Ethical Eating

We human beings consume organic matters to sustain our lives and grow. We cannot photosynthesize; nor can we extract needed nutrients from the soil. We must get our sustenance from live things. That is to say we must kill to eat. It is well known that we kill for our meat. To eat beef, we raise and kill steers. We also kill to eat plants. To eat rice, we grow and kill rice plants. And the killing does not stop there. We kill all kinds of things to create farms for our rice and cattle. We kill even more to maintain them. It is either ignorance or hypocrisy to claim that it is more ethical to eat vegetable, because one must kill and continue killing to produce vegetable. Just because we do not see the cruelty does not mean it is any more ethical. Since killing is not something avoidable, and we still want ethical living, we must look at it from a different angle. If killing is unavoidable, then we must look at the kill itself and its consequences. We should start by not wasting anything usable. This is not simply thrifty but to minimize the need to kill. We should also be respectful to the killed by cooking them carefully, tastily and creatively. And we should know what we are eating, not some hot beigy thing wrapped on a plastic tray, but a feathered bird that ran and chirped. That is the least we can do. It is bad enough that we have to kill, we had better not mess up the corpses. If we do not, as the poet Yuan Mei 袁枚 wrote: “ I am afraid if chickens, pigs, ducks and geese had spirit, they would no doubt file complaints against us in hell’s court. 吾恐鸡、猪、鹅、鸭有灵，必到枉死城中告状矣。”