by Michelle Summer Fike

The usual reasons cited for a commitment to vegetarianism include health, environment, and animal rights concerns. Medical studies clearly indicate that the high-fat red meat diet of the Western world is compromising our health on many levels. The pollution and disintegration of ecosystems worldwide, resulting from our meat-heavy Western diets, have very serious and far-reaching ecological effects. Finally, the alienation and cruelty with which our society treats both wild and domesticated animals on a general level is another shameful manifestation of Western culture.

What’s missing from this traditional approach to the vegetarian argument, though? Why do these words still fail to move many of us? Partly, I think, because vegetarianism is essentially about food, which means that it is also about agriculture, a fact which is often overlooked. As farmers, then, our point of connection to the issue of vegetarianism is through agriculture. So what is the big picture then? Where and how do these issues interrelate in our own lives and on a global level?

Those of us who are committed to organic agriculture believe in it because something is fundamentally wrong with conventional, industrial agriculture and the global corporate food system that it has developed into. Industrial agriculture represents a basic alienation from the land and all other life. Every year, more people go hungry around the world and in our own country. Farmers are increasingly displaced from their land and suffering from economic hardship. Rural communities are plagued with vast social problems and dissolution. Chemical residues in and on food are becoming the norm. Animals are subjected to increasing confinement and mistreatment. Peasants in Southern nations are becoming more marginalized than ever as a result of inappropriate "green revolution" programs. The air, water, and soil in agricultural ecosystems and far beyond them are severely eroded, contaminated and weakened. All the while, a handful of Western-owned banks and corporate executives for the increasingly concentrated, large transnational corporations and chemical/pharmaceutical companies are making a pretty penny from the social inequity and environmental deterioration that they create.

The important thing to understand is where this devastation comes from. Environmental and social problems are the symptoms of the global agricultural system, but the root cause lies elsewhere. In "The Metaphysical Transition in Farming: From the Newtonian-Mechanical to the Eltonian-Ecological" (Journal of Agricultural Ethics, Vol. 3, No.1, 1990), philosopher Baird Callicott notes: "How people go about producing food both reveals and reflects their world view." It is clear that the root of industrial agriculture’s problems can be found in the prevailing ideology and social structures that exist in our society. A world view based on control, exploitation, capitalism, right-wing political platforms, and a fine-tuned web of interconnected forms of oppression is the driving force behind mainstream Western thought and life. Industrial agriculture, too, has become a tool of capitalism and patriarchy, thriving because nature and farming communities are undervalued and are rendered exploitable through various institutional, societal and economic arrangements.

So, what does all this have to do with being a vegetarian? My vision of farming is based on care, reciprocity and connectedness between people, animals, and the environment. In order to change the face of conventional agriculture, it is not enough for us to simply use organic methods while continuing to rely upon the ideology and institutions of today. I strongly believe that a new agricultural system that does not address the needs of all peoples, animals and systems involved in agriculture will not be capable of long-term, meaningful change. I do not care to see a new agriculture that simply markets organic produce on the shelves at Loblaws, perpetuates the violence and isolation of rural communities, and maintains a hierarchy amongst humans, animals and nature. To do this is to undermine our very efforts for a new agricultural tomorrow.

Farm animals and companion animals play important roles on our farms. They enrich agriculture and the farms and lives of agricultural people. My vision is certainly not an agricultural paradigm without animals. Rather, it is a vision of mutual benefit and interaction.

The farming community, including the organic community, dismisses vegetarians fairly categorically, deeming us a threat to agricultural interests. But my vision is a threat only to a system of agriculture whose foundational assumptions validate and condone unnecessary violence and the rift between humans and nature that this implies. Manure, dairy products and companionship are some of the very precious gifts farm animals can provide us in a cooperative, socially just alternative scenario. Control, destruction and power-over, the very entities which perpetuate conventional agriculture, are recreated and strengthened every time we take an animal’s body and make it a site of violence. Its death becomes a human manipulation of earth’s sentient life processes, which the organic movement is seemingly trying to rectify in other circumstances.

I am only too aware of the life in a bed of soil, a garden of vegetables or a fruiting tree. Vegetarianism, then, is not a state of non-involvement so much as a direction toward minimal impact. Eating a carrot versus a cow implies a fundamentally different type of relationship to the earth. Conventional agriculture has become a dangerous global monolith because of a world view which supports the latter food choice.

Can we as a farming community continue to include animals in our agrarian world while simultaneously advancing a new agricultural paradigm that engenders respect, reverence and equality for all life? I know many farmers who do. Without this commitment, I fear that the agriculture of tomorrow, organic or not, will continue to be based on values and lifestyle choices that are not fundamentally different from those of today. And they must be in order to truly transform agriculture.

We have so much to lose if organics goes the way of conventional agriculture. I believe that a vegetarian ethic on the farm is a necessary political and personal platform from which we can begin to articulate a brand new agricultural ethic. This is a tomorrow that I very much want to see.