What's for dinner, and Related Issues...

From what I can tell, part of being a good Buddhist is becoming a strict vegetarian. However, my teacher focuses on waking up to the nature of our existence, and doesn't say much about specific practices or dogmas. Correspondingly, as far as my practice is concerned, I tend to modify my point of view only as a result of direct meditation-related insight. On this question, my awareness once of what appeared to be at least an aspect of the original nature indicated that its basic character was not significantly different for animals and for humans, and thus that eating animals was tantamount to eating humans.

However, from a "rational" point of view, I don't really understand vegetarianism in a practical sense. It has long seemed to me that almost everything we do deprives animals of their lives. If you eat grains, animals were killed when the field was plowed, when the grain was harvested, and by pest control for the stored grain. If you use paper, animals were killed when those trees were harvested. If you eat dairy products, what do you think the dairy industry does with the excess male animals? And a large fraction of our energy needs is supplied by burning fossil fuels, producing global warming and changing habitats on a massive scale all over the world. Given this sort of death of animals from human activity, eating a little bit of animal protein for our dietary protein requirements seems rather minor. (I highly recommend the Harper's article at the last link.) Besides, it's not just animals that die because of the way we live, but other humans as well. Indeed, after reading Jared Diamond's descriptions of the results of environmental collapse on Easter Island and in the pre-European-arrival American southwest, there would seem to be a non-negligible possibility that the economic changes resulting from exhaustion of global resources (such as reaching peak oil) could produce an outbreak of cannibalism somewhere.

In the midst of all these questions, my reaction is that there are much larger spiritual issues involved than whether or not one eats animals. How do we reconcile ourselves to the death that is the direct result of our continuing to live? How does it affect what it means to be alive?