Originally written by Sherry Jeppson Zitter for Vegan Villager magazine (c. 2019). Reprinted with permission.
Editor’s Note
The Humane Herald is honored to republish this essay by Sherry Jeppson Zitter, originally published in Vegan Villager magazine around 2019.
When Sherry and I spoke earlier this year as part of our Voices of the Movement interview series, she graciously shared several of her previously published writings and confirmed that Vegan Villager editors Paul Carr and John Small had granted permission for these articles to be reprinted with attribution.
Although written several years ago, the questions raised in this essay remain timely. Sherry reflects on a perspective that is sometimes overlooked in conversations about veganism: the people whose journey begins not primarily with concerns for health, the environment, or even animal rights, but with humanity itself. Her reflections remind us that the paths into compassionate living are many, even when they ultimately converge toward the same destination.
The article that follows is presented in its original form as a historical reprint.
— Brandy W. Walt-Rose
Contributing Editor, Humane Herald
A Fourth Group of Vegan Villagers
VEGAN VILLAGER
By Sherry Jeppson Zitter | Vegan Villager Contributing Writer
The animal rights vegans. The health-conscious vegans. And the environmental vegans. Those are the reasons mentioned by most people for choosing veganism, and referenced by Lisa Bouley in “The Many Shades of Vegan” in the preview issue of Vegan Villager.
I would like to highlight a fourth group that is small but undeniable: the often invisible humanitarians or social activists who choose their diet primarily, or originally, from a concern about humanity’s world hunger. As with the other groups, this initial choice is often but a step on the path into our Vegan Village, as one learns more about the other sound reasons and benefits of a vegan diet and lifestyle. Yet each of us is unique and is compelled to give up animal products from that special tug in our own hearts, at that specific “teachable moment” in time.
I was just out of college and sharing an apartment when I began to cook daily meals for myself. I bought a copy of Diet for a Small Planet and Recipes for a Small Planet (by Frances Moore Lappé, 1971), and what I read that summer of 1977 horrified me: each pound of meat I consumed was said to take 7 pounds of grain to produce! With 2/3 of the world going to bed hungry every night, my hamburger was using up 7 times worth of valuable grain that could potentially feed every human being on earth!
This modest figure has been found to be actually far higher. In 1997, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, professor of ecology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported that beef cattle production actually requires an energy input to protein output ratio of 54:1. (His analysis showed that beef uses over eight times the fossil-fuel energy of plant production, but the animal protein produced is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans, pound for pound, than plant protein.)
Pimentel went on to show that grain-fed cattle use more than 200 times the amount of water required to produce an equivalent weight in potatoes. (UNICEF reported in 2005 that over 400 children die per day due to lack of safe drinking water.)
And Lappé’s 1971 analysis of how meat-eaters contribute to world hunger continues to be true. The landmark 2009 study by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, World Bank Group environmental specialists, reported:
“If the hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland now used to raise cattle feed were used to raise 16 times the amount of food for humans, we would sharply decrease world hunger and greatly increase self-sufficiency among poorer nations.”
Catherine Badgley, et al., in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems (2007), is even more optimistic:
“If the whole world moved to sustainable agriculture, a U. of Michigan study found that enough food could be grown to feed the world’s current and projected population.”
Lappé’s 1971 data was enough for me to swear off red meat that very day; yet it took me years to totally eschew all animal flesh, including fish — and decades to become completely vegan. But that’s a story for another article.
Of course, there are countless other groups of vegan villagers, each with their own reasons for being vegan: those practicing a vegan religion, such as Jainism; or those born into a vegan household who absorbed these values as they were learning about honesty and kindness, so that such a lifestyle feels natural to them.
Will Tuttle, in The World Peace Diet, states that the fear, grief and anger in the enzymes of slaughtered animals causes similar emotions in humans (“you are what you eat,” literally), citing among many arguments the ancient practice of feeding animal flesh to soldiers to make them more aggressive. Those of us who prioritize world peace may be led to veganism through Will’s viewpoint.
There may be many other paths that lead people to choose this way of living, and we would love to hear from you about your journey and what put you on the path to becoming a vegan villager.
Sherry Jeppson Zitter is a vegan activist and writer who, with her wife Sarah, keeps working on shrinking her global footprint in creative and zany ways. She is a singer-songwriter, an eco-biker, and a clinical social worker in Maynard, MA, who loves to help people free their spirits. She can be reached at sherry@gnomesteading.com.
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