Question: On the article ‘The Cabbage & the Cow’ at http://thedailyenlightenment.com/2011/09/the-cabbage-the-cow , I think we should simply be grateful to have food to eat, be it a cabbage or a cow. It’s easy to condemn meat-eaters and conveniently forget that hundreds if not thousands of earthworms and other sentient beings living in the soil had to die just so that we can get our cabbage. As long as we are in Samsara, there will be no end to suffering, even if we are a vegan, living things have to die just so that we can live.
Answer: The article does not say we should not be grateful for the animals that die for vegan produce to be possible, but that the cabbage in itself does not require gratitude as it is not sentient, while the true way to be grateful and compassionate to the cow is to not even want to eat him.
In this sense, the article is not against gratitude to all sentient beings. In fact, it is to remind us what true gratitude is – by minimising harm – especially the obvious harm from greed for animals’ flesh and produce.
Much less animals die for vegan produce, as vegans eat right at the bottom of the food chain, while animal-eaters eat right at the top. The animals animal-eaters eat had to eat much more crops in their lifetimes to fatten up, which implicate the lives of more insects and such. Here is a sense of the proportion killed: http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc