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By Root 981 0

every diner who makes morally motivated choices about consumption. And I stand with nonviolence, as one of those extremist moms who doesn’t let kids at her house pretend to shoot each other, ever, or make any game out of human murder. But I’ve come to different conclusions about livestock. The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing jam-packed chickens and sick downer-cows usually declare, as their first principle, that all meat is factory-farmed. That is false, and an affront to those of us who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with our buying power. I don’t want to cause any creature misery, so I won’t knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing it was dead until bam, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fish, or the vegetarian option.)

But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu. Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and wars brought on this world by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

To breed fewer meat animals in the future is possible; phasing out those types destined for confinement lots is a plan I’m assisting myself, by raising heirloom breeds. Most humans could well consume more vegetable foods, and less meat. But globally speaking, the vegetarian option is a luxury. The oft-cited energetic argument for vegetarianism, that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain, only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil. Many of the world’s poor live in marginal lands that can’t support plant-based agriculture. Those not blessed with the fruited plain and amber waves of grain must make do with woody tree pods, tough-leaved shrubs, or sparse grasses. Camels, reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle, and other ruminants are uniquely adapted to transform all those types of indigestible cellulose into edible milk and meat. The fringes of desert, tundra, and marginal grasslands on every continent—coastal Peru, the southwestern United States, the Kalahari, the Gobi, the Australian outback, northern Scandinavia—are inhabited by herders. The Navajo, Mongols, Lapps, Masai, and countless other resourceful tribes would starve without their animals.

Domestic herds can also carry problems into these habitats. Overgrazing has damaged plenty of the world’s landscapes, as has clearing rain forests to make way for cattle ranches. But well-managed grazing can actually benefit natural habitats where native grazers exist or formerly existed. Environmental research in North and South American deserts has shown that careful introduction of cattle, sheep, or goats into some grasslands helps return the balance of their native vegetation, especially mesquite trees and their kin, which coevolved for millennia with large grazing mammals (mastodons and camels) that are now extinct. Mesquite seeds germinate best after passing through the stomach of a ruminant. Then the habitat also needs the return of fire, and prairie dog predation on the mesquite seedlings—granted, it’s complicated. But grazers do belong.

In northwestern Peru, in the extremely arid, deforested region of Piura, an innovative project is using a four-legged tool for widespread reforestation: goats. This grassless place lost most of its native mesquite forests to human refugees who were pushed out of greener places, settled here, and cut down most of the trees for firewood. Goats can subsist