Program of Persuasive Performance: Veganism

Program of Persuasive Performance: Veganism 

A Brief Explanation of the Assignment: 

This is an assignment I had for a speech class last semester. Except for one section (beginning with "If you are looking for..." and ending with "...are responsible for causing"), I did not write anything here, but rather I copied the words of other speakers or writers and arranged them as you see below. It is a clever exercise to focus on the delivery of speaking rather than the memorization of each sentence. Since this is a topic that is important to me, and since I know which people have had the largest impact on my beliefs, I don't need to worry so much about reciting the words verbatim because I already have a large portion of them memorized. 

If you are nervous about public speaking, this could be a useful exercise. It isn't "lying" or "plagiarizing" because you are giving credit to the original sources, and you are giving the information that you found the most compelling. That said, it might reduce the fear of the audience judging you because it isn't "your" words they are hearing. If they dislike the content of the speech, there isn't any reason to take it personally because the content is someone else's explanation. You can focus more on improving your delivery rather than writing and remembering hundreds or thousands of words. 

There was a most important job that needed to be done,

And no reason not to do it, there was absolutely none.

But in vital matters such as this, the thing you have to ask

Is who exactly will it be who’ll carry out the task?

Here’s Fluffy.

She’s been your close companion since she was a kitten. You love her very much, and you’ve given her the best life you could. But now, Fluffy is nearing the end of her life. You’ll care for her until the end, but when she dies, why not eat her? I mean, unless you’re a vegetarian, there seems to be no good reason that you’d be repelled by this idea, but you almost certainly are. Take some time here to think about why that is.

It can’t be about harm, because Fluffy’s already dead – she can’t feel pain. Maybe you’re appealing to some sort of principle of respect for the dead. But, we know that some cultures think the best way to respect the dead is to consume their flesh.

So, if you’re only not eating her because you have a thing against eating cats in particular, but you’re okay with eating other animals, that seems pretty speciesist. It’s just that the species you’re giving preference to are both humans and cats, but you’re still a speciesist.

If you are looking for my brutally honest opinion, I think it’s pathetic that so many people are cognizant of the amount of animal suffering in our society and don’t attempt to change it.

“Pathetic” may seem like a strong word, but it is easily justified. The National Institute of Health wrote an article explaining that four of the most common reasons that people eat meat is because they think it is natural, normal, necessary, and nice – the four N’s of justification. It is okay to eat meat because evolution has allowed us to, our culture emphasizes it nearly everywhere, it is vital for obtaining certain nutrients, and it gives us a brief sense of pleasure. Since, out of these four reasons, three are irrelevant morally speaking – owning slaves was at one point believed to be natural, normal, and nice – and the last one, necessity, is scientifically demonstrated to be false, what other word could you possibly use to describe giving these justifications for such immeasurable harm other than pathetic? I legitimately cannot think of any other word.

Through the prose,

Vegan For Life by Jack Norris, RD, and Virginia Messina, MPH, RD

The poetry,

“The Responsibility Poem” by Charles Osgood

And the drama, the YouTube channels

CosmicSkeptic and

Crash Course Philosophy,

Hopefully I can convince at least some of you to consider switching to a vegan diet, or at the very least strive to reduce the amount of animal suffering that humans are responsible for causing.

Anybody could have told you that Everybody knew

That this was something Somebody would surely have to do.

Nobody was unwilling; Anybody had the ability.

But Nobody believed that it was their responsibility.

When you go meatless and dairy-free, what on earth do you eat? Some of the best food you’ve ever tasted!

It would seem that dropping entire food categories from your menus would leave a diet that feels restricted. But upon going vegan, many people find that their food horizons actually expand as they explore new menu items like crusty barbecued Indonesian tempeh, Moroccan chickpea stew, Thai peanut sauce, and cashew cream cheesecake. Dining at a vegan table is anything but dull!

If you think about it on a meal-by-meal basis like that, it seems like such a tiny thing, right? Say you’re about to have a beef curry. Alright, well, swap the beef for lentils or chickpeas; “Okay, I can do that. Probably doesn’t make a huge difference.” Okay, now just do that every time you eat something, and you have solved our greatest moral crisis, our greatest contribution to environmental catastrophe, our greatest insurance that there’ll be another pandemic worse than this one, our greatest contribution to antibiotic resistance, and one of the best things you can do for your health. All of this, all of this, just by changing what you eat, just by choosing something else on the menu.

But what if exotic fare isn’t your thing? What if you have neither the patience nor time to follow a recipe? That’s fine. You can build healthful and appealing vegan meals around convenience foods and easily prepared dishes – old standbys that have been a part of your diet all of your life, like spaghetti with marinara sauce.

But you still might be thinking, “Why should I care?” What if I don’t care that I’m a speciesist? I like eating meat, and feel no shame about it, because everyone I know eats meat too. Well, the thing is, philosophers want you to be consistent with your beliefs. They want you to think about why it would be wrong to eat Fluffy, or why you wouldn’t eat dog meat if it was served to you, or why you were upset about Cecil the lion, and yet you have no problem eating, say, bacon, even though dogs and pigs have the same level of cognition and awareness.

Diets built around plant foods can offer profound benefits for health. Time-honored patterns, like the traditional Mediterranean diet, are linked to a lower risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and cognitive decline with aging. Plant-based diets, including vegan diets, have been used more recently as therapeutic approaches for managing heart disease and diabetes. While diet is just one part of a health-promoting lifestyle, there is no doubt about the fact that plant foods have some unique attributes.

And any of these arguments would work on their own: if the moral argument was there by itself, that would be enough of an obligation to go vegan. If the environmental argument was there by itself, that would be enough to give us moral reason to go vegan. If it was about pandemic prevention, that would be enough. Antibiotic resistance will ruin us, medically speaking. And the biggest contributor to that is antibiotics fed to animals in factory farms. That’s where the majority of our antibiotics go….Yet we’ve got all of these put together.

Philosophers want you to be able to justify your actions, to give reasons for what you do. So, if you’re saying that reasons don’t matter, that you can just do what you want even if your reasons are internally inconsistent, then not only are you not doing philosophy, you’re sort of opting out of rational discourse altogether.

Because if these reasons don’t matter, then why should any reasons matter? If I want to be a racist, or a homophobe, or a sexist, and I’m comfortable with it because the people I hang out with have those attitudes too, the conversation’s sort of over. It can be hard to really scrutinize your actions, not just regarding non-human animals, but in most areas of your life.

When I’ve been giving talks about it, I’ll tell people why I was convinced to become vegan, and then I just say to people, in earnest, genuinely, “Someone tell me what I’m missing. What am I misunderstanding here? What am I not getting, because it seems to me like this is the most obvious thing in the world.” And yet everyone around me is still contributing to this.

It seemed to be a job that Anybody could have done,

If Anybody thought he was supposed to be the one.

But since Everybody recognized that Anybody could,

Everybody took for granted that Somebody would.

Somebody should have done the job

And Everybody should have,

But in the end Nobody did

What Anybody could have.