(*credit to the folks at the pulp for the semi-plagarized title)
I choked down a burger the other day. I don’t typically (have to choke it down that is). I grew up in the middle of North America. Beef was always what was for dinner. Frankly, I liked it. And I still do.
However, increasingly as I’ve explored what a Biblical worldview might really be (as opposed to a North-American-Church Person worldview), deciding what’s for dinner has become a little more complicated. My parents visited my home once and cooked shrimp fettucini. They brought the shrimp with them from Canada so I asked if the shrimp was a Canadian product. It was at the exact time of the Canadian seal hunt when fishermen club baby seals to death for their furs. It’s a brutal death. The slaughter occurs in front of the young seals’ mothers. And it’s so fishermen have a few extra bucks in the off season and we can have a “dead seal skin” clothing option. I don’t want any part of supporting that. But the dinner smelled really great and I wanted to appease my family members who thought I was being silly so I ate it. And, therein lies my dilemna.
I like the taste of meat. And, it’s what I’ve been raised on: meat, potatoes and some other “colorful” vegetable with a slice of bread. Everyday. With everyone at the table. But I don’t think it’s what God originally intended nor will it be the ultimate reality of the Kingdom. Carnivorism arose when the curse reverberated through the galaxy. The lamb was laying down with the wolf in utter dozing contentment until Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. In the moment of the curse, for the first time ever, the lamb experienced fear and the wolf discovered a new craving.
We can argue Biblically that God required animal sacrifices and that he created laws for how people should prepare meat for consumption. We can argue that Peter’s vision of the meat picnic laid out on a blanket in a vision was God’s obvious blessing to eat away. But, I cannot be convinced that God approves of gestation crates and feed lots and abused milker cows and battery cages. I can’t be convinced that animals were created as little chunks of meat for humanity — that it doesn’t matter how they are treated while they’re alive if they’re just being raised to become food.
And there is my problem. I don’t like eating meat if the food product is the result of, and promotes, blatant abuse of living creatures who ultimately belong to the God who created them (the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof). As the recently revolutionized world famous chef Wolfgang Puck says, “The veal calf may end up as wiener schnitzel, but… [I] want it to have a happy life first.“
The bookends of the Biblical narrative appear to me to be vegetarian. In the middle of God’s story with us we have permission to eat meat. But we still carry the responsibility of caring for creation (animals included) in a way that honors the One from whom life is given.
