Last night, Bruce Friedrich let the numbers speak for themselves to show his audience that eating animals is not only unethical, but also wasteful.
The Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals spoke at the Penn Vegetarian Society’s first official event in Houston Hall last night.
In his talk, Friedrich challenged the audience to think about what goes into the food they eat and advocated vegetarianism for humane and environmental reasons.
Opening his speech with a quote from Socrates — “the unexamined life is not worth living” — Friedrich said he only started thinking about how his food landed on his plate when he read Frances Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. By reading this book, he discovered that only a small percentage of the nutrients a animal feeds on eventually reaches the consumer.
Among the audience was College senior Aliza Kempner, who said she felt the “quantitative data [Friedrich] presented was astounding.” She said, “I have been vegan and vegetarian because it’s the right thing to do, but to see the 20-to-one ratio of soy consumption for meat-based versus plant-based diets really floored me.”
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2006 report, eating animals is “one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems,” including pollution and shortage of food. Meat consumption also drives up the cost of basic food for the world’s poor, he said.
Friedrich also discussed the killing of and cruelty towards animals reared for meat, dairy and eggs. In what some participants said was his most thought-provoking statement of the night, Friedrich said eating animals goes against one’s integrity because “one pays people to do what we do not support,” for instance removing a pig’s testicles without anesthesia.
He went on to say that meat consumption also leads to a number of social problems, including the exploitation of farm workers, who he said often take out their employment frustrations on the animals.
He ended the night with a word for Penn students: “If you wouldn’t slit animals’ throats personally, don’t pay other people to do it for you.”
