Is the Desire for Meat a Craving of the Flesh?

How Biblical Christians should think about meat-eating

The Bible says (1) that humans have dominion over animals and (2) that meat-eating is permissible:

“Everything that creeps on the ground and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.” (Genesis 9:2-3)

But did you know that this instruction replaces an earlier one?

No Meat Before the Flood

Here is the instruction in Genesis 1:

“God said, ‘I give you all of Earth’s plants with seeds and trees with seed in their: You shall have them for food.’” (Genesis 1:29)

So in the beginning, God requires everyone to be a vegetarian — or, indeed, a vegan.

The permission to eat meat comes 1,500 years later, in God’s Covenant after the Flood. So unless they blatantly violated God’s law, Abel, Enoch, Metushael, Lamech, Jabal, Seth Kenan, Mahalael, and Jared were all vegans.

In the same verse where meat-eating is later permitted, it is simultaneously made clear that the practice of meat-eating comes with a moral cost. From now on,

"fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth and on every bird of the air." (Genesis 9:2)

“Fear” and “dread” are hardly value-neutral terms.

God then declares that for all killing, including the killing of animals, he will "surely require a reckoning.” (Genesis 9:5)

So even though the lives of animals are not inviolable, their lives have at least some moral weight. If they had no moral weight at all, there would be no grounds for requiring a reckoning.

The value of animal life reaffirmed later in the Old Testament. We can read, in Deuteronomy, that

“if you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” (Deuteronomy 22:6)

And in Proverbs:

“The righteous has regard for the life of his beast” (Proverbs 145:9)¹

Every Single Sparrow

In the “Gospel of Matthew,” Jesus says:

“Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father.” (Matthew 10:29)

The Father has concern for his creatures.

Then Jesus adds:

“Do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:31)

If the worth of a sparrow is zero, this is not at all reassuring.

So animals matter morally. That’s a plain and elementary point. It’s the reason why there is a large moral difference between kicking a football fun and kicking a dog just for fun. If we are going to harm or to kill an animal, we need a good reason for doing so.

Do we have good reason to kill the animals that we eat? I used to think that the answer clearly is yes. Why? Because to feed us humans is an extremely important cause.

I was wrong.

I was not wrong in thinking that to feed us humans is an extremely important cause. Few causes could be more important.

I was wrong in thinking that in order to feed us humans, we must kill large numbers of animals. We do not need to kill animals to get food. There is plenty of healthy and affordable plant-based food available in most grocery stores.

A Craving of the Flesh

We do not kill animals in order to be fed. We are easily fed without killing animals. Our reason for killing, is the small difference in taste between a meal containing meat and the best available vegetarian option.

We do not need meat. And even those among nutritionists who that think we do need some meat, think that we need very little. Irrespective of where that level of need goes, meat consumption above that level cannot by an appeal to our nutritional needs. Meat-consumption above that level is done for the sake of tantalizing our taste-buds.

Is that a sufficiently weighty cause to justify killing?

Every Single Chicken

If God watches every sparrow that falls, Good presumably also watches the 70 billion chickens that fall in slaughterhouses each year. For God, slaughterhouses have glass walls. Does he like what he sees?

He sees that the animals we kill are not the animals that are themselves killers. Overwhelmingly, we kill peaceful and trusting animals such as chickens, cows, and sheep, and we exploit these animals’ trust.

And I imagine that he asks himself: How can humans ask to be treated with mercy and grace by the Being above them, when they are merciless and without grace in how they treat the beings below them?

Christian Tradition

Christian advocacy for animals no new idea. Many of the early Christians abstained from eating meat. According to Tertullian, eating meat brings us closer to lions and wolves, and further away from the divine. Clement of Alexandria said that to eat meat is to turn our bodies into a burial ground for animals.

In more recent times, John Wesley (the founder of the Methodist Church), William and Catherine Booth (the founders of the Salvation Army) and Joseph Bates and Ellen White (two of the founders of the Adventist Church) advised their followers to abstain from eating meat.

A Washing of Hands

Based on the Bible, Christians should not hold that it is wrong, in principle, to kill an animal, or hold that humans and animals are of equal worth. Christians should, however, be vocal about the moral importance of the lives of animals, and be willing to ask difficult questions about the theological significance of the way that we treat animals.

Christians should say, moreover, that even though meat-eating might be morally permissible in some circumstances, to eat meat at nearly every meal is Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, and Hubris.

Of course, most of us do not want to change our ways. I understand that you want our lamb-chop on you plate, and you want it irrespective of whether a killing was needed in order to get a satisfying meal.

But I tell you: Before you eating, when you go to wash your hands, you should ask yourself if your own hand-washing has something in common with a hand-washing that you know from the Gospels.

1. Thanks to Bentham’s Bulldog, whose post “Theists Should Obviously Be Effective Altruists and Vegans” inspired me to write this post and made me aware of the citations from Deuteronomy and Psalms.