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BY SARAH POZGAY

In print | Published March 26, 2009

In a collaborative effort to motivate campus-wide consideration of the environmental benefits of vegetarianism, activist groups Earthlust, Environmental Justice, the Good Food Project and Swarthmore Labor Action Project organized a Meatout dinner in Sharples on Thursday, March 19. In order to promote vegetarianism as a viable option, these groups worked with dining services to design a menu of primarily vegetarian dishes for one night. A part of Earthlust’s Green March campaign, the event corresponds to a larger shift within the Swarthmore activist community regarding the motivations behind choosing a vegetarian lifestyle.

“At Swarthmore, it’s no longer just a moral issue or an animal rights issue. It’s an environmental issue, a carbon issue, it’s a sustainable choice,” said Co-president of Earthlust Blaine O’Neill ’11.

Jessica Holler ’10, a member of the Good Food Project who was also involved in the Meatout, said collaboration between the groups is a part of promoting a broader perception of vegetarianism, especially on the Swarthmore campus. “People tend to view [vegetarianism] as an independent ethical decision,” Holler said. “I think events like this and collaborations between Earthlust, SLAP, Good Food, are helping people realize that regardless of your reasons, these things are part of a bigger network and vegetarianism is [not only] an individual choice but also is a social movement.”

Co-president of Earthlust Camille Rogine ’11 echoed this statement. “I would say every person on this campus is passionate about some social issue … and sustainability is really something that connects with all those issues,” she said. “Whether you think about corporate companies who are abusing farmers or abusing people or really exaggerating class divisions — those are all interconnected with vegetarianism.”

Students involved in the Meatout emphasized the way in which each group’s respective concerns ultimately lead back to maintaining an economic system that is environmentally sustainable and socially just.

According to the groups, vegetarianism is one way to do that. “From an environmental perspective, and even in some ways from a social justice perspective, a lot of the steps we can take to build a criticism of the economic system in which we live are steps that involve opting out of that system,” said Anna Grant ’10, the SLAP liaison for the event.

According to Ladule Lako LoSarah ’09, a member of Environmental Justice and the chief organizer behind the Meatout, the meat industry is a prime example of a socially unjust and economically inefficient system. “[Meat] has become such a part of our culture that the only way we can actually produce this much meat and have it be accessible to everybody and have it be cheap is if we farm in this way,” he said.

Speaking about her involvement with the event on behalf of SLAP, Grant said, “We really wanted to take the approach that this is about the way we produce and consume and the effect it has on the environment and on human communities, and whether we can continue to produce and consume the way we do.” Grant also noted that though fair labor issues are particularly pertinent in discussions of the meat industry, “We [SLAP] could have done this with any industry at all.”

Holler said, however, that she feels vegetarianism at Swarthmore is about more than just abstaining. “Instead of just the negative, the positive — building a community around a different sort of relation to food — is something a lot of people on this campus are interested in,” she said.

Connecting social issues with vegetarianism, while particularly motivating in a community like Swarthmore, is part of a growing population of vegetarians outside the college as well. When asked whether Swarthmore Dining Services has noticed a trend of ever-increasing vegetarianism on campus, Director of Purchasing Janet Kassab responded that while that may be the case, it’s important to note that this is part of a greater “food trend” that goes beyond the Swarthmore community.

Lako LoSarah said that he’s noticed progress over the years in the way Dining Services caters to the needs of vegetarians and vegans on campus. “When I was a freshman it was not nearly as good as it is now,” Lako LoSarah said. “They’ve dramatically improved, and I think it’s because a lot of students now are much more aware of the issues involved and they’ve been talking to Dining Services and the administration.”

Thursday night’s Meatout was a prime example of this growing trend in the activism of vegetarianism. In addition to securing a greater variety of vegetarian and vegan options for the dinner, those involved in organizing the Meatout distributed information about the ways in which adopting a vegetarian lifestyle can be an act of environmentalism. According to statistics printed on flyers, brochures and table tents, the single most powerful action an individual can take to decrease his or her carbon footprint is to avoid eating meat. A 2006 U.N. report cited in Earthlust’s campaign materials stated that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world combined.

Swarthmore’s Good Food Project adopted a more hands-on method, setting up large compost bins near the trash cans and teaching students about which parts of their food waste (uncontaminated vegetable parts only) could be easily composted.

Commenting on the Good Food Project’s connection to environmentalism and vegetarianism, Toby Altman ’10 said, “I think part of what composting is about is redrawing the line between waste and resource … A lot of the arguments that tend to connect vegetarian lifestyle with environmentalism are concerned with what we think of as a resource and how we consider resources, how we orient ourselves towards the things which are resources.”

At the end of the dinner, students were asked to sign “veg-pledges” promising to go vegetarian for a certain number of days or meals, or to simply cut back on the quantity of meat they consume in a given space of time. “We’ve had over 100 pledges,” Lako LoSarah said, adding that there was a wide range of pledges, with some students deciding to go vegetarian for the following meal, others for the following month. The organizers emphasize that vegetarianism doesn’t necessarily entail cutting out meat entirely. “It doesn’t have to be a strict choice either; it can be just thinking about remediation and cutting back on meat,” said Jesse Marshall ’11, a member of the Good Food Project. Grant echoed this statement. “It’s not about an either/or choice between consuming enormous amounts of meat and never consuming meat at all … That’s like saying either you leave your house with all the lights on or you study by candlelight,” she said.

While the groups organizing the Meatout hoped the dinner would be entirely meat-free, Dining Services objected to a total Meatout for several reasons. According to Director of Dining Services Linda McDougall, Sharples hosted a similar event a number of years ago that was met with backlash from the student body, specifically from student athletes. “It was several years ago, but I don’t think I want to take the chance of doing it again and having that kind of impact,” McDougall said.

However, Kassab said that the decision not to exclude meat at the dinner was based on more than this experience. “As you respond to the allergies and the special needs, the dietary restrictions, you just can’t obliterate a single group,” she said. “No one would ask me to serve all meat all day and never serve a vegetable … and even though I appreciate [the argument] ‘It’s one day, it’s one meal,’ it’s their day and their meal. We can’t impose on someone else your choices, whatever those choices happen to be.”

Zein Nakhoda ’12, a member of Earthlust who was involved in the event, said, “Ultimately the most social value is when people make the choice themselves.” Event organizers said part of presenting that choice effectively requires exploring the multi-faceted nature of its implications, which is where collaboration between the student groups comes in. “It’s important to stress how this event was sort of a coalition event of these four student groups; I think that’s something we’re looking to do more in the future — really look at issues from all these angles so we can see all the complexities of an issue,” Lako LoSarah said.

Rogine agreed, saying, “I would love to see more collaboration on campus, and I think that’s something Earthlust is always trying to do.”

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