Meat vs. Vegan Reflective Essay Example

After reading his opinions and arguments, it’s hard for me to decide if I should be in #teammeat or #teamvegan. But for the sake of this discussion, I’m staying right in between these two, and I undeniably have some opinions myself, some for and some against.

First off and to clear tensions up, I certainly agree with him that being a vegetarian is a person’s personal choice. A person is never born with a feeling that meat-eating is a crime, it is always influence by their surroundings and backgrounds. Maybe some of them went vegan because of religious reasons or maybe they have a family tradition, it’s always unexpected. Ultimately, you can’t force someone to do something that you think is wrong. I mean, would you cut off your hair if someone tells you that having long hair is sinful? No right, because at the end it always comes down to what you believe and what you think is right.

Secondly, I do agree with him that someone eating meat is not cruel. Because by saying that it is cruel, you are actually elevating the value of animals’ life over plants’ life. But as he had said, researchers had found that plants can also respond to threats electrochemically, it’s just that they can’t express their emotions, unlike animals and humans. Okay, now that we know scientifically, animals and plants do respond to dangers around them, will the vegetarians and vegans step down and not eat plants too? No, because then they don’t have anything to eat, that’s why it’s always in the end about the person’s choice and this cycle with the strong (humans) consuming the weak (animals) is not wrong. And it’s the fact that this cycle happens in the animals’ and plants’ kingdom too that makes this argument about ‘eating meat is cruel’ more ironically stupid. Even funnier is that we are taught about this cycle in primary school, it’s called ‘Food Chain’.

From what I can see, I do agree with him most of the time. But the argument that stated ‘vegetarians don’t live a longer life’, that I do somewhat not agree. And it’s the words of science that prove this argument otherwise. Researchers at Loma Linda University in the USA has shows that vegetarian men live 10 years longer than omnivorous men. This is the same as vegetarian women, with them living 6 years longer than non-vegetarian women. But there are still many factors that may affect someone’s life expectancy, such as do they smoke or drink, are they being active, are they hygienic or how good are their living conditions. Still, researchers had found that going vegan is one of the big factors that help vegetarians and vegans achieve a longer life than their fellow omnivores.

There is one more argument that I definitely do not agree, that is ‘not eating meat is way worse for the environment’. This shouldn’t even be an argument. Let’s see, the fact that meat and dairy industry actually contribute roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and industrial meat is the single biggest cause of deforestation and forest fires. For example, if you actually watch the news, you would know that the Amazon Rainforest’s fires occurred to make space for people who work for the meat industry to grow industrial animal feeds. Talk about better for the environment, alright! By destroying these natural forests which are the habitats of the faunas in the world, the meat industry is massively contributing to the extinction of thousands of endangered wildlife species. This one is a bit out of topic, but seriously it needs to be brought to attention by the media. Indigenous People around the world are trying their very best to fight and protect forests. But they are the ones who ended up being abused, harassed, abducted, and even raped by people that worked for these industries. Governments are not even solving these problems, instead are encouraging these types of horrible actions that violate basic human rights. All of these happened because of the meat and dairy industries’ lack of responsibility. It is time for them to come up with real solutions for these horrendous problems.

In a nutshell, there are bad sides to all of things, whether it’s veganism or meat-consumption, abortions and anti-abortions. But these things do not matter, at the very end, it’s always and will always be your personal choice that matters the most.