Eating Well: Giving Up Meat for a Better World

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Her desk is covered with stacks of paper: newspaper articles, scientific essays, press releases and ads. "It's hard work, discovering the truth," she says. For example, it took her 112 hours to document the life of a German chicken. Anyone who tries to obtain data from the food industry is likely to find lots of contradictory information, depending on the author.

According to figures compiled by the German Ministry of Agriculture, more than 700 million animals a year are slaughtered for food in Germany, including more than 500 million chickens. Some 500,000 hogs, inadequately stunned, wake up in the scalding hot-water baths at slaughterhouses.

"At first I would think to myself: How can you do this, you gruesome people?" says Duve. But by the next day she was already salivating over the thought of eating a steak with herb butter.

'It's a Bit Like Sex'

"Sometimes it feels terrible, leading the life of a vegetarian," says Jonathan Safran Foer. "The people at the next table are eating steak, and I don't get any. A person I love is cooking, but I can't eat with them." The dish of his childhood, which meant everything to him -- safety, confidence and home --, was his grandmother's chicken with carrots.

Chicken with carrots isn't part of his life anymore. "It's a bit like sex," he says. "During the course of a week, many people think to themselves: Wow, I'd really like to sleep with that person. But as beings with a civilized self-image, we curb our impulses. We do without some things because other things are more important to us. Good decisions sometimes include feeling awful."

But, as Duve has discovered, the cravings eventually subside. By now, she even feels OK without milk and cheese.

She had not expected that the power of habit could be tamed in this way. Meat and dairy products are at the center of European and American food culture -- and at the center of all excess. Milk is touted as a source of strength, and meat has always been associated with myths at various levels of awareness, from the butcher with his blood-spattered apron to the family man tending the barbecue in his shirtsleeves. The recently launched German magazine Beef! claims to appeal to "men with taste." Gourmets can not resist Japanese Kobe beef, supposedly the best and, at up to €600 ($785) a kilogram, most expensive beef on the market.

Restaurants that specialize in meat and cater to people with a lot of money are suddenly all the rage. The "Meatery" in Hamburg advertises "the world's most tender sirloin," while in Berlin, the "Grill Royal" is the place to be for hipster carnivores.

Basic Instincts

People, at least in Western cultures, are apparently vulnerable to suggestion. Perhaps the steaks that appear in Duve's and Foer's fantasies are the product of a basic instinct. In the animal kingdom, the strong are the ones that devour the weak at the end of a battle. And few people are likely to salivate at the sight of a plate of cooked carrots.

Meat is part of the diet of most families in Western cultures. It was a staple until the late Middle Ages. During the course of industrialization, as the population grew rapidly, potatoes and fast-growing grain largely replaced slower-growing animals as food sources.

When factory farming was invented about 80 years ago, meat became a widely available product. Children develop a taste for it early on, even before they are capable of thinking about where the slice of ham on their sandwich comes from.

Doing without meat is so difficult for many people because it invalidates established habits and calls into question the rituals and narratives of a family: the favorite meals, the Christmas goose, a beloved aunt's ham sandwiches.

"You're no longer part of it," says Duve. "Now I'm usually the problem case, the outsider." She just attended a family event where mountains of cake were served in the afternoon and fish in the evening, but there was nothing for Duve. That was when her mother discovered that vegans can eat red berry compote, a traditional German dessert. From then on, she would bring her daughter a bowl of it at every meal.

'It's Impossible Not to Kill'

Duve hasn't decided yet how she wants to proceed in the future. She does know that she won't go back to the way she was living before she began her experiment. She still faces two months of fruitarianism, the most unpopular dietary regimen, because it's the most restrictive. Fruitarians only eat what falls naturally from a plant, things like ripe apples, nuts and seeds. They are widely viewed as cranks. Nevertheless, their arguments are beginning to carry weight. Some scientists now believe that it is possible that plants might feel pain.

"It's very distressing to grapple with these questions," says Duve. "It's because it's impossible not to kill. All we can do is decide how much we destroy and under what conditions."

It's an inescapable dilemma for anyone who wants to continue to exist in the cycle of growth and decay.

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• Part 1: Giving Up Meat for a Better World
• Part 2: A Long List of Culinary Sins
• Part 3: 'How Can You Do This, You Gruesome People?'