by Hal Herzog
Staci Giani, the vegetarian I interviewed who now eats raw liver for breakfast, thinks the Skinny Bitch message to “eat plants, lose weight” is dangerous for adolescent girls. She remembers giving up meat as a seventeen-year-old with a distorted body image. “Being a vegetarian was a way for me to have more control over my body by taking the fat out of my diet. Fat was the big evil. Emotionally, I was in a tough position in my life at seventeen. Vegetarianism gave me something to hold on to. There was something appealing about the righteous ness of vegetarianism. At that age, you want to have something that is strong and clear and righteous.”
Staci had opened up a can of worms. A Harris poll reported that vegetarianism is most common among teenage girls, the group that is also most susceptible to eating disorders. I had surveyed and interviewed many vegetarians over the years, but never considered that there could be a dark side to what I had always thought of as a healthy lifestyle. Could the Skinny Bitch approach to weight loss actually be promoting eating disorders? I immediately started looking for research on the connection between vegetarianism and eating disorders. I was surprised by what I found.
While the Skinny Bitches dangle dreams of svelte bodies in front of young women who stop eating animals, there is no guarantee that an all-plant diet will make you thin. In an article published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, “Self-Reported Vegetarianism May Be a Marker for College Women at Risk for Disordered Eating,” Sheree Klopp and her colleagues found that female college students who were vegetarian did not weigh any less or have lower body mass indexes than students who ate meat. The vegetarians were, however, more likely to feel guilty after they ate and be more preoccupied with thinness. They also more frequently used laxatives and extreme exercise to lose weight, and more of them had the impulse to vomit after meals.
Other studies have reported similar findings. University of Minnesota researchers reported that vegetarian teens are almost twice as likely as their meat-eating peers to diet frequently, four times more likely to self-induce vomiting, and eight times more likely to use laxatives to lose weight. A 2009 study found that teenage and young adult vegetarians are nearly four times as likely as omnivores to engage in binge eating. (This was one of Staci’s symptoms.) In separate studies, researchers in Turkey and Australia found that vegetarian adolescents are more concerned about their appearance than non-vegetarians and engage in more extreme forms of dieting. Marjaana Lindeman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Helsinki agrees that teenage vegetarianism is sometimes symptomatic of underlying emotional issues. She has found that vegetarian women, in addition to having high rates of eating disorders, also have more symptoms of depression, lower self-esteem, and more negative worldviews than non-vegetarians.
Finally, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that among college students, meat-avoiders are more obsessed with their weight, diet more often, and binge and purge more than meat-eaters. Perhaps their saddest finding was that vegetarians were much more likely than omnivores to agree with the statement, “If given the opportunity to eliminate all my nutritional needs safely and cheaply by taking a pill, I would.”
My colleague Candace Boan-Lenzo studies eating disorders in young women. She has not eaten meat in fifteen years. I asked her if she knew about the evidence linking meat-avoidance to eating disorders.
“Oh, yes.” she said. “I tell my graduate students about it every semester.”
“What do they say?” I asked.
“They don’t believe me.”
Candace gets to the heart of the issue. “Vegetarianism does not cause people to become anorexic or bulimic. But some people, particularly teenage girls with these tendencies, use vegetarianism as a way to cover up their eating disorders. They may not even be aware of what they are doing.”
Candace is right. For most people, vegetarianism offers a healthy lifestyle. Indeed research has shown that a plant-based diet is generally better for you than a diet that includes a lot of meat. I am not suggesting that most vegetarians are borderline anorexics, but we can’t ignore the half-dozen studies that link vegetarianism with disturbed eating behavior, particularly in teenage girls. As with the controversial connection between childhood animal abuse and adult criminality, the important questions are how strong the link is and why it exists.
Eating disorders are serious. Bulimia, anorexia, and binge-eating disorder affect 7 million women and a million men in the United States. With a fatality rate between 5 and 10%, anorexia nervosa is among the most dangerous of mental illnesses. Clearly, more research is needed, but the Skinny Bitch admonition to women that vegetarianism = healthy = skinny is dead wrong.
WHY DO MOST VEGETARIANS
RETURN TO EATING MEAT?
Staci overcame her eating disorder. And now she eats raw meat every day. Like Staci most vegetarians return to meat. According to a 2005 survey by CBS News, there are three times more ex-vegetarians than current vegetarians in the United States. Perhaps because I was raised a Southern Baptist, I have always been fascinated by backsliders—people who have seen the light but then have a change of heart. I ran the idea of studying ex-vegetarians by Morgan Childers, an honors student who came into my office one afternoon looking for a research project. We designed an online survey and Morgan recruited participants by sending announcements of the study to MySpace and Facebook interest groups.
Within a couple of weeks, seventy-seven former vegetarians had completed our questionnaire. On average, they had been vegetarian for nearly ten years before they resumed eating meat. In his book The Face on Your Plate: The Truth about Food, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson extols the health benefits of avoiding animal-based foods. He writes, “Vegetarian for most of my life, I have never really experienced illness. Now at sixty-eight, several years a vegan, I find that I have never been healthier: I weigh less than I did at thirty; I am stronger than when I was forty; I have fewer colds or minor illnesses than at fifty; and in my entire life I have experienced no major illness of any kind.”
Jeffrey Masson is lucky. Not everyone thrives on an all plant diet. In our study, the most common reason vegetarians gave for resuming meat consumption was declining health. Recall that Staci reverted to omnivory because she always felt sick. Many of the ex-vegetarians that took our survey said the same thing. One wrote, “I was very weak and sickly. I felt horrible even though I ate a good variety of foods like PETA said to.” Another said, “I was very ill despite having regular iron injections and vitamin supplements. My doctor recommended that I eat some form of meat as I was not getting any better. I thought it would be hypocritical of me to just eat chicken or fish as they are just as much an animal as a cow or pig. So I went from no meat to all meat.” The most succinct response was from a person who wrote, “I will take a dead cow over anemia any time.”
There are other reasons vegetarians have for returning to meat. Many of the participants in our study simply grew tired of the hassle of vegetarian or veganism—they could not find quality organic vegetables locally or at a price they could afford, they did not have the time to prepare vegetarian meals, or they simply grew tired of the lifestyle. In describing the dietary difficulties he faced, the philosopher Gary Steiner wrote, “You just haven’t lived until you’ve tried to function as a strict vegan in a meat-crazed society. What were once the most straightforward activities become a constant ordeal.”
Some vegetarians simply miss the flavor of flesh. Some of our participants talked about protein cravings or how the smell of sizzling bacon would drive them crazy. One wrote, “I just felt hungry and that hunger would not be satisfied unless I ate some meat.” Another was succinct. “Starving college student + First night back home with folks + Fifty or so blazin’ buffalo wings waiting in the kitchen = Surrender.”
MEAT AS THE BATTLEGROUND
BETWEEN MIND AND BODY
When he was a graduate student, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt read Peter Singer’s book Practical Ethics and immediately decided the indus
trial production of meat was immoral. His new awareness of the cruelty inherent in industrial agriculture, however, had no effect on his diet. He writes, “Since that day I have been morally opposed to all forms of factory farming. Morally opposed, but not behaviorally opposed. I love the taste of meat, and the only thing that changed after reading Singer is that I thought about my hypocrisy each time I ordered a hamburger.”
My experience is similar to Jon’s. I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family and often ate meat three times a day, usually foods that start with the letter “b”—bacon, baloney, beef. No longer. More because we like the flavors than anything else, Mary Jean and I are drawn to Mediterranean-style cuisines that are supposed to be good for you—dishes that taste of tomato, lemon, and garlic; pasta and rice entrees. We do eat meat, though much less than we used to, and usually creatures that swim or fly.
I also make what are probably symbolic gestures to reduce the cruelty of the fork. I get eggs from my friend Lydia who dotes on her mixed flock of Araucanas and Barred Rocks. I pay three times as much as I need to for chickens from Bell and Evans, whose Web site claims their chickens were “allowed to bask in the warm light of the sun.” And my occasional flatiron steak comes from a Niman Ranch steer that I am told was “humanely raised on sustainable U.S. family farms and ranches.” I know, however, that according to Consumer Reports, terms like “natural” and “cruelty-free” are usually marketing ploys that mean little.
Meat inhabits the psychological territory that Al Pacino’s character in The Devil’s Advocate called the “no-man’s land in the battle between mind and body.” The most natural of human interactions with animals is our desire to eat them. Meat hunger is metaphorically “in our genes,” just as it is in chimpanzee genes. But though people like Jon Haidt and I cave when it comes to matters of the flesh, humans are the only species with the ability to look into the eye of a chicken and decide it would be wrong to eat it.
The Harvard University primatologist Marc Hauser, author of the book Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think, has remarked that the cognitive chasm between humans and chimpanzees is greater than the gap between an ape and a worm. Nowhere is the difference between humans and other animals more apparent than in matters of food. Chimps can recognize themselves in mirrors, make tools, coordinate group hunts, use symbols to communicate, and establish political alliances. But no chimpanzee has ever shown the slightest sign of remorse when ripping a tasty arm off a screaming colobus monkey.
MY RAW STEAK DINNER
A month after I interviewed Staci about her transformation from vegetarian to raw meat eater, I received an email from her: Hal, could you and Mary Jean come over for dinner Sunday? We’re having steak.
Sure, Staci. What kind of wine goes with raw beef?
A week later, I am having second thoughts, having been lectured by my son, an emergency room nurse, and his wife, a physician, about the perils of uncooked flesh. But Sunday afternoon, we drive over the mountain. Staci gives us a tour of the farm, which is in full summer bloom. Two adolescent pigs run over to us, oinking enthusiastically; they seem genuinely glad to meet us. Then it’s time to eat. For Staci, Gregory, and me, dinner is raw T-bone and a lovely Greek salad. (Mary Jean opts for baked chicken breast.) The steak, which came from a steer Staci and Gregory raised, is surprisingly good. Tender, tasty, moist. My reservations disappear. I ask for seconds and even sample a slice of raw duck breast Gregory offers me.
A couple of weeks later, I get an email from Staci that captures the moral ambiguity of the human-meat relationship.
Hal,
We just took our pigs to the butcher this morning.
It’s amazing how complex our psyches must be in order to nurture creatures every day for seven months, only to have them sent away and then come home in little freezer packages. Or sometimes to butcher them ourselves.
I think it takes bravery, don’t you?
I think of all the millions of humans over time who have hunted and raised animals for food because that was the way you survived. But you need to make it right in your conscience. Maybe reverence helps. Maybe killing the creature yourself helps. It completes the cycle somehow. Taking responsibility is somehow the balm that soothes the horror.
Blessings to you and Mary Jean and to our pigs.
8
The Moral Status of Mice
THE USE OF ANIMALS IN SCIENCE
If, in evaluating a research program, the pains of a rodent count equally with the pains of a human, we are forced to conclude 1) that neither humans nor rodents possess rights, or 2) that rodents possess all the rights that humans possess. Both alternatives are absurd.
—CARL COHEN
Here was the human body writ small.
—ALLEGRA GOODMAN
My first brush with the moral complexities of animal research was in my second year of graduate school. I had been assigned to work as a lowly assistant in the laboratory of a biochemist. One of my jobs was to collect molecules from the skin surface of earthworms. The procedure involved dropping worms into 180-degree water. Two minutes later, I would remove their inert bodies from the hot water and freeze little vials of eau de worm for chemical analysis. I had performed this procedure several times and viewed it as just another lab chore, one that I did not enjoy, but which also caused me no moral discomfort. The worms died instantly, and, after all, they were just worms.
One morning I was asked by the lab manager to do something different. A scientist from the another university who was studying the skin chemistry of desert creatures had arranged for some of his analysis to be done in our laboratory. Several days later, a box stamped “Caution: Contains Live Animals” was delivered to the lab. Inside was a virtual menagerie: a dozen crickets, a pair of eerily pale scorpions, a lizard about six inches long, a small snake, and a lovely little gray deer mouse. The task of liquefying the animals fell to me.
I had plunged an occasional lobster into a pot of boiling water with only a slight moral twinge, and I did not expect to be bothered by my morning’s task. I lit the Bunsen burner and started to work my way up the phylogenetic scale. Like worms, the crickets died almost immediately when they hit the near-boiling water. No problem. Next, the arthropods. In the few days they had been in the lab, I had come to like the scorpions. They had an air of menace I found fascinating. They also had more body mass than the insects and took a little longer to die when I dropped them in the beaker of water. I began to wonder what I was doing.
The lizard was a striped juvenile of the genus Cnemdopherous. My stomach turned as I lifted it from the cage, and I began to sweat. My hands shook a little when I dropped it in the near-boiling water. The lizard did not die quickly. It thrashed for maybe ten seconds before becoming still. The little snake was an elegant racer with big black eyes. More shaking hands and sweating brow, and the thrashing reptile soon was reduced to molecules swirling in solution.
Finally, the mouse. I weighed the mouse, calculated the appropriate amount of distilled water, poured it into the beaker and turned on the heat. As the water approached the 180 degree mark, I realized that I just could not “do” the mouse. I turned off the Bunsen burner and with a mixture of trepidation and relief, walked into the office of the lab manager. I told him that I had made extracts from most of the animals but that I just could not drop a live mouse into scalding hot water. My boss did the mouse while I waited in the next room.
I have thought about my predicament many times since. In hindsight, I am struck by the similarity between my tasks that morning and the plight of the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments. As all introductory psychology students learn, the hapless participants in these studies were instructed to administer a series of electrical shocks of increasing intensity to subjects in an adjacent room. The majority of people in the experiment administered shocks they thought would be extremely painful if not lethal. Like Milgram’s participants, I was confronted with a series of escalating choice points, but in my case, they were ba
sed on the phylogenetic scale rather than electric shock levels. The difference was that in the Milgram study the shocks were a ruse; the supposedly shocked “subject” was really a confederate of the experimenter. In my laboratory, the animals really died. When I look back on the incident, I get some satisfaction in knowing that I refused to boil a living mouse. But I really wish I had quit between the cricket and the scorpion.
This event provoked me to ask myself questions that I still struggle with. What is the difference between researchers who kill mice because they are trying to discover a new treatment for breast cancer and the legions of good people who smash the spines of the mice in their kitchen with snap traps or slowly poison them with d-Con? Why was it easy for me to plunge crickets into hot water, harder for me kill a lizard, and impossible for me to boil the mouse? Was it a matter of size, phylogenetic status, nervous system development, the grisly manner of their death, or the fact that the mouse was really cute? Were the results of this experiment really worth the deaths and suffering of the animals? Are they ever?
DARWIN’S MORAL LEGACY
I was not alone in my ambivalence about animal research. Even Charles Darwin struggled with vivisection—the nineteenth-century term for invasive animal research. Because Darwin was fascinated by animals, he was confronted by a problem that many modern zoologists face—sometimes you wind up killing the very creatures you have dedicated your life to studying. Jim Costa, a Darwin historian, told me that as a fledgling naturalist, Darwin shot and poisoned thousands of animals, including mice, for his collections. He was horrified by some of his own studies. He wrote of his pigeons, “I love them to the extent that I cannot bear to skin and skeletonise them. I have done the black deed and murdered the angelic little Fan-tail Pointer at 10 days old.”
