By Bailey Elise McBride

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 11 years old. Well, sort of.

It all started when I somehow came across the Web site for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA. Its PETA Kids Web site has pictures of little chicks saying, “I am not a nugget!” and friendly cartoon pigs chanting, “Pigs are friends, not food!”

Photo Illustration by Jaclyn Johnson

I know what you’re thinking – probably either, “I’ll give you PETA, People Eating Tasty Animals!” or, “Why would she ever trust PETA? They’re crazy!” I was 11 years old at the time – stay with me.

All through high school and my first two years of college, I tried really hard to stay faithful to my commitment to veggies, but to tell you the truth, it was really hard. Eating in a cafeteria and trying to get enough variety and protein to stay healthy is no easy task. 

As a result, I was a “selective omnivore,” as author Jonathan Safran Foer puts it – a vegetarian with a propensity to cheat and eat meat.

In his latest book, “Eating Animals,” Foer expands on the two years of research he did on the factory farming industry in the United States.

The book is full of startling statistics, like the fact that more than 450 billion land animals are factory-farmed every year across the globe. Our darling Thanksgiving turkeys can no longer reproduce naturally and must be artificially inseminated. And, according to the United Nations, globally the livestock sector is responsible for around 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, which is 40 percent more than the whole of the transportation sector – cars, planes, trains, subways and ships – combined.

There are an equal number of statistics that go the other way, too, I’m sure. The number of people employed by the livestock industry in the United States alone has to be huge. According to the International Labor Organization, the agriculture industry employs 36.1 percent of the global workforce.

I would never suggest that these people should up and quit their jobs for the great vegetarian cause. In fact, I really don’t spend much time trying to convert people to my way of thinking.

Like Jonathan Safran Foer, it took some life-altering event (in my case, it was moving out on my own for the first time; in his case, it was having his first child) for me to really consider the implications of my vegetarianism and begin to do some research into what I was eating.

Luckily for me, Foer had done a lot of the research for me. Like a modern version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” “Eating Animals” paints a complete portrait of the factory farming industry in the United States and the treatment of the animals whose lives we often take for granted.

One of the biggest issues raised by Foer in his book is the hypocrisy of law in the United States regarding the treatment of animals. If someone treated dogs and cats the same way cows and pigs are treated on factory farms, he would soon find himself in jail and/or facing hefty fines for animal cruelty. But when it is an animal that we happen to eat in this country, the same standards do not apply.

What really is the difference between keeping a dog in the dark chained to the ground, never allowing it to move and feeding it food infused with hormones and the remains of other animals and doing the same thing to a cow? What makes treating cows this way OK?

This was the sort of question I had to ask myself when I evaluated my commitment to not eating meat. In the end, I didn’t really have an answer.  

Another issue is the idea of “free-range” meat, a concept that has grown increasingly popular in the United States as hipsters across the nation feel that pang of liberal guilt at eating regular meat. The only problem with this is that there is currently no national standard for what free-range means. Nothing says Tyson Chicken could not up and decide that it wants to call its meat free-range in the interest of making its consumers feel better about what they are eating.

One of the biggest questions I get as a vegetarian is, “Why?” My answer for a long time was that I could never kill an animal myself, and it would be hypocritical for me to eat it anyway because it was already cooked up and tastily prepared in my McChicken.  

In many ways, that is how I still feel. My choice to become a vegetarian was a personal one, and although I am more than willing to talk to people about it and provide tips to new converts to vegetarianism (fresh veggies, as we call them), I am hardly the kind of person who will throw a can of red paint on you for wearing a fur coat.

Bailey Elise McBride is the news editor for The Arkansas Traveler. Her column appears monthly.