What does the Bible say about eating meat?

The objection

“God gave humans dominion over the animals. Scripture is explicit that they were put here for us to use, and Jesus himself ate fish. Eating them isn’t a sin; it’s part of the order of creation.”

The answer

The Bible does let people eat animals, and Christians and Jews who eat meat are not defying their scriptures. The rest of the objection fares worse. In Genesis, meat is no part of the world as first created, and the Catholic Church reads dominion as a duty of care that leaves no room for needless suffering.

What did God give humans to eat in Genesis 1?

Genesis 1 gives humans plants to eat, in the verse straight after the one that gives them dominion. God tells the first people to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (1:28), and goes on: “I have given you every herb bearing seed… and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat” (1:29, King James Version) [1]. A modern translation, the NRSVUE, renders that last phrase “you shall have them for food”, and the animals are given “every green herb” in the same way (1:30) [1]. The medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, who wrote in Troyes, France, more than 900 years ago, cites the Talmud to explain that Adam was not permitted “to kill any creature and eat its flesh, but all alike were to eat herbs”, and that meat was permitted only from the time of Noah’s sons [2].

When does the Bible allow eating meat?

The Bible allows meat from Genesis 9, after the Flood, when God tells Noah and his sons: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things” (9:3) [3]. The permission comes with a limit, that they must not eat “flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof” (9:4), and with a change in the animals themselves: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth” (9:2) [3]. The New Testament keeps the permission and defends it. After the resurrection Jesus eats “a piece of a broiled fish” in front of his disciples (Luke 24:42-43) [4], and in a vision of clean and unclean animals Peter hears “Rise, Peter; kill, and eat” (Acts 10:13) [5]. The First Letter to Timothy counts “commanding to abstain from meats” among the “doctrines of devils” that will lead some to “depart from the faith”, since “every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused” (4:1-4) [6]. In Romans, Paul calls the believer who eats only vegetables “weak” (14:2), though he tells the two sides not to despise or judge each other (14:3) and says “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine” where either makes a fellow believer stumble (14:21) [7].

Some meals of meat are commanded outright as a religious duty, such as the Passover lamb that Israel was told to roast and eat (Exodus 12:8, 11) [8]. Beyond rites like that, eating meat is something scripture allows rather than asks of anyone. Its first picture of the world, in Genesis 1, has no killing in it, and nor does Isaiah’s vision of the peace to come, in which “the lion shall eat straw like the ox” and “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:7, 9) [9]. Not every prophecy spares the animals, and one of Ezekiel’s visions has fishermen spreading their nets beside waters full of fish (47:9-10) [10].

What does dominion over animals mean?

In Catholic teaching, dominion means stewardship, a trust to care for animals that gives no right to treat them as we please. The Catechism says human dominion “is not absolute” (2415) and that “God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image” (2417) [11]. Pope Francis went further in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, writing that “we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures” [12]. He reads the “keep” in the command to “till and keep” the garden (Genesis 2:15) as “caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving”, points to the laws that give the ox and the donkey the Sabbath rest (Exodus 23:12) and forbid taking a mother bird with her young (Deuteronomy 22:6), and concludes that “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures” [12]. Proverbs puts it in a line: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” (12:10) [13].

Does the Catholic Church say eating meat is wrong?

The Catholic Church does not teach that eating meat is wrong: the Catechism says “it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing” (2417), then in the next paragraph that “it is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly” (2418) [11]. It doesn’t say which suffering is needless, and since it allows eating animals, it cannot count every animal killed for food as needless. Anyone applying the word to what they buy has two facts to weigh. One is whether people need meat to be healthy, and the British Dietetic Association says carefully planned plant-based diets “can support healthy living at every age and life stage” [14]. The other is what the meat costs the animals. In 2024 the world slaughtered about 86 billion cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys and ducks for meat, nine in ten of them chickens, on figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (2025) [15]. Nothing in scripture describes anything like the farrowing crates in Animal Equality’s footage from one of England’s biggest pig producers, published in 2012.