A Return to Organic Gardening
Author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), notes that by
arguing against the killing of plants, the meat-eater "seeks to reduce
vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living
creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing
plants and insects as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it
can’t be wrong to kill animals.
"Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do
not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants.
This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can
be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.
"Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though,
is not particularly difficult. Plants have no evolutionary need to feel
pain, and completely lack a central nervous system. Nature does not create
pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive.
Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants
would not."
In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer
in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster
seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."
Keith Akers states further, "Even if one does not want to become a
fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to
the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to
destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for
food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than
if we merely ate the plants directly."
(Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!)
"What about insects?" asks Akers, "While there may be reason to kill
insects, there is no reason to kill them for food. One distinguishes between
the way meat animals are killed for food and the way insects are killed.
"Insects are killed only when they intrude upon human territory, posing a
threat to the comfort, health, or well-being of humans. There is a huge
difference between ridding oneself of intruders and going out of one's way
to find and kill something which would otherwise be harmless."
According to Akers:
"These questions may have a certain fascination for philosophers, but most
vegetarians are not bothered by them. For any vegetarian who is not a
biological pacifist, there would not seem to be any particular difficulty in
distinguishing ethically between insects and plants on the one hand, and
animals and humans on the other."
Organic farming is a direct response to the moral question of unnecessarily
killing insects!
Anna Lappe says:
"Organic farming is also proving to dramatically reduce on-farm emissions as
well as related emissions associated with producing food. Cut out synthetic
fertilizer and on-farm petroleum-based chemicals and you're cutting back on
significant greenhouse gases."
I'd like to see a return to organic farming. In 1989, concern over the use
of the pesticide Alar on apples caused many Americans to consider organic
produce. John Robbins writes in his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Diet for
a New America (1987), "We produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000
times faster than we did only 35 years ago. Our environment and food chains
are being inundated by a virtual avalanche of pesticides. What three decades
ago took us six years to produce, we now produce every couple of hours."
"It is hard for us to imagine how destructive these substances are.
Pesticides are extraordinarily concentrated and powerful chemicals which
have been intentionally developed to kill living creatures. In fact, some of
them were originally developed to kill human beings. Phosgene, used today to
produce chemical herbicides and insecticides, was originally developed for
use in chemical warfare, and as, in fact, the agent of almost all deaths due
to poison gas in World War I. Zykon-B, another modern pesticide, is the
substance which the Nazis used to produce deadly hydrogen cyanide gas, used
to kill millions upon millions at Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration
camps.
"Many of today's most widely used pesticides--including malathion and
parathion--are members of the nerve gas family. So lethal is parathion that
a chemist who swallowed an infinitesimal dose, amounting to 0.00424 of an
ounce, was instantaneously paralyzed and died before he could take an
antidote he prepared in advance and had at hand.
"Pesticides are not the kind of substances you'd want to have hanging around
in your environment. But hang around many of them do. In fact, the
chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides--DDT, aldrin, kepone, dieldrin,
chlordane, heptachlor, endrin, mirex, PCB's, toxaphene, lindane, etc.--are
extremely stable compounds. Ominously, they do not break down for decades,
and in some cases, centuries."
Poisons used to kill insects accumulate on crops, in the soil and in greater
concentration in the tissues of living creatures higher on the food chain.
The Environmental Protection Agency's Pesticide Monitoring Journal reports
that "Foods of animal origin (are) the major source of...pesticide residues
in the diet."
John Robbins writes: "Recent studies indicate that of all the toxic chemical
residues in the American diet, almost all, 95% to 99%, comes from meat,
fish, dairy products and eggs. If you want to include pesticides in your
diet, these are the foods to eat. Fortunately, you can overwhelmingly reduce
your intake of these poisons by eating lower on the food chain, and not
choosing foods of animal origin...
"While DDT has gotten most of the publicity, there are unfortunately many
other toxic chemicals that are equally widespread in the environment, and
actually more poisonous. The pesticide dieldrin, for example, is five times
more poisonous than DDT when swallowed, and forty times more so when
absorbed by the skin. Yet by the time dieldrin was finally banned in 1974,
the FDA found it in 96 percent of all the meat, fish and poultry in the
country, in 85% of all dairy products, and in the flesh of 99.5% of the
American people! Sadly, dieldrin will remain with us for a long time; it is
one of the most biologically stable of all pesticides, taking many decades
to break down."
In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, How to Survive in America the
Poisoned, pesticide authority Lewis Regenstein writes: "Meat contains
approximately 14 times more pesticides than do plant foods; dairy products 5
1/2 times more. Thus, by eating foods of animal origin, one ingests greatly
concentrated amounts of hazardous chemicals. Analysis of various foods by
the FDA shows that meat, poultry, fish, cheese and other dairy products
contain levels of these pesticides more often and in greater amount than in
other foods."
As far back as 1966, it was admitted in Congressional hearings that:
"No milk available on the market, today, in any part of the United States,
is free of pesticide residues."
In 1975, the Council on Environmental Quality concluded dairy and meat
products account for over 95% of the population's intake of DDT. The same is
true of other pesticides.
A 1976 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found the breast milk of
mothers who consume animal products to be 50 to 100 times more contaminated
by pesticide residues than the milk of vegetarian or vegan mothers.
John Robbins writes: "Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, used
to say that before the United States could consider organic farming, it
would have to decide which 50 or 60 million Americans were going to be
allowed to starve. His attitude exemplified the stance that government and
agribusiness have taken in the past: that organic farming is a luxury we can
ill-afford, and we need these chemicals to feed ourselves. The chemical
companies...have spent millions to reinforce this way of thinking.
"But it could hardly be less true."
Organic farming and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are getting more
attention today. These utilize natural insect controls, such as predatory
insects, weather, crop rotation, pest-resistant varieties, soil tillage, and
other environmentally safe practices.
A 1979 Department of Agriculture task force of scientists and economists
came to "...positive conclusions on the importance of organic farming and
its potential contributions to agriculture and society." Until the end of
the Second World War, American farmers produced bountiful harvests without
relying on pesticides. There is no reason why America cannot do so again.
Go on to: Abolish Animal Research
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