# Animal-Based Nutrition Including Meat
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[Introduction and Overview](/en/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick) › [Glossary for the Networking Language](/en/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar) · 19 min read
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## Definition
Animal-based nutrition including meat refers here to a dietary pattern in which, alongside plant-based foods, foods of animal origin are also consumed.
This can include meat, fish, milk and dairy products, eggs, honey, and other foods of animal origin. These foods are each linked to different life and agricultural systems. With meat, the connection to the life and death of an animal is immediately visible. Milk is linked to reproduction, birth, and rearing; eggs to the keeping and breeding of poultry; honey to bee colonies and their living conditions. Fish can come from natural waters or aquaculture and thus be embedded in very different ecological contexts.
The role that animal-based foods play within a diet can vary greatly. Key influencing factors include:
- **Region and landscape**, because arable land, grassland, mountains, forests, coasts, or arid areas create different opportunities for agriculture and nutrition.
- **Climate and seasons**, because temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons influence which plants and animals can live in a place and what food is available throughout the year.
- **Ecosystems and agricultural opportunities**, because not every area is equally suitable for arable farming, vegetable cultivation, grassland, or animal husbandry.
- **Culture and life situation**, because people have developed different forms of animal husbandry, processing, preservation, and nutrition over generations, and nutrition is also shaped by individual living conditions.
From the perspective of the [Qualitarian](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Qualitarian), the quality of a diet is therefore not determined solely by the consumption of animal-based foods.
What is decisive is **the life and agricultural system from which these foods originate**.
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## Animals Are Part of Natural Ecosystems
Animals have long been part of the development of landscapes and ecosystems. Herbivores, predators, birds, insects, fish, soil organisms, and many other organisms interact with each other and their environment.
Large herbivores can help shape vegetation structures and grasslands. Through grazing, they select certain plants while leaving others untouched. Through movement and trampling, they alter soil surfaces on a small scale and bring plant material into contact with the soil. Through dung and urine, nutrients are moved and organic matter is reintroduced into biological cycles.
Possible ecological effects include, among others:
- the co-shaping of vegetation structures and grasslands
- the movement and return of nutrients
- the dispersal of seeds via fur, hooves, and digestion
- the conversion of plant material and organic matter
- the creation of diverse small-scale habitats
These effects depend heavily on the species, number, landscape, and intensity. Trampling or grazing, for example, can be part of functional ecological processes but can also damage vegetation and soils if the intensity is too high.
Predators also play important roles. They influence populations of herbivores, their behavior, and sometimes their movement within a landscape. Birds can disperse seeds, consume insects, and move nutrients. Insects can pollinate plants, break down organic material, and themselves serve as food for numerous other animals. Fish are part of aquatic food chains and nutrient cycles. Soil organisms decompose and transform organic material, contributing to the development of living soils.
Animals are thus involved in the creation and ongoing transformation of ecosystems.
Humans, too, are mammals and part of these ecological relationships.
The Qualitarian perspective therefore asks:
> **Which animals belong to this habitat, and how can humans, animals, and agriculture live together in a healthy relationship?**
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## Animal Husbandry Can Be Part of Agricultural Cycles
In diverse agricultural systems, kept animals can perform various functions within the farm and landscape ecosystem.
These can include, for example:
- **Grazing**, as animals consume plants and thereby influence vegetation development, plant height, and the composition of a stand.
- **Landscape management**, as meadows, pastures, orchards, or other open landscapes are shaped through grazing.
- **Utilization of grassland**, particularly by ruminants that can digest plant material that humans cannot directly process.
- **Conversion of biomass**, as plant material is ingested and further processed within biological material cycles.
- **Return of organic matter and nutrients**, as dung, urine, and other organic materials return to the land.
- **Utilization of cover crops and certain by-products**, allowing biomass to be further used within a farm system.
- **Connection of different farm areas**, linking arable farming, grassland, cover crops, trees, and animal husbandry through material and nutrient cycles.
Especially areas that are only marginally suitable for direct arable or vegetable farming can sometimes be used by grazing animals. This can result in food from landscapes that offer different or more limited opportunities for the direct cultivation of human food.
However, this does not mean that every form of animal husbandry is automatically ecologically sound. The species, number, feeding, husbandry, soil, climate, and landscape must all fit together.
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## Dietary Categories and Natural Ecosystems
Vegan, vegetarian, and animal-based diets are human categories. They help people describe different dietary patterns.
A natural ecosystem, however, is not vegan, vegetarian, or carnivorous. It consists of relationships between living beings that have developed over very long evolutionary periods.
Plants use solar energy and form biomass. Herbivores feed on plants. Predators feed on other animals. Animals disperse seeds. Insects pollinate plants. Fungi and microorganisms decompose dead material. Organisms die, and their components re-enter biological cycles. New life emerges based on these cycles.
When people categorize their diets, it does not mean that a landscape can also be organized according to these categories.
The follow-up question is:
> **How can a human dietary choice be connected to the actual ecological relationships of a habitat?**
Even animal-based nutrition does not derive its ecological justification solely from the fact that animals are naturally part of ecosystems. The existence of herbivores and predators in natural ecosystems does not automatically mean that every form of human animal husbandry is ecologically embedded.
The decisive question remains: **which animals, in what numbers, under what conditions, and within what relationships actually fit a specific habitat?**
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## Life Sustains Life
Every diet is based on life. Humans cannot completely escape this relationship.
With meat, this relationship is particularly visible: an animal dies so that its body can become human food.
With plant-based food, the life of a plant may also be ended. Roots, tubers, cereal plants, or many vegetable crops are harvested entirely. With fruits, nuts, or certain plant parts, the plant may continue to live.
Yet even there, agriculture requires space, water, soil, and nutrients, thereby intervening in the habitats of other organisms. Animals eat plants and other animals. Plants compete for light, water, and nutrients. Fungi and microorganisms decompose organic material. Dead life becomes part of new life again.
In this sense, the following holds true:
> **Life sustains life.**
This statement does not mean that every form of killing, using, or suffering is therefore equivalent or justified. Precisely the dependence of one's own life on other life creates responsibility.
This raises fundamental questions:
- Whose life sustains my diet?
- Under what conditions was this life able to exist?
- How much avoidable suffering arises in the process?
- Which living beings and habitats are displaced or promoted?
- Which interventions are necessary and which are avoidable?
- What remains after the production of our food?
- Can life continue to emerge on this soil for future generations?
With animal-based nutrition, an additional responsibility arises. The animal that is eaten has its own life. It moves, perceives its surroundings, has species-specific needs, and exists within social and ecological relationships.
The fact that life sustains other life must not lead to arbitrariness in how animals are treated. On the contrary, it can lead to a greater appreciation of the significance of an individual animal and its life story.
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## Animal Husbandry Requires Natural Limits
Quality-oriented animal husbandry aligns the number of animals with the capacity of the habitat.
This involves the relationship between area, vegetation, water, regional feed base, animal species, herd size, and the regenerative capacity of a landscape. An area can only support a certain number of animals without permanently overburdening vegetation, soils, or the water balance.
Key questions therefore include:
- **How much feed can be produced regionally, and how many animals can be supported by it?**
- **How much grazing can the landscape tolerate, and which animal species are suitable for the location?**
- **How can nutrients return to the soil and into functional cycles?**
- **What herd size can the farm responsibly support with its area, labor capacity, and resources?**
If animal numbers far exceed the capacity of a location, large quantities of feed, energy, and other resources must be imported from outside. At the same time, large amounts of nutrients may be generated that can no longer be meaningfully returned to natural or agricultural cycles within the region.
What was once an embedded system increasingly becomes an industrial production system.
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## Industrial Animal Husbandry Is Not an Inevitable Consequence of Animal-Based Nutrition
Animal-based nutrition is often directly associated with industrial animal husbandry. However, this connection is not inevitable.
Grazing animal husbandry, small-scale animal husbandry, mixed farm systems, mobile animal husbandry, extensive landscape management, and regenerative grazing systems can integrate animals into agriculture and landscapes in very different ways.
In a mixed farm system, crop cultivation, grassland, and animal husbandry can be connected through nutrient cycles. In mobile systems, animals can be regularly moved between areas. Extensive grazing can maintain certain habitats with low animal densities. Regenerative grazing systems attempt to coordinate animal movement, vegetation regeneration, soil development, and landscape.
Animal husbandry that relies on large quantities of imported feed, high animal densities, and extensive industrial structures differs fundamentally from a system in which animal numbers, area, feed, and landscape remain interconnected.
Qualitarian therefore does not only ask:
**Is meat eaten?**
But rather:
> **How did this animal live, and within what system did this food originate?**
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## The Well-Being of the Animal Is Part of Quality
An animal is not a means of production.
When people keep animals, responsibility arises for their entire life—from birth and rearing to old age, illness, death, and, if applicable, slaughter.
A responsible approach includes, in particular:
- nutrition and husbandry that meet the physiological and species-specific needs of the animal
- sufficient movement, shelter, and suitable habitat
- consideration of social relationships and species-specific behavior
- prevention, observation, and appropriate treatment in case of illness or injury
- transport that is as short and low-stress as possible
- responsibility even for older, sick, or economically unproductive animals
Birth, rearing, and the end of life are part of the same life story. Responsibility does not end at the moment when an animal no longer serves an economic purpose.
From the Qualitarian perspective, a high-quality animal-based food cannot be separated from the quality of life of the animal. An animal that lives permanently under unsuitable conditions cannot become a high-quality food simply because of a certain label or processing method.
**Quality begins with life.**
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## Slaughter Is Part of Responsibility
Where animals are kept for human nutrition, their death is also part of the system's reality.
Qualitarian does not attempt to make this reality invisible.
Responsible slaughter should be carried out by experts, avoid unnecessary fear and preventable suffering, and minimize stress, particularly during loading, transport, waiting time, restraint, and slaughter. Unnecessarily long transports should be avoided.
Key aspects include:
- expertise and safe handling of the animal
- as little fear and stress as possible
- the shortest possible distance between husbandry and slaughter
- respectful treatment until the end of life
- transparent and traceable processes
The conditions at the end of life must not disappear from the responsibility of those who keep animals or use their products.
The question of a good slaughter does not render the killing of a living being meaningless.
Precisely because a life is ended, a special responsibility arises.
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## Valuing the Entire Animal
After an animal is slaughtered, the question arises of how to handle its body.
A quality-oriented diet attempts to use as much of the animal as possible in a meaningful way. Depending on the animal and cultural context, this can include different cuts of meat, offal, fat, bones, skin, and other usable parts.
Offal, for example, was a natural part of many dietary cultures. Fat can be used as food or for other purposes; bones can be used for broths and other processing; and skin can, depending on the animal and context, be used as food or raw material.
Using the entire animal can help make the relationship between the number of animals kept and the actual food needed more visible again.
Such an approach can lead to meat being eaten less frequently while fostering greater appreciation for the individual animal.
The available quantity is then more closely aligned with how many animals a farm or landscape can actually support responsibly.
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## Less Can Be Part of Quality
Animal-based nutrition in the Qualitarian sense does not mean consuming as many animal-based foods as possible.
If animals require sufficient space, are fed regionally, are allowed to grow slowly, live in a species-appropriate manner, are part of a farm system, and are used as fully as possible, this can naturally limit the available quantity.
The question thus shifts from
**“How much meat do we want?”**
to
> **“How many animals can this ecosystem sustain well, and what foods result from that?”**
Such a limit is not merely a question of individual abstention. It arises from the actual carrying capacity of soil, water, vegetation, landscape, and farm.
Nutrition thus more closely follows the possibilities of the habitat.
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## Region and Climate Change the Significance of Animal-Based Foods
The significance of animal-based foods can vary greatly by region.
A fertile region with a long growing season can produce large quantities of vegetables, legumes, grains, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Where soil, water, and climate allow for diverse plant production, the plant-based portion of a regional diet can be correspondingly large.
In other habitats, conditions are fundamentally different. Particularly relevant factors may include:
- **short growing seasons and long winters**, which can limit the variety and seasonal availability of plant-based crops
- **high mountains and grasslands**, where arable farming is sometimes only possible to a limited extent, while grassland can be used by adapted grazing animals
- **coastal regions**, where aquatic ecosystems and fishing have historically formed part of regional nutrition
- **barren or arid landscapes**, where water availability, soils, and irregular rainfall determine agricultural possibilities
Grasslands, for example, can produce vegetation that humans can hardly utilize directly, while ruminants can use these plants as food.
There, grazing animals, fish, or other animal-based foods can form a significantly larger portion of a regionally embedded diet.
Qualitarian does not, therefore, presuppose a uniform quantity of animal-based foods everywhere.
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## Nutrition Also Follows the Habitat
A diet can appear very consistent on paper and yet only be maintained through extensive imports. Conversely, a diet that includes animal-based foods may come directly from the landscape in which people live.
This makes the assessment more complex.
Qualitarian therefore considers, among other things:
- what can actually grow in a region
- which animals can live there under suitable conditions
- which areas can be sensibly used for crop cultivation or grazing
- which foods are produced across the seasons
- what imports, energy, and technical infrastructures are required
- which nutrient, water, and biomass cycles can be regionally sustained
- how resilient the resulting supply is in the long term
Exchange between regions can be sensible. What is crucial is making dependencies and ecological impacts visible.
Animal-based nutrition is thus not understood as a universal model. It is considered in relation to the specific location.
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## Meat Consumption Can Also Overburden a Habitat
The ecological integration of animals does not mean that any amount of meat can be produced within an ecosystem.
Very high meat consumption can lead to animal numbers exceeding the carrying capacity of a landscape. This may result in feed being imported, additional land being required, and increasingly larger spatial contexts being involved in the supply.
This can lead to, among other things:
- regional feed base and animal numbers diverging
- landscapes being overburdened by too intensive use
- nutrient surpluses arising
- additional land being needed for feed production
- animal husbandry being increasingly pushed into industrialized structures
Quality-oriented animal husbandry can therefore also mean **having fewer animal-based foods available**.
The natural carrying capacity of the system sets limits. These limits are not seen as a deficiency. They are part of an agriculture that orients itself to the possibilities of its habitat.
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## Considering Plants and Animals Together
In diverse farm systems, crop cultivation and animal husbandry can be interconnected.
Animals can graze cover crops, thereby utilizing plant biomass while some of the ingested nutrients return directly to the land. Plants can feed animals through pasture, hay, silage, grain, or suitable by-products. Manure and other organic materials can be returned to agricultural land.
The landscape itself can also be part of this connection. Hedgerows can provide food and shelter for wildlife, reduce wind, and structure landscapes. Trees can offer shade for grazing animals while also influencing the water balance and microclimate. Permanent grassland keeps living roots in the soil over long periods and can reduce erosion.
Agriculture can thus be understood as a network of different life forms in which plants, animals, soil, humans, and landscape are interconnected.
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## Wild Animals Also Belong
The quality of animal husbandry cannot be assessed solely by the well-being of the kept animals. Wild animals are also part of the habitat.
Hedgerows and field margins can provide shelter, food, breeding sites, and corridors. Refuge areas allow animals to have spaces that are not permanently used or disturbed for agriculture. Water bodies and wetlands are of great importance for many species.
A diverse agriculture therefore also considers questions such as:
- Are there different vegetation structures and refuge areas?
- Can insects find enough food?
- Are there habitats for birds, amphibians, and small mammals?
- Are water bodies, wetlands, hedgerows, and field margins present?
- Can wild animals move between feeding, breeding, and refuge areas?
Livestock, wildlife, and plant life should not be completely separated from one another.
They share a habitat.
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## The Spiritual Relationship to the Habitat
Beyond its biological, agricultural, and social dimensions, nutrition also holds a spiritual dimension for many people.
This spirituality does not need to be tied to a specific religion or worldview. It can begin with the experience that human life does not exist independently of soil, water, plants, animals, and other living beings.
Especially with animal-based nutrition, this relationship becomes immediately visible. When a person eats meat, the life of an animal has been ended for that purpose.
This fact can be suppressed or made invisible. It can, however, also be consciously acknowledged.
In many cultures, forms of gratitude, rituals, prayers, communal meals, or other practices have emerged through which people expressed their dependence on other living beings. These traditions vary greatly and should not be conflated into a uniform historical or "indigenous" perspective.
What many of them share, however, is the experience that food can be more than an anonymous product. It connects humans to a place and to other life forms.
From such a perspective, the question may arise:
> **What does it mean that another living being sustains my own life?**
This question can change how animal-based foods are approached. An animal is then not perceived solely in terms of weight, price, or usable parts. Its life, its habitat, and its death become part of one's own diet.
A spiritual relationship to the habitat can deepen responsibility. It can enable gratitude, make boundaries visible, and help take less for granted what soil, plants, and animals provide. It can remind us that humans are themselves part of the same life cycles.
A sustainable agricultural and nutritional system therefore needs not only ecological knowledge, good agricultural practices, and functioning social structures but also a cultural relationship to its foundations.
Where this relationship is completely lost, there is a risk that soil, water, plants, and animals will only be seen as available resources.
Qualitarian therefore understands the spiritual dimension as a possible deepening of responsibility:
> **Food directly connects our own life with other life.**
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## Relationship to Vegetarian Nutrition
[Vegetarian nutrition](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Vegetarische-Ernaehrung) often continues to use milk and eggs but avoids meat.
From a holistic agricultural perspective, these foods remain connected to the entire life of the animals.
Milk arises in the context of reproduction and birth. A female mammal produces milk in connection with the birth of an offspring. The use of milk is therefore linked to breeding, pregnancy, birth, young animals, the duration of use, and the later end of life of the mother animal.
Egg production also has such a life story. Laying hens are bred and reared. Male animals from the same breeding lines are also produced. Egg-laying performance changes with age, and even older hens remain animals for whose further life or death responsibility exists.
Thus, fundamental questions remain:
- What happens to young animals and male animals?
- How do the mother animals and laying hens live?
- What happens to older or sick animals?
- How are birth, rearing, illness, and the end of life managed?
Vegetarian nutrition does not automatically mean animal-suffering-free nutrition. Depending on husbandry and production systems, the production of milk or eggs can be associated with significant burdens for animals.
Animal husbandry must, regardless of the dietary choices of individual people, answer what happens to these animals.
From the Qualitarian perspective, milk, eggs, and meat can therefore be seen as components of the same agricultural reality.
What is decisive is whether this reality is made visible and responsibly managed.
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## Relationship to Vegan Nutrition
[Vegan nutrition](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Vegane-Ernaehrung) aims to overcome the exploitation of animals and the suffering inflicted on them through human use as far as possible and practicable.
This raises a fundamental ethical question:
> **How can people live without unnecessarily exploiting animals and causing them avoidable suffering?**
Qualitarian takes this question seriously and expands the consideration to the entire agricultural system.
This includes, among other things, examining what functions animals perform within a habitat, how nutrient cycles are organized with or without kept animals, and what machinery and inputs are needed to fulfill certain functions in other ways.
The impacts of crop cultivation on wildlife, soil life, and landscapes are also considered. Soil cultivation, harvesting, plant protection, and landscape changes also affect other living beings.
This raises further questions:
- Which diet can be regionally sustained under the conditions of climate, soil, and water?
- What impacts do different agricultural systems have on kept and wild animals?
- Which biological functions are performed by animals, plants, humans, or technology?
- Which form of agriculture maintains healthy and diverse ecosystems in the long term?
Vegan and animal-based nutrition are thus not treated as two opposing worldviews. Both are assessed based on the quality of their entire life system.
The ethical impulse to reduce avoidable suffering remains.
At the same time, it is acknowledged that no human diet takes place entirely outside biological life cycles.
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## Relationship to Qualitarian
The term [Qualitarian](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Qualitarian) expands the perspective beyond the rigid boundary between vegan, vegetarian, and animal-based nutrition.
It does not first ask:
**Does a person eat meat?**
At the center is the entire life and agricultural system from which food originates.
This includes, in particular, questions such as:
- **How did the animal live, and how does its life end?**
- **Do the animal species, number, and feed base fit the habitat?**
- **How healthy are soil, water, and landscape?**
- **Where does the feed come from, and what area is actually part of the supply system?**
- **How are wild animals, plants, and other life forms considered?**
- **How fully and responsibly is a killed animal used?**
- **What quantities can the landscape actually produce?**
- **How regional and resilient is the entire supply?**
- **What living conditions does the system leave for future generations?**
From this perspective, animal-based nutrition can be part of a healthy agricultural system. It can equally be part of a heavily burdened industrial system.
The label alone does not determine this.
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## The Decisive Question
From the Qualitarian perspective, animal-based nutrition therefore does not mean:
**We are allowed to eat animals.**
It leads to a more comprehensive question:
> **How can humans, as part of an ecosystem, live with animals, take responsibility for them, and use the foods that emerge from a healthy and sustainable life system?**
This does not create a fixed rule about how much meat a person should eat.
The answer emerges from the place, from soil and water, from climate and landscape, from plants and animals, from agriculture, and from the relationship between life and life.
When human life is sustained by other life, this does not create an automatic entitlement to unlimited use.
It creates responsibility.
The decisive question thus becomes even more fundamental:
> **How can we be sustained by other life and at the same time contribute to sustaining the life around us?**
## Related Terms
- [Qualitarian](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Qualitarian)
- [Vegan Nutrition](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Vegane-Ernaehrung)
- [Vegetarian Nutrition](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Vegetarische-Ernaehrung)
- [Regenerative Agriculture](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/regenerative-landwirtschaft)
- [Supply Landscape](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/Ernährungsregionen)
- [One Health](https://wiki.teikei.us/de/home/0_Einstieg-und-Überblick/Glossar/One-Health)
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By the TEIKEI editorial team, with AI support (ChatGPT)
Created on August 7, 2026 · Last updated on August 7, 2026
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