Early Vegetarians

Originally, I created the black-and-white caricature for a T-Shirt print in 2007. Now, in 2020, I added color and embedded it into a collage.

It’s about the idea of living a vegetarian life. Humankind is breeding massive quantities of animals. To feed those animals, woodland has to be cleared to free space for cultivating grains. All of that to eat the animals afterward. These animals grow up in unworthy conditions and are moved far away – just to get killed as cheaply as possible. The people in the meat processing industry have unworthy conditions as well and are paid low wages.

However, a high amount of meat produced for our meals gets thrown away because production is too high for people to eat. The earth is destroyed through wood clearing, etc.

It makes sense to live and eat vegetarian. But if we think it through, we have to accept that we kill living creatures – even if we eat plants like the huge carrot that’s pictured.

We are part of the earth, part of a community, part of a habitat. Because of our nutritional requirements etc., we will always have to hurt and kill others.

Everyone has to decide for him*herself how big his*her ecological footprint is.

2020, Collage, Acrylic (2007), on Canvas, 40×50 cm