Eating Meat to Recover from Anorexia: The Ethics Trick

"I had a hamburger the other day and suddenly I'm not cold all the time." (Community, "Heroic origins")

What it feels like to buy and eat what you need

I was in the supermarket recently, doing my weekly shop. I’d started going to the usual places in the usual aisles, but suddenly I realized, I wasn’t getting a good feeling off these choices. I was imagining eating these things, and as I imagined it, I just felt hungry. Not hungry as in “I’m so hungry I can’t wait to eat this” but hungry as in “I’m going to be hungry after I eat this”.

This was not usual. It seemed worth taking seriously. I stopped in the middle of the freezer aisle and asked myself whether there was anything in this shop I wouldn’t feel this about. I took a look around. I thought about the aisles I’d just gone down. And the answer was: Yes, there’s a whole class of things I think would actually fill me up. Meat. When I thought about eating a burger or some sausages, I felt quite different: sated.

So I went back to the meat section. I got myself a pack of peppered Aberdeen Angus burgers and a pack of sliced black pudding, to add to the Quorn battered “fish” and a couple of other veggie protein things I already had. At dinner that evening and breakfast the day after, I ate the meat. I felt satisfied. I finished up the packets. I moved onto the Quorn etc. (for dinner) and back to halloumi with my breakfast egg, mushroom, and bagel. Back in Waitrose a week later, the imagined hunger didn’t happen. I bought no meat, as usual, and as usual that felt fine.

This experience is an example, in microcosm, of some of the broad principles I’ll be exploring in this series of posts on vegetarianism and veganism as they relate to eating disorder recovery. I’ll be making a strong claim for the necessity of being open to eating meat if you want recovery to happen—as a subset of the even more general principle that you need to be open to eating anything and everything if you want recovery to happen. Threading through this series will be 3 main principles already implicit in this anecdote: 1) the importance of attending to your appetites, 2) the importance of treating recovery as a phase distinct from what precedes and follows it, and 3) the importance of asking “who or what is benefiting here?”.

The meat-free ethics trick

There are lots of good reasons to eat less meat, mainly related to animal welfare and environmental sustainability. There are also some bad reasons, like trying to eat healthily (I am aware of no high-quality evidence supporting the claim that eating meat as part of a diet that includes plenty of other things is a driver of poor health, even though meat consumption often accompanies other things that are) and having an eating disorder.

Anorexia nervosa is a bad reason to do pretty much anything. But it survives by disguising its dysfunctions in all kinds of ways. One reason it’s such an adaptive illness right now—so well suited to survival in the environmental niche it finds itself in—is that its trump card is the thinness trick, and there’s never been a better time to play it. As societies we’ve collectively managed to do such a good job of fooling ourselves that thinner (or more “toned”) is always better that anorexia has an easy time of it, often right up until it becomes life-threatening and long after it became life-wrecking. Other disguises that are less triumphant but useful backups to the central thinness one include: the frugality trick (spending less money on food and life in general must be good), the self-discipline trick (making everything rule-bound and self-denying must be good), and the specialness trick (no one else can do this so it must be impressive). I’ve explored these in my posts on the “six seductions”, on money, and others. Another seductive trick I didn’t include there is the ethics trick.

Meat-eating is probably the best example of the anorexic ethics trick in action, though it also pops up in other everyday decisions like walking instead of using the appropriate transport or turning the heating down too low. With meat-eating in particular, ethical concerns make for a great disguise because they are so obviously significant. It’s hard to understate the scale of the contributions intensive farming makes to urgent global problems like methane emissions, antibiotic resistance, or ecosystem destruction, for instance. It’s equally hard to argue that most of the animals bred for meat on this planet probably endure lives even more bleak, brutal, and agony-filled than they are short.

Like any big issue, however, these issues are complex. They all point to the hardly contestable conclusion that most people in developed countries should eat less meat, and the meat they do eat should come from animals bred with higher welfare and environmental standards than most are now. But beyond this, it’s hard to generalize. It is certainly not easy to defend a hard-line philosophical position in which all consumption of other creatures’ flesh is morally unacceptable. Lots of people have tried to defend such a position, but I’m not convinced by any of them. Writing in the New Statesman last year on “The moral conflict between environmentalism and animal welfare”, a philosopher friend David Egan gave a nice outline of why this neat moralizing doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—why neither the “tender-hearted vegan” nor the “ecologically minded hunter” has an answer that does more than provide a comforting illusion of moral clarity. (Speaking of which, I'd note here that providing a comforting illusion of moral clarity, plus performing a bit of easy in-group signalling, is all that religiously condoned avoidance specific foods is good for. If you let these be good enough reasons to say blanket no's to foods that could heal you, you can thank your religion for your persisting illness.)

More specifically for our purposes here, the problem is that all the general yes/no arguments about meat are by definition general: They assume an average human being who is averagely well fed. Just like someone emerging from a years-long drought-driven famine, someone with anorexia is obviously nothing like the well-nourished person. They can get back to well nourished, but only with the right nourishment. Different rules apply—or ought to. Pretending they don’t and shouldn’t amounts to smuggling in incoherence under an ethical veneer.

Ethics and Morality Essential Reads

How Patience Is the Virtue of Remaining in Difficulty

How Does Morality Develop and Differ as We Age?

In the second part of this series, then, we’ll look at the specific case of a person with an eating disorder. The presence of an eating disorder brings quite different probabilities and cost/benefit considerations into play.