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The High Cost of Cheap Meat: Vegetarianism, Gandhi, and Humanity's Meat Problem

Note: I wrote this as a paper for a class, so if it reads a bit academic-y-ly, that’d be why.

A couple months ago, I passed through Chicago when I had a layover between trains on the way home. Walking from Union Station towards the Loop, I realized I was at the base of the Sears Tower. I looked up towards the sky, but instead of drawing any far-off horizon, the skyscraper just faded away: today, its spire perched well above the clouds. The scale of the thing is nearly incomprehensible.

Humans are famously bad at grasping the true scale of large numbers, though the state of our world is measured by ever-increasing quantities. Yet even among them, those involving something utterly commonplace stand out: eating meat. In 2021, people ate around 330 million metric tons of meat, or nearly 500 million if you include fish. Those numbers are beyond imagination — they fade into the clouds. By mass, that’s about 1,635 Sears Towers of animals — or 2,477 with fish.

Even if it’s possible to visualize a single Sears Tower of meat, imagining sixteen hundred of those breaks one’s mental scale all over again. But eating is firmly at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and few think about it. Fewer still stop to ask: wait, is this a good idea? All the while, the industry grows larger. Today, 42.8 kilograms of meat are produced per person, about double as much as in 1960. The world’s population increased 2.6 times in that same span. Population is increasing exponentially, and meat consumption is increasing exponentially on top of that. But wait — is this a good idea? It’s increasingly clear that this exponential growth is unsustainable: the current state of global meat production consumes vast tracts of land and huge amounts of energy, degrades the environment both local and global, is the source of rampant suffering both animal and human, and a whole lot more. And the industry, and all these problems, are growing only larger by the day. With such a behemoth — a whole sector of the economy — what’s to be done?

A rather unlikely character provides some uniquely-positioned insights into this question that lies at the intersection of morality and practicality: radical peacemaker and Father of India Mohandas Gandhi. The story of Gandhi’s life is in many ways a story of the question and all the baggage with which it comes: what is the right idea? Gandhi is most-known for devoting his life to the fight for civil rights in South Africa and India, but his passions were by no means confined to that cause alone. Always ‘experimenting’ with the truth, as aptly described by his autobiography’s subtitle, he left no stone of introspection unturned, constantly seeking refinements to everything from small-scale practices (his dress, how to travel) to those that underly the very fabric of society (inter-religious relations; satyagraha, his framework of nonviolent resistance; and the like).

But perhaps no topic intertwines these two extremes — the personal and the societal — as does food. Aptly, diet experimentation was one of Gandhi’s favorite endeavors and is notable among them for its longevity; it’s a saga that spans his entire life. That he devoted so much bandwidth to it makes sense, all things considered. For all humanity’s once-unimaginable progress on many fronts, a huge amount of time and effort, both on a broader societal and day-to-day individual level, goes to the simple act of eating… and yet eating remains a deeply personal act. There is simply no other aspect of human life that at once occupies half the world’s habitable land (an unfathomably large scale) and simultaneously involves something so individual as the incorporation of new molecules into one’s own body (a conversely microscopic scale). This is why Gandhi’s thoughts on diet are so powerful: he addresses the two elegantly with the same underlying concept of ahimsa, or nonviolence, and concern for the interconnectedness of all things.

Gandhi was raised vegetarian out of familial and religious tradition. India is, of course, known for its uniquely high levels of vegetarianism; about thirty percent of its people today don’t eat meat. But this would be no Gandhian story without some measure of experimentation. As a teenager, Gandhi started eating meat at a then-friend’s behest in what he went on to pithily describe as “a tragedy,” which gives you an idea of where he ideologically headed from there. In one particularly vivid recollection, he wrote that “Every time I dropped off to sleep it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me and I would jump up full of remorse." 

After a year of covertly eating meat on occasions with this friend, he eventually reverted to vegetarianism because he felt so guilty about keeping the secret from his parents — but, notably, not because of the meat-eating itself. That change-of-heart didn’t come until later, until after he’d departed India for England: setting off to study law in London, he had sworn to his mother that he would refrain from eating meat. A few weeks into the endeavor, he came upon a vegetarian restaurant in the city and, sitting down to eat, opened Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetariansim for the first time.

From then on, the cause became his own, not just a sub-consequence of another moral obligation but a meaningful thing in and of itself. He joined the burgeoning Vegetarian Society and even briefly led a chapter himself, became close friends with Salt, and went on to continue practicing and advocating for vegetarianism for the rest of his life. For Gandhi, this question of whether it’s a good idea to eat meat (or, at minimum, whether it’s not a bad idea) came down to, in essence, two things: morals and health.

To the former, Gandhi sought to practice the concept of ahimsa — the idea of nonviolence that’s common across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism — the best he could in all things, and, since it entails nonviolence towards all life, not eating meat logically followed from that precept. Debate still ensues among philosophers today about the minutiae of this ‘moral vegetarianism’: for one, is it the production or consumption of meat that may be morally wrong, or both? But it seems self-evident that there is a case to be had herein: if hurting or mistreating animals is wrong, there is likely something wrong about meat.

And besides the colder philosophical means of approaching the issue, there’s the psychological-moral aspect, too, that’s so viscerally articulated by Gandhi in the goat episode. This is a prime example of what some psychologists term "meat-related cognitive dissonance” (MRCD). Drawing on the framework of cognitive dissonance, first proposed in the 1950s, it posits that meat-eating individuals are faced with two opposing beliefs — “I eat meat” vs. “compassionate people don’t hurt animals,” for example. Experiencing the mental turbulence arising from believing two antithetical things, they seek to avoid or reduce that dissonance in a handful of different ways. 

Gandhi felt that disconnect firsthand when he imagined the goat alive inside him, and he eventually forewent it altogether by undertaking the most direct solution: removing its trigger (meat-eating). But if eating meat induces such mental disarray, why does 95% of the US population remain decidedly non-vegetarian? The MRCD framework proposes that one might prevent dissonance in the first place by avoiding or otherwise willfully ignoring disturbing information about meat consumption — or even by dissociating live animals from meat products, pretending that the meat was never an animal to begin with. Once in the face of dissonance, an individual might engage in some mental acrobatics in an attempt to reduce discomfort: self-identifying as not eating much or only humanely-produced meat, redirection of moral outrage towards others who more directly hurt animals, denial of the existence of animal minds, and justifying meat-eating as “natural, normal, and nice” are all in the fold. 

The two friends who appear in Gandhi’s vegetarian story fit right into this latter concept. In India, that friend who initially convinced Gandhi to try meat did so it by saying that the British ruled India because they ate meat and thus were stronger than the Indians: this is precisely the “meat-eating is natural” explanation. And later, in England, Gandhi’s roommate tries repeatedly to convince him to eat meat on the premise that it is “normal” in English society, on top of the fact that he deems it “natural” (nutritionally essential) in light of England’s harsher weather. What people say to convince or justify themselves to others provides a window into their inner psychological processes, and it may well be that these friends weren’t just trying to convince Gandhi — they were convincing themselves, too.

Improving his own personal health, as mentioned, was another primary goal for Gandhi in his dietetic experiments. He saw vegetarianism as plainly healthier than eating meat, taking issue with the presiding medical thought of the day that meat was simply necessary for the functioning of the human body. Like the friend from London who told him as such, he argued in letters against doctors and other experts who advised him that meat was an essential part of a healthy diet. And even as his wife fell ill, he kept her from drinking beef broth, despite her doctors admonishing him vehemently for doing so.

But at the same time he, notably, took heed of their other recommendations. Even after becoming steadfastly vegetarian, Gandhi continued iterating his diet, from foregoing salt to fruitarianism to much else in between, and when doctors cautioned him that he was only hurting his physical health in some of those endeavors — we are now completely sure that salt is indeed an essential nutrient and that fruits alone couldn’t possibly cover all nutritional groups — he took their thoughts to heart and scaled back. Speaking to his investment in nutritional science, one of the most striking things about his book The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism is that it doesn’t really broach the title’s subject until well into its pages — Gandhi first approaches dietetics with an exacting, medical view, discussing such minutiae as the detriments of removing the pericarp from rice, the importance of chewing when eating cereals because starches begin to be digested by saliva, and the newly-discovered “tissue building substrates…known as proteins.” But even in light of all of this, he remained committed to the benefits of foregoing meat, noting that while “there is no fixed dietetic rule for all constitutions,” “one should eat not in order to please the palate but just to keep the body going” — and he determined meat to fall squarely into that first category while likewise shunning highly-processed foods. The nuance that he exhibited in constantly adapting his diet manifests an important recurring theme of Gandhi’s life: always strikingly measured, particularly in response to confrontation, he sought to understand the opposite party’s perspective and empathize before deciding upon a course of action.

And it seems today like his dietetic course of action may have, it turns out, actually been ahead of his time both in acknowledging the healthfulness of vegetarianism and in anticipating the modern health-foods movement. Sociologist Donna Maurer argues that in the US, “vegetarians were often portrayed in popular culture as sallow, wan, and emaciated,” especially given that up through the 1970s, “many nutritionists characterized vegetarian diets as medically unsound” like Gandhi’s doctors. But a slow sea change began when the American Dental Association gave credence to vegetarianism as being at least equally healthful as an omnivorous diet. And since then, vegetarianism and personal health have only become more tightly linked — it may even be that in the public consciousness, vegetarianism is now more readily associated with the health-foods movement than morals.

These two facets — the ethical and healthful — were what defined the basis of Gandhi’s vegetarianism and, really, vegetarianism as a whole through the 20th century. They remain very important today. Actually, that’s a gross understatement: they’re more important today than ever. And yet they are even still overshadowed by the ominous imminence of a new issue — environmental degradation. All of this is, of course, due to the rise of factory-farming.

During Gandhi’s time, farming was still often a pastoral endeavor, the types of scenes that appear on today’s egg cartons and animal-product advertisements. But not long after Gandhi, factory farming quietly conquered the planet, and, in just one more staggering statistic to add to the heap, over 99 percent of meat consumed in the US now comes from such farms. This is how we got to thousands of Sears Towers’ worth of meat-by-mass. And today, the concerns that underly for many the choice to be vegetarian — morals and health, like before, and now additionally environmental concern — have similarly been super-sized, elevated to an entirely new level of consequence.

Morally, factory-farming meat production is almost an entirely other realm as compared to farming practices of yore, something author Johnathan Safran Foer powerfully articulates in Eating Animals, a book that spends much time on the practice. There was once an argument to be made for the oft-reminisced-upon husbandry between a farmer and their animals — that the farmer helped the animals have good lives, even if at the end of those lives their bodies became meat. But no one is arguing now that chickens confined to sixty-seven square inches or pigs specifically bred to suffer cardiovascular failure and broken bones — because those things just come along with selecting for higher meat yields — are living good lives. The entirety of their lives is suffering. For Gandhi and his ahimsa, this would have been, it’s easy to imagine, one of the most evil things possible. How is it, then, that 95% of America continues to qualmlessly eat meat from factory-farms?

Again, the MRCD framework seems even more pertinent in modern circumstances. The suffering of these animals is so obviously real once exposed, yet it remains veiled before then. Meat companies aren’t going around making billboards with photos of their concentrated animal feeding operations. Nor are consumers hoping that they do any time soon: instead, many just don’t seek out further information about where their meat comes from, choosing instead to remain oblivious to all of this suffering, the most of what they see only ever the long, plain buildings from the Interstate, never the carnage inside. It’s easier to scroll past a link to another exposé than it is to completely change one’s eating habits, especially when the normalcy of eating meat is so ingrained within society. One might buy the package of meat which says on its packaging that it’s “all-natural”, or that its animals are raised “free-range” or “cage-free,” unaware that those terms are all basically meaningless, that all the animals are sent to the same slaughterhouse and subjected to the same treatment anyway. But why would anyone want to know at all?

Foer also discusses at length the health impacts of eating meat produced in this way: Gandhi may have had a point regarding the health benefits of vegetarianism to begin with, but it has, like the moral side of the issue, become an entirely new beast in the wake of factory-farming. Now, individual health is not the only thing at stake — there is also the health of the entire world, as extremely high rates of antibiotic use in the animal-farming industry contributes to rising occurrences of antibiotic-resistant pathogens (on top of poor sanitary practices contributing to viruses more frequently jumping to humans).

And finally, the issue of environmental degradation feels even more imminent. Eating meat is intensely polluting and plainly inefficient — it will always be more efficient to simply eat the plants ourselves as opposed to feeding those plants to animals and then eating the animals. Huge amounts of methane, which has 28 times the effect of CO₂ on global warming, are emitted by livestock just because of their digestive systems. This is also not to mention other forms of air pollution or water pollution (from having that much animal waste accumulate in one location), or inefficient land use (again expounded by needing to grow crops just to feed those animals).

A particularly salient memory stands out to me now. About a year ago, the teacher for my environmental science class showed us all the now-famous (or infamous, depending on to whom you’re talking) documentary Food Inc. As luck would have it, our lunch period followed immediately thereafter, and I vividly recall standing in the line next to one of my classmates and talking briefly about the movie and all the suffering it portrays. “Oh, it doesn’t bother me at all,” he said, and a couple minutes later took a hamburger without, I presume, much more than a second thought.

But even though it might be more convenient to just ignore or avoid all these issues, Gandhi’s thoughts have something to teach us once more. Ahimsa is in practice about nonviolence, but in theory it’s all related back to the concept of karma — that one way or another, our actions will come back to us. And it indeed feels as though we may be approaching some sort of precipice, with the suffering of animals now a cornerstone of our economy, with new drug-resistant bacteria now popping up on the regular and viruses once confined to pigs or birds jumping to humans every few years, with our shared environment teetering on the edge as we feel the climate tremble. Perhaps it is time, and has been for a while now, to recall Gandhi’s holistic perspective and rethink how the world eats.