Earlier this month, The New York Times held an essay contest
asking readers to perform a surprisingly challenging task:
provide an ethical justification for eating meat. The best six
responses, as judged by a celebrity panel that included Peter
Singer, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer, were published
last week. The winning essays relied on a variety of justifying
principles, from the reasonable – livestock waste nourishes the
land – to the dubious: animals are allegedly incapable of
forming meaningful relationships. To my mind, however, none of
the six pieces captured the most powerful argument in favor of
meat-eating: that every source of food, vegetables included,
results in animal deaths. You simply can't see the creatures
that died for your veggie burger. In 2011, a team of scientists
published an article in the journal Insect Conservation and
Diversity that sought to explain the mysterious decline of North
America’s monarch butterflies. The culprit, according to the
entomologists: Roundup, the wo