After Thoughts on Dominion

This blog is a follow up to a series of blogs on Dominion. The next couple will address my own response to the new information and awareness.

I would never have picked up Dominion, or respected its content so much, if it wasn’t for Erik.

I’m not really sure how to best describe Erik.

There was a time when he was an enigma who sped by me in the church halls after services.

Other times, he was my husband’s somewhat ambiguous coworker, one who—graciously—attended my book signing at the Nomad.

Still later, he was my co-worker, someone who won me over at a Halloween party my first month on staff.

It wasn’t long before he was bringing a lot of intelligence, humor and generosity to the lounge at Jackson High and to my life.

At times, he has been more than just a co-worker too—a friend, a brother-like figure, someone to banter with, to lose a few dozen games of Around the World to, to exchange books with… Which brings me to Erik buying me Dominion, a title about animal rights.

To be clear, Erik has never made the statement “you should become a vegetarian”. For the most part, using the word “should” isn’t Erik’s style. Though there have certainly been times he’s set that rule aside in attempts to straighten me out. In reference to vegetarianism, though, Erik was never pushy.

Early on, though, I asked Erik why he was a vegetarian. I was more curious more than I was seeking contributions to my own life philosophy, but his answer was more comprehensive than a lot of others I had previously encountered.

Ultimately, Erik’s story traces back to the influence of his gorgeous, now-red-headed wife—Jill—who independently converted to vegetarianism around twelve or thirteen years old. If I remember the story right, it was after she watched the movie Faces of Death—which contains graphic, stomach-turning scenes of animal slaughter—that she closed the door on meat for good. Now, Jill is a vegan, a lifestyle that relies on non-animal products and thus requires impressive amounts of discipline. Not to mention, in a place like Jackson that isn’t exactly a vegetarian mecca, it requires a lot of creativity and organization to pull meals that don’t taste like cardboard together. Luckily Jill has a superhuman share of discipline too.

By the time I worked with Erik, I was already buying humanely produced meats, thanks to the influence of a previously mentioned co-worker, Diane. I saw this as an educated choice, more than a deep personal conviction. And it was a choice I only thought about for the sixty seconds it took me to decide which meat to select during my weekly trip to the grocery store.

I certainly wasn’t an advocate for animal rights either. When I talked about the disadvantages of industrialization or various agricultural revolutions while teaching history, I sometimes offered a brief tangent about abuses in the meat industry. But other than that, if I was standing on any kind of anti-meat platform, it was a pretty short and almost invisible one.

The difference between how Erik described vegetarianism and how others described it could be summed up in one phrase:

cost
to
people.

He was the first person who pointed out that crops grown to feed livestock could be better used to feed the world’s malnourished populations. And he also noted that practices like feeding cattle animal by-products and raising them in confined quarters with no access to fresh air and grass, creates health implications for society as well. He was the first to make me understand that the inhumane industrialization of meat was driven by our generation’s increased demand for meat.

Even though I was already an animal lover and was—at some basic level—mindful about brand selection, it was helpful for me to think about meat’s impact on human quality of life. It was particularly interesting to me because people of faith have always championed ‘sacredness of life’ issues—like abortion or assisted suicide—but have been unusually silent on issues like this that impact quality of life as well. However, some of the insights Erik offered—both in person and via the book—belonged in the same category. Humans, particularly people of faith, have a responsibility to look at the toll our meat preferences has on the common good.

*Check “shop local” on the blog categories at sarahcunningham.org for purchase options.