Is There A Moral Case For Meat Summary

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but why? Human beings are creatures of habit, that over time, develop patterns to how they live their individual lives. Food is essential for life and quickly becomes one its most important aspects. Consequently, people eat food because it satisfies hunger or tastes good, and it becomes habitual and mindless. This reality makes it difficult to acknowledge that everything one consumes is ultimately a choice and a deliberate one. Most people in modern society consume an excessive amount of animal products, despite the negative consequences on other aspects of their lives. Many who understand this reality still find it difficult to leave their meat products behind and switch to a plant based diet. What makes it so …show more content…
Peter Singer was one of the early voices of the animal rights movement and his book, Animal Liberation, is a call to action to convert society to veganism. For those who were convinced, many made the switch temporary. Nathaniel Johnson pointed out in his essay “Is there a Moral Case for Meat?” that vegetarianism only accounts for about “2-4 percent in any society and long term (at least a decade) or lifelong adherence to solely plant based diets is less than 1 percent” (898). So even those convinced to see the error in their ways returned to their wrongdoings. A vast group of people find it difficult to leave their steak loving lifestyle behind, for the sake of what seems like the right thing to do, and Johnson represents this population in his essay.