorist bomb grievously injures Bob and Cece. They attend a support group for victims, fall in love, and live happily ever after, leaving them significantly better off than they were before the attack.

Bob and Cece seem to benefit from wrongdoing but seem not to be doing anything wrong by being together. Whereas the productivist struggles to explain why it is wrong to patronize Chef in Shackles, the extractivist struggles to explain why it is permissible for Bob and Cece to benefit from wrongdoing.

A participatory idea has no trouble with the terror-love case. According to it, consuming wrongfully-produced goods is wrong because it cooperates with or participates in or, in Hursthouse’s phrase, is party to wrongdoing (2011). Bob and Cece do not participate in terror, so the idea does not imply they do wrong. The idea issues an argument that, in outline, goes:

Consuming some product P is participating in the production of P .

It is wrong to participate in the production of wrongful things. Hence,

Consuming P is wrong. (Kutz 2000; Lepora & Goodin 2013)

Moral vegetarians would then urge that meat is among the values of P . Unlike the productivist or extractivist ideas, the participatory idea seems to as easily cover buying and eating for each is plausibly a form of participating in wrongdoing. Unlike the productivist idea, it has no trouble explaining why it is wrong to patronize Chef in Shackles and does not imply it is wrong to pay rent to a landlord who buys wrongfully-produced meat. Unlike the extractivist idea, whether or not you get food poisoning at Chef in Shackles has no moral importance to it. Unlike the extractivist idea, the participatory idea does not falsely imply that the Bob and Cece do wrong in benefiting from wrongdoing—after all, their failing in love is not a way of participating in wrongdoing.

Yet it is not entirely clear what it is to participate in wrongdoing. Consider the Jains who commit themselves to lives without himsa (violence). Food production causes himsa. So Jains try to avoid eating many plants, uprooted to be eaten, and even drinking untreated water, filled with microorganisms, to minimize lives taken. Yet Jaina monastics are supported by Jaina laypersons. The monastic can’t boil his own water—that would be violent—but the water needs boiling so he depends on a layperson to boil. He kills no animals but receives alms, including meat, from a layperson. Is the monastic participating in violence? Is he participating because he is complicit in this violence (Kutz 2000; Lepora & Goodin 2013)? Is he part of a group that together does wrong (Parfit 1984: Chapter 3)? When Darryl refuses to buy wrongfully-produced meat but does no political work with regard to ending its production is he party to the wrongful production? Does he participate in it or cooperate with its production? Is he a member of a group that does wrong? If so, what are the principles of group selection?

As a matter of contingent fact, failing to politically protest meat exhibits no objectionable attitudes in contemporary US society. Yet it might be that consuming certain foods insults or otherwise disrespects creatures involved in that food’s production (R.M. Adams 2002; Hill 1979). Hurka (2003) argues that virtue requires exhibiting the right attitude towards good or evil, and so if consuming exhibits an attitude towards production, it is plausible that eating wrongfully produced foods exhibits the wrong attitude towards them. These are all attitudinal ideas about consumption. They might issue in an argument like this:

Consuming some product P exhibits a certain attitude towards production of P .

It is wrong to exhibit that attitude towards wrongdoing. Hence,

Moral vegetarians would then urge that meat is among the values of P . Like the participatory idea, the attitudinal idea explains the wrongness of eating and buying various goods—both are ways of exhibiting attitudes. Like the participatory idea, it has no trouble with Chef in Shackles, the rent case, the food poisoning case, or the terror-love case. It does hinge on an empirical claim about exhibition—consuming certain products exhibits a certain attitude—and then a moral claim about the impermissibility of that exhibition. One might well wonder about both. One might well wonder why buying meat exhibits support for that enterprise but paying rent to someone who will buy that meat does not. One might well wonder whether eating wrongfully-produced meat in secret exhibits support and whether such an exhibition is wrong. Also, there are attitudes other than attitudes towards production to consider. Failing to offer meat to a guest might exhibit a failure of reverence (Fan 2010). In contemporary India, in light of the “meat murders” committed by Hindus against Muslims nominally for the latter group’s consumption of beef, refusing to eat meat might exhibit support for religious discrimination (Doniger 2017).

The productivist, extractivist, participatory, and attitudinal ideas are not mutually exclusive. Someone might make use of a number of them. Driver, for example, writes,

[E]ating [wrongfully produced] meat is supporting the industry in a situation where there were plenty of other, better, options open…What makes [the eater] complicit is that she is a participant . What makes that participation morally problematic…is that the eating of meat displays a willingness to cooperate with the producers of a product that is produced via huge amounts of pain and suffering. (2015: 79; all italics mine)

This seems to at least incorporate participatory and attitudinal ideas. Lawford-Smith (2015) combines attitudinal and productivist ideas. McPherson (2015) combines extractivist and participatory ideas. James Rachels (2004) combines participatory and productivity ideas. And, of course, there are ideas not discussed here, e.g., that it is wrong to reward wrongdoers for wrongdoing and buying wrongfully produced meat does so. The explanation of why it is wrong to consume certain goods might be quite complex.

Driver, Lawford-Smith, McPherson, and James Rachels argue that it is wrong to consume wrongfully produced food and try to explain why this is. The productivist, extractivist, participatory, and attitudinal ideas, too, try to explain it. But it could be that there is nothing to explain.

It could be that certain modes of production are wrong yet consuming their products is permissible. We might assume that if consumption of certain goods is wrong, then that wrongness would have to be partly explained in terms of the wrongness of those goods’ production and then argue that there are no sound routes from a requirement not to produce a food to a requirement not to consume it (Frey 1983). This leaves open the possibility that consumers might be required to do something —for example, work for political changes that end the wrongful system—but permitted to eat wrongfully-produced food.

As §4.1 discusses, Warfield raises a problem for productivist accounts that they seem to falsely imply that morally permissible activities like paying rent to meat-eaters or buying salad at a restaurant serving meat are morally wrong (2015). Add the assumption that if consumption is wrong, it is wrong because some productivist view is true, and it follows that consumption of wrongful goods need not be wrongful. (Warfield does not assume this but instead says that “the best discussion” of the connection between production and consumption is “broadly consequentialist” (ibid., 154).)

Instead, we might assume that an extractivist or participatory or attitudinal view is correct if any is and then argue no such view is correct. We might, for example, argue that these anti-consumption views threaten to forbid too much. If the wrongness of producing and wrongness of consuming are connected, what else is connected? If buying meat is wrong because it exhibits the wrong attitude towards animals, is it permissible to be friends with people who buy that meat—or does this, too, evince the wrong attitudes towards animals? If killing animals for food is wrong, is it permissible merely to abstain from consuming them or must one do more work to stop their killing? The implications of various arguments against consuming animals and animal products might be far-reaching. Some will see this as an acknowledgment that something is wrong with moral vegetarian arguments. As Gruen and Jones (2015) note, the lifestyle some such arguments point to might not be enactable by creatures like us. Yet they see this not as grounds for rejection of the argument but, rather, as acknowledgment that the argument sets out an aspiration that we can orient ourselves towards (cf. §4 of Curtin 1991 on “contextual vegetarianism”).

A different sort of argument in favor of the all things considered permissibility of consuming meat comes from the idea that eating and buying animals actually makes for a great cultural good (Lomasky 2013). Even if we accept that the production of those animals is wrong, it could be that the great good of consuming justifies doing so. (Relatedly, it could be that the bad of refusing to consume justifies consumption as in a case in which a host has labored over barbequed chicken for hours and your refusing to eat it would devastate him.) Yet this seems to leave open the possibility that all sorts of awful practices might be permissible because they are essential parts of great cultural goods. It threatens to permit too much.

5. Extending Moral Vegetarian Arguments: Animal Products and Plants

Moral veganism accepts moral vegetarianism and adds to it that consuming animal products is wrong. Mere moral vegetarians deny this and add to moral vegetarianism that it is permissible to consume animal products. An additional issue that divides some moral vegans and moral vegetarians is whether animal product production is wrong. This raises a general question: If it is wrong to produce meat on the grounds adduced in §2 , what other foods are wrongfully produced? If it is wrong to hurt chickens for meat, isn’t it wrong to hurt them for eggs? If it is wrong to harm workers in the production of meat, isn’t it wrong to harm workers in the production of animal products? If it is wrong to produce huge quantities of methane for meat, isn’t it wrong to produce it for milk? These are challenges posed by moral veganism.

But various vegan diets raise moral questions. If it is wrong to hurt chickens for meat, is it wrong to hurt mice and moles while harvesting crops? If it is wrong to harm workers in the production of meat, isn’t it wrong to harm workers in the production of tomatoes? If it is wrong to use huge quantities of water for meat, isn’t it wrong to use huge quantities of water for almonds?

5.1 Animal Products

As it might be that meat farming wrong, it might be that animal product farming is wrong for similar reasons. These reasons stem from concerns about plants, animals, humans, and the environment. This entry will focus on the first, second, and fourth and will consider eggs and dairy.

Like meat birds, egg layers on industrial farms are tightly confined, given on average a letter-sized page of space. Their beaks are seared off. They are given a cocktail of antibiotics. Males, useless as layers, are killed right away: crushed, dehydrated, starved, suffocated. As they age and their laying-rate slows, females are starved so as to force them to shed feathers and induce more laying. They are killed within a couple years (HSUS 2009; cf. Norwood & Lusk 2011: 113–127, which rates layer hen lives as not worth living).

Freerange egg farming ideally avoids much of this. Yet it still involves killing off young but spent hens and also baby roosters. It often involves painful, stressful trips to industrial slaughterhouses. So, as it is plausible that industrially and freerange farming chickens for meat makes them suffer, so too is it plausible that industrially and freerange farming them for eggs does. The same goes for killing.

The threat to the environment, too, arises from industrial farming itself rather than whether it produces meat or eggs. Chickens produce greenhouse gas and waste regardless of whether they are farmed for meat or eggs. Land is deforested to grow food for them and resources are depleted to care for them regardless of whether they are farmed for meat or eggs.

In sum, arguments much like arguments against chicken production seem to apply as forcefully to egg production. Arguments from premises about killing, hurting, and harming the environment seem to apply to typical egg production as they do to typical chicken production.

Like beef cattle, dairy cows on industrial farms are tightly confined and bereft of much stimulation. As dairy cows, however, they are routinely impregnated and then constantly milked. Males, useless as milkers, are typically turned to veal within a matter of months. Females live for maybe five years. (HSUS 2009; cf. Norwood & Lusk 2011: 145–150).

Freerange milk production does not avoid very much of this. Ideally, it involves less pain and suffering but it typically involves forced impregnation, separation of mother and calf, and an early death, typically in an industrial slaughterhouse. So far as arguments against raising cows for meat on the basis that doing so kills them and makes them suffer are plausible, so are analogous arguments against raising cows for dairy.

The threat to the environment is also similar regardless of whether cattle are raised for meat or milk. So far as arguments against raising cows for meat on the basis that doing so harms the environment are plausible, so are analogous arguments against raising cows for milk. Raising cows for meat and for milk produces greenhouse gas and waste; it deforests and depletes resources. In fact, to take just one example, the greenhouse-gas-based case against dairy is stronger than the greenhouse-gas-based case against poultry and pork (Hamerschlag 2013).

In sum, arguments much like arguments against beef production seem to apply as forcefully to dairy production. Arguments from premises about killing, hurting, and harming the environment seem to apply to typical dairy production as they do to typical beef production.

As it might be that animal, dairy, and egg farming are wrong, it might be that plant farming is wrong for similar reasons. These reasons stem from concerns about plants, animals, humans, and the environment. This entry will focus on the first, second, and fourth.

Ed drenches Fatima’s prized cactus in pesticides without permission. This is uncontroversially wrongful but only uncontroversial because the cactus is Fatima’s. If a cactus grows in Ed’s yard and, purely for fun, she drenches it in pesticides, killing it, is that wrong? There is a family of unorthodox but increasingly common ideas about the treatment of plants according to which any killing of plants is at least pro tanto wrongful and that treating them as mere tools is too (Marder 2013; Stone 1972, Goodpaster 1978, and Varner 1998 are earlier discussions and Tinker 2015 discusses much earlier discussions). One natural way to develop this thought is that it is wrong to treat plants this way simply because of the effects on plants themselves. An alternative is wrong to treat the plants this way simply because of its effects on the biosphere. In both cases, we can do intrinsic wrong to non-sentient creatures.

The objection raises an important issue about interests. Singer, following Porphyry and Bentham, assumes that all and only sentient creatures have interests. The challenge that Marder, et al. raise is that plants at least seem to do better or worse, to flourish or founder, because they seem to have interests in a certain amount of light, nutrients, and water. One way to interpret the position of Porphyry, et al. is that things are not as they seem here and, in fact, plants, lacking sentience, have no interests. This invites the question of why sentience is necessary for interests (Frey 1980 and 1983). Another way to interpret the position of Porphyry, et al. is that plants do have interests but they have no moral import. This invites the questions of when and why is it permissible to deprive plants of what they have interests in. Marder’s view is that plants have interests and that these interests carry significantly more moral weight than one might think. So, for example, as killing a dog for fun is wrong, so, too, is killing a dandelion. If killing a chicken for food we don’t need is wrong, so, too, is killing some carrots.

If it is impermissible to kill plants to provide ourselves food we don’t need, how far does the restriction on killing extend: To bacteria? Pressed about this by Gary Francione, Marder is open-minded: “We should not reject the possibility of respecting communities of bacteria without analyzing the issue seriously” (2016: 179).

Marder’s view rests on a controversial interpretation of plant science and, in particular, on a controversial view that vegetal responses to stimuli—for example that “roots…are capable of altering their growth pattern in moving toward resource-rich soil or away from nearby roots of other members of the same species” (2016: 176)—suffice to show that plants have interests, are ends in themselves, and it is pro tanto wrong to kill them and treat them as tools.

Uncontroversially, much actual plant production does have various bad consequences for animals. Actual plant production in the US is largely large scale. Large-scale plant production involves—intentionally or otherwise—killing a great many sentient creatures. Animals are killed by tractors and pesticides. They are killed or left to die by loss of habitat (Davis 2003; Archer 2011). The scope of the killing is disputed in Lamey 2007 and Matheny 2003 but all agree it is vast (cf. Saja 2013 on the moral imperative to kill large animals).

The “intentionally or otherwise” is important to some. While these harms are foreseen consequences of farming, they are unintended. To some, that animals are harmed but not intentionally harmed in producing corn in Iowa helps to make those harms permissible (see entry on doctrine of double effect ). Pigs farmed in Iowa, by contrast, are intentionally killed. Chickens and cows, too. (Are any intentionally hurt? Not typically. Farming is not sadistic.)

The scale is important, too. Davis (2003) and Archer (2011) argue that some forms of meat production kill fewer animals than plant production and, because of that, are preferable to plant production.

The idea is that if animal farming is wrong because it kills animals simply in the process of producing food we don’t need, then some forms of plant farming are wrong for the same reason. More weakly, if animal farming is wrong because it kills very large numbers of animals in the process of producing food we don’t need, then some forms of plant farming are wrong for the same reason.

An outstanding issue is whether these harms are necessary components of plant production or contingent. A further issue is how easy it would be to strip these harms off of plant production while still producing foods humans want to eat at prices they are willing to pay.

A final objection to the permissibility of plant production: There are clearly environmental costs of plant production. Indeed, the environmental costs of plant farming are large: topsoil loss; erosion; deforestation; run-off; resource-depletion; greenhouse gas emissions. To take just the last two examples, Budolfson (2016: 169) estimates that broccoli produces more kilograms of CO 2 per thousand calories than pork and that almonds use two and a half times the water per thousand calories that chicken does.

If some forms of animal farming are wrong for those environmental reasons, then some forms of plant farming are wrong for those reasons (Budolfson 2018).

Again, an outstanding issue is whether these harms are necessary components of plant production or contingent. A further issue is how easy it would be to strip these harms off of plant production while still producing foods people want to eat at prices they are willing to pay.

Moral vegetarian arguments standardly oppose treating animals in various ways while raising them for food that we do not need to eat to survive. This standardly makes up part of the arguments that it is wrong to eat animals.

These arguments against meat production can be extended mutatis mutandis to animal product production. [ 9 ] They can be extended, too, to some forms of plant production. This suggests:

The arguments against industrial plant production and animal product production are as strong as the arguments against meat production.

The arguments against meat production show that meat production is wrong. Hence,

The arguments against industrial plant production and animal product production show that those practices are wrong.

One possibility is that the first premise is false and that some of the arguments are stronger than others.

Another possibility is that the first premise is true and all these arguments are equally strong. We would then have to choose between accepting the second premise—and thereby accepting the conclusion—or denying that meat production is wrong.

Another possibility is that the argument is sound but of limited scope, there being few if any alternatives in the industrialized West to industrialized plant, animal product, and meat production.

A final possibility is that the parity of these arguments and evident unsoundness of an argument against industrial plant production show that the ideas behind those arguments are being misexpressed. Properly understood, they issue not in a directive about the wrongness of this practice or that. Rather, properly understood, they just show that various practices are bad in various ways. If so, we can then ask: Which are worse? And in which ways? The literature typically ranks factory farming as worse for animals than industrial plant farming if only because the former requires the latter and produces various harms—the suffering of billions of chickens—that the latter does not. Or consider the debate in the literature about the relative harmfulness to animals of freerange farming and industrial plant farming. Which produces more animal death or more animal suffering? Ought we minimize that suffering? Or consider the relative harmfulness of freerange and industrial animal farming. Some argue that the former is worse for the environment but better for animals. If so, there is a not-easy question about which, if either, to go in for.

Given length requirements, this entry cannot convey the vastness of the moral vegetarian literature. There is some excellent work in the popular press. Between the Species , Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , Journal of Animal Ethics , Environmental Ethics , and Journal of Food Ethics publish articles yearly. Dozens of good articles have been omitted from discussion.

This entry has omitted quite direct arguments against consuming meat, arguments that do not derive from premises about the wrongness of producing this or that. Judeo-Islamic prohibitions on pork, for example, derive from the uncleanliness of the product rather than the manner of its production. Rastafari prohibitions on eating meat, for another example, derive in part from the view that meat consumption is unnatural. Historically, such prohibitions and justifications for them have not been limited to prohibitions on consuming meat. The Laws of Manu ’s prohibition on onion-eating derives from what consuming onion will do to the consumer rather than the manner of onion-production (Doniger & Smith (trans.) 1991: 102). The Koran’s prohibition on alcohol-drinking derives from what consuming alcohol will do to the consumer rather than the manner of alcohol-production (5:90–91).

Arguments like this, arguments against consumption that start from premises about intrinsic features of the consumed or about the consumed’s effects on consumers, largely do not appear in the contemporary philosophical literature. What we have now are arguments according to which certain products are wrongfully produced and consumption of such products bears a certain relation to that wrongdoing and, ipso facto , is wrong. Moral vegetarians then argue that meat is such a product: It is typically wrongfully produced and consuming it typically bears a certain relation to that wrongdoing. This then leaves the moral vegetarian open to two sorts of objections: objections to the claims about production— is meat produced that way? Is such production wrongful?—and objections to the claims connecting consumption to production— is consuming meat related to wrongful production in the relevant way? Is being so related wrong? Explaining moral vegetarian answers to these questions was the work of §2 and §4 .

There are further questions. If moral vegetarian arguments against meat-consumption are sound, then are arguments against animal product consumption also sound? Might dairy, eggs, and honey be wrongfully produced as moral vegetarians argue meat is? Might consuming them wrongfully relate the consumer to that production? Explaining the case for “yes” was some of the work of §5 .

Relatedly, some plants, fruit, nuts, and other putatively vegetarian foods might be wrongfully produced. Some tomatoes are picked by workers working in conditions just short of slavery (Bowe 2007); industrial production of apples sucks up much water (Budolfson 2016); industrial production of corn crushes numerous small animals to death (Davis 2003). Are these food wrongfully produced? Might consuming them wrongfully relate the consumer to that production? Explaining the case for “yes” here, too, was some of the work of §5 .

Fischer (2018) suggests that the answers to some of the questions noted in the previous two paragraphs support a requirement to “eat unusually” and, one might add, to produce unusually. If meat, for example, is usually wrongfully produced, it must be produced unusually for that production to stand a chance of being permissible, perhaps as faultless roadkill (Koelle 2012; Bruckner 2015) or as the corpse of an animal dead from natural causes (Foer 2009) or as a test-tube creation (Milburn 2016; Pluhar 2010; see the essays in Donaldson & Carter (eds.) 2016 for discussion of plant-based “meat”).

If consuming meat is usually wrong because it usually bears a certain relation to production, it must be consumed unusually to stand a chance of being permissible. Some people eat only food they scavenge from dumpsters, food that would otherwise go to waste. Some people eat only food that is given to them without asking for any food in particular. If consuming is wrong only because it produces more production, neither of these modes of consumption would be wrongful.

As some unusual consumption might, by lights of the arguments considered in this entry, turn out to be morally unobjectionable, some perfectly usual practices having nothing to do with consumption might turn out, by those same lights, to be morally objectionable. Have you done all you are required to do by moral vegetarian lights if you stop eating, for example, factory-farmed animals? Clearly not. If it is wrong to eat a factory-farmed cow, it is for very similar reasons wrong to wear the skin of that cow. Does the wrongful road stop at consumption, broadly construed to include buying, eating, or otherwise using? Or need consumers do more than not consume wrongfully-produced goods? Need they be pickier in how they spend their money than simply not buying meat, e.g., not going to restaurants that serve any meat? Need they protest or lobby? Need they take more direct action against farms? Or more direct action against the government? Need they refuse to pay rent to landlords who buy wrongfully-produced meat? Is it permissible for moral vegetarians to befriend—or to stay friends with—meat-eaters? As there are questions about whether the moral road gets from production to consumption, there are questions about whether the road stops at consumption or gets much farther.

As discussed in §5 , the moral vegetarian case against killing, hurting, or raising animals for food might well be extended to killing, hurting, or raising animals in other circumstances. What, if anything, do those cases show about the ethical treatment of pets (Bok 2011; Overall (ed.) 2017; Palmer 2010 and 2011)? Of zoo creatures (DeGrazia 2011; Gruen 2011: Chapter 5; Gruen 2014)?

What, if anything, do they show about duties regarding wild animals? Palmer 2010 opens with two cases from 2007, one of which involved the accidental deaths of 10,000 wildebeest in Kenya, the other involving the mistreatment and death of 150 horses in England. As Palmer notes, it is plausible that we are required to care for and help domesticated animals—that’s why it is plausibly wrong to let horses under our care suffer—but permissible to let similar harms befall wild animals—that’s why it is plausibly permissible to let wildebeest suffer and die. And yet, Palmer continues, it is also plausible that animals with similar capacities—animals like horses and wildebeest—should be treated similarly. So is the toleration of 10,000 wildebeest deaths permissible? Or do we make a moral mistake in not intervening in such cases? Relatedly, moral vegetarians oppose chicken killing and consumption and yet some of them aid and abet domestic cats in the killings of billions of birds each year in the United States alone (Loss, et al. 2013; Pressler 2013). Is this permissible? If so, why (Cohen 2004; Milburn 2015; Sittler-Adamczewski 2016)? McMahan (2015) argues that standard moral vegetarian arguments against killing and suffering lead (eventually) to the conclusion that we ought to reduce predation in the wild.

What, if anything do moral vegetarian arguments show about duties regarding fetuses? There are forceful arguments that if abortion is wrong, then so is killing animals for food we don’t need (Scully 2013). The converse is more widely discussed but less plausible (Abbate 2014; Colb & Dorf 2016; Nobis 2016).

Finally, in the food ethics literature, questions of food justice are among the most common questions about food consumption. Sexism, racism, and classism, are unjust. Among the issues of food justice, then, are how, if at all, the practices of vegetarianism and omnivorism or encouragement of them are sexist (C. Adams 1990) or racist (Alkon & Agyeman (eds.) 2011) or classist (Guthman 2011). Industrial animal agriculture raises a pair of questions of justice: It degrades the environment—is this unjust to future generations who will inherit this degraded environment? Also, what makes it so environmentally harmful is the scale of it. That scale is driven, in part, by demand for meat among the increasingly affluent in developing countries (Herrero & Thornton 2013). Is refusing to meet that demand—after catering to wealthy Western palates for a long stretch—a form of classism or racism?

The animals we eat dominate the moral vegetarian literature and have dominated it ever since there has been a moral vegetarian literature. A way to think about these last few paragraphs is that questions about what we eat lead naturally to questions about other, quite different topics: the animals we eat but also the animals we don’t; eating those animals but also eating plants; refusing to eat those animals but also raising pets and refusing to intervene with predators and prey in the wild; refusing to eat but also failing to protest or rectify various injustices. Whereas the questions about animals—and the most popular arguments about them—are very old, these other questions are newer, and there is much progress to be made in answering them.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Adamson, P., 2012, “ King of Animals: Porphyry ”, podcast Episode 92 of History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps , LMU/Munich and Kings College London.
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animal: cognition | animal: consciousness | animals, moral status of | doing vs. allowing harm | double effect, doctrine of | ethics: in Indian Buddhism | moral status, grounds of

Acknowledgments

Surveys of the moral vegetarian literature are common. I have greatly benefited from reading, among others, Engel 2015, Fischer 2018, McPherson 2018, and Stuart Rachels 2011.

I have benefited, too, from helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions. For them, I thank Anne Barnhill, Selim Berker, Mark Budolfson, Terence Cuneo, Bob Fischer, Rachelle Gould, Matthew C. Halteman, Elizabeth Harman, Oscar Horta, James John, Robert C. Jones, Jeff McMahan, members of the Vermont Ethics Group, Kate Nolfi, Clare Palmer, L.A. Paul, Tina Rulli, Jeff Sebo, Peter Singer, Sarah Stroud, Mark Timmons, Amy Trubek, and Alisha Utter.

Some material in this entry started life in Barnhill & Doggett 2017a and 2017b.

Copyright © 2018 by Tyler Doggett < tyler . doggett @ uvm . edu >

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Vegetarianism, Veganism, and Eating Disorders: Understanding Implications for Assessment and Diagnosis

Principal supervisor, additional supervisor 1, additional supervisor 2, year of award, department, school or centre, campus location, degree type, usage metrics.

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Vegetarianism Essay

This is a model  vegetarianism essay .

As I always stress, you should  read the question very carefully  before you answer it to make sure you are writing about the right thing.

Take a look at the question:

Every one of us should become a vegetarian because eating meat can cause serious health problems.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Staying on topic

If you rush to start writing and don't analyse the question and brainstorm some ideas you may include the wrong information.

There are religious or moral arguments for not eating meat, but if you discuss those you will be going off topic .

This question is specifically about the health problems connected to eating meat.

So you must discuss in your answer what some of these problems are and if you think there are real health risks or not.

Knowing about the topic

And don't get worried that you do not know much about diet and health.

As part of your IELTS study it will help if you know the basics of most topics such as some health vocabulary in this case, but you are not expected to be an expert on nutrition.

Remember, you are being judged on your English ability and your ability to construct an argument in a coherent way, not to be an expert in the subject matter. So relax and work with

Organisation

In this vegetarianism essay, the candidate disagrees with the statement, and is thus arguing that everyone does not need to be a vegetarian.

The essay has been organised in the following way:

Body 1: Health issues connected with eating meat (i.e. arguments in support of being a vegetarian Body 2: Advantages of eating meat

Now take a look at the model answer.

Model Essay

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

IELTS Vegetarianism Essay - Sample Answer

Vegetarianism is becoming more and more popular for many people, particularly because of the harm that some people believe meat can cause to the body. However, I strongly believe that it is not necessary for everybody to be a vegetarian.

Vegetarians believe that meat is unhealthy because of the diseases it has been connected with. There has been much research to suggest that red meat is particularly bad, for example, and that consumption should be limited to eating it just a few times a week to avoid such things as cancer. Meats can also be high in saturated fats so they have been linked to health problems such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

However, there are strong arguments for eating meat. The first reason is that as humans we are designed to eat meat, which suggests it is not unhealthy, and we have been eating meat for thousands of years. For example, cavemen made hunting implements so that they could kill animals and eat their meat. Secondly, meat is a rich source of protein which helps to build muscles and bones. Vegetarians often have to take supplements to get all the essential vitamins and minerals. Finally, it may be the case that too much meat is harmful, but we can easily limit the amount we have without having to cut it out of our diet completely.

To sum up, I do not agree that everyone should turn to a vegetarian diet. Although the overconsumption of meat could possibly be unhealthy, a balanced diet of meat and vegetables should result in a healthy body.

(264 words)

You should begin by intoducing the topi c. The introduction in this vegetarianism essay begins by mentioning vegetarians and the possible harm of eating meat .

It then goes on to the thesis statement , which makes it clear what the candidate's opinion is.

The first body paragraph has a topic sentence which makes it clear that the paragraph is going to address the possible health issues of eating meat.

Some reasons and examples are then given to support this.

The second body paragraph then has a topic sentence which makes it clear that the main idea is now about the arguments for eating meat .

The conclusion in this vegetarianism essay then repeats the opinion and gives the candidates final thoughts.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Vegetarianism — An Introduction to the Reasons for Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism: Introduction, Positive and Negative Sides

• Categories: Vegetarianism

About this sample

Words: 1182 |

Published: Aug 10, 2018

Words: 1182 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

Table of contents

What is vegetarianism (essay), benefits and drawbacks of vegetarian diets, works cited.

• Davis, B., & Melina, V. (2014). Becoming Vegetarian: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet. Book Publishing Company.
• Flynn, R. W. V. (2017). Vegetarianism in Western Europe: A Study of Vegetarianism in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Sweden. Routledge.
• Fox, N., & Ward, K. (2008). Health, ethics and environment: A qualitative study of vegetarian motivations. Appetite, 50(2-3), 422-429. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2007.09.007
• Haddad, E. H., Sabaté, J., Whitten, C. G., & Tanzman, J. S. (2014). Vegetarian food guide pyramid: A conceptual framework. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 100(Supplement_1), 356S-361S. doi:10.3945/ajcn.113.071621
• Leitzmann, C. (2017). Vegetarian nutrition: Past, present, future. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 100(Supplement_1), 496S-502S. doi:10.3945/ajcn.113.071621
• Mangels, A. R., Messina, V., & Messina, M. (2011). The Dietitian's Guide to Vegetarian Diets: Issues and Applications. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
• Marsh, K., & Zeuschner, C. (2012). The vegan plate: A guide to healthy vegan nutrition. Akerman Publishing.
• Sabaté, J., & Wien, M. (2015). Vegetarian diets and childhood obesity prevention. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 101(1), 152S-157S. doi:10.3945/ajcn.113.071621
• Spencer, E. A., Appleby, P. N., Davey, G. K., & Key, T. J. (2003). Diet and body mass index in 38 000 EPIC-Oxford meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans. International Journal of Obesity, 27(6), 728-734. doi:10.1038/sj.ijo.0802300
• Tuso, P. J., Ismail, M. H., Ha, B. P., & Bartolotto, C. (2013). Nutritional update for physicians: Plant-based diets. The Permanente Journal, 17(2), 61-66. doi:10.7812/TPP/12-085

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Literary Vegetarianism & Veganism

Theophilus savvas.

‘Diet’ is derived from the Greek diaita , meaning ‘way of life’, so that what we eat is intimately connected with who we perceive ourselves to be. Historically, those who chose to abstain from the eating of animal flesh were outsiders, frequently viewed with suspicion; today, vegetarianism and veganism are part of identity politics. There is wider significance too: reducing our consumption of animal products is now considered one of the most important factors in the debate about sustainability, climate change, and the Anthropocene.

The topic features in the work of major ancient writers, including Plutarch (‘On the Eating of Flesh’) and Porphyry (‘On Abstinence from Animal Food’); but it is Pythagoras who is most associated with it. His connection with the phenomenon was such that those who abstained from the consumption of meat were frequently labelled ‘Pythagoreans’ until the coining of the word ‘vegetarian’ in the mid-nineteenth century. The transmigration of souls offered the major reason for avoiding the consumption of animals for Pythagoras—you might be eating a departed relative re-birthed in animal form—but there is also an ethical component to his argument as humans and animals are drawn into the same kinship group: humans, he thought, should not eat those creatures that had loyally helped them with the daily chores.

Aristotle had a very different view: he emphasised a ‘natural’ hierarchy, in which animals were made entirely for human usage, and it was this view which generally prevailed. The Bible speaks of mankind having ‘dominion […] over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’; that is ambiguous, but it was taken by many, including theologians such as Aquinas and Augustine, to legitimise an Aristotelian view of mankind’s relationship with animals. This helped ensure that ethical vegetarianism remained a marginalised practice in the west until the nineteenth century. In the east, the story is a little different—there is indeed some speculation that Pythagoras’ practice was influenced by his own eastern travels—where Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism tended to advocate a greater reverence for animal life (although only Jainism actually mandates anything approaching veganism). The cross-pollination of ideas was important, and we should guard against seeing it as a one-way process of cultural transmission from east to west.

In the sense that vegetarianism circulated through creative writing, it can be seen as a literary phenomenon. There is, for instance, debate about the extent of the historical Pythagoras’ vegetarianism (and limited extant evidence for it), but there is significant cultural importance in the literary representation of him as such, most notably in Ovid’s great poem Metamorphoses . During the early modern period, when humanity’s behaviour towards animals was generally most cruel, the idea of vegetarianism was kept alive through its association with the related literature of utopianism and pastoralism. Indeed, this strong connection goes back to the ancient idea of the Golden Age, via the Biblical notion of Eden—John Milton, for instance, offers a vegetarian version of prelapsarianism in Paradise Lost (1667)—and it is found in Thomas More’s foundational Utopia (1516), and later in key Victorian novels of the utopian genre, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1869) Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872).

The philosophy of vegetarianism is key to Shelleyan romanticism too. Percy Bysshe Shelley advocated what he called the ‘natural diet’ in several essays and it features in his utopic poem ‘Queen Mab’ (1813), the extensive notes to which reveal that the idea was central to both his ethics and his poetics. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the creature initially idolises humanity, but is then revolted by it, recognising that the behaviour of the species does not match the perfection of the form; humanity is rejected via an avoidance of the violence of human eating habits: ‘My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment’. The importance of this declaration lies in the fact that it provides both the conduit for the creature’s critique of humanity and the substance of his own promise to be a better version of the human. Here a distinction is established, then, between the monstrously human Victor Frankenstein and the humane monster.

In America, Transcendentalism, deeply influenced by romanticism, was also engaged in such considerations. While British romantic vegetarian thought was generally ethically-focused, in the United States, the idea was more often than not couched in terms of its supposed health benefits to the human (although these health benefits did often also bring with them the sense of moral improvement too—as with temperance). However, the leading vegetarian advocate in the United States, Amos Bronson Alcott, was sympathetic to the animal welfare cause and made abstention from the ‘fruits of oppression and blood’ central to his belief system. The very first usage of the word ‘vegetarian’ seems likely to have been at Alcott House, a school started at Ham Common, London, in 1838 by James Pierrepoint Greaves and named after Bronson; during the early 1840s several uses of the word appear in the House journal, The Healthian . Alcott would later go on to establish his own vegetarian commune, Fruitlands, back in the United States.

By the end of the nineteenth century, influential works by Howard Williams, Henry Salt, Edward Carpenter, and the Theosophists Anna Kingsford and Annie Besant, had established vegetarianism in London as a ‘new cult’ in the words of the young Gandhi, who arrived in the capital in 1888. This intellectual atmosphere was accompanied by a perhaps surprising amount of eating opportunities in the capital—34 vegetarian restaurants are listed as being open in 1889. By 1895, the cause was prominent enough for Oscar Wilde to have Algernon quip about it in The Importance of Being Earnest : ‘You can’t possibly ask me to go without having some dinner’, he protests, ‘It’s absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.’

Vegetarianism is axiomatically connected with animal rights; but it has also frequently been linked to the rights of marginalised humans too. Alcott, for instance, was a ‘universal reformer’, and so vegetarianism was linked to abolitionism in the States, and in Britain, Carpenter advocated vegetarianism as part of a ‘larger socialism’ which would champion not just the working classes, but those whom Carpenter described as ‘Uranian’ (today’s approximation would be ‘queer’). The connection is established through the way in which humans have been strategically ‘degraded’ as animals and thus abused through a variety of servitudes by those more powerful. Eliminate the assumption of natural hierarchy, the argument goes, and the basis for the metaphorical degradation is eliminated too. This rationale has featured most strongly in a branch of feminist thought, and writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose utopian novel Herland (1915) presents a meatless and menless society, and Carol J. Adams, in her The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), have allied vegetarianism with a rejection of patriarchy.

Veganism begins with the expansion of vegetarian dietary discourse to include a prohibition on all animal-derived foods and drinks, but goes further, rejecting the human use of animal products more generally. The term was coined during World War II, but its cultural prominence is a twenty-first century phenomenon (perhaps due to greater viability). The emergence of a more engaged climate change politics has seen the topic move from a question of individual personal preference to one of global politics, related to food security and sustainability of planetary resource. This debate is a matter of science and politics, but it too has literary antecedents. Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), linked the topic to his satirical critique of colonial excess (the society of the equine Houyhnhnms, which Gulliver idolises, is vegetarian)—while Shelley intuited what science has now confirmed arguing in his vegetarian writings that animal pasturage was inefficient. Today, these matters are a part of the debate about international capital (in 2021 the global meat market was worth over 1.3 trillion US dollars), and it may be that veganism comes to be seen as the most convincing and effective form of contemporary anti-capitalist protest.

While we ought to be cautious before concluding that we are inevitably proceeding to a vegan world (to some, the end of the twentieth century might have seemed to be ushering in the end of carnivorism), it is most likely that the topic of meat and animal product consumption will be of central importance to conversations about the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century by Theophilus Savvas

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About The Author

Theophilus Savvas is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. He is the author of American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past (2011) and co-editor of After Postmode...

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Recovery after exercise-induced muscle damage in subjects following a vegetarian or mixed diet.

1. Introduction

2. materials and methods, 2.1. subjects, 2.2. baseline measurements, 2.2.1. soreness, 2.2.2. power, 2.3. isometric strength, 2.4. concentric contractions, 2.5. muscle damage protocol, 2.6. statistical analysis, 3.1. demographics, 3.3. strength: isometric, 3.4. strength: concentric, 3.5. vertical jump, 3.6. soreness, 4. discussion, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Presti, N.; Rideout, T.C.; Temple, J.L.; Bratta, B.; Hostler, D. Recovery after Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage in Subjects Following a Vegetarian or Mixed Diet. Nutrients 2024 , 16 , 2711. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16162711

Presti N, Rideout TC, Temple JL, Bratta B, Hostler D. Recovery after Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage in Subjects Following a Vegetarian or Mixed Diet. Nutrients . 2024; 16(16):2711. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16162711

Presti, Nicole, Todd C. Rideout, Jennifer L. Temple, Brian Bratta, and David Hostler. 2024. "Recovery after Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage in Subjects Following a Vegetarian or Mixed Diet" Nutrients 16, no. 16: 2711. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16162711

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