My taste for meat and cheese and eggs is very much at odds with the reality that consumption of these foods not only vastly increases human and animal suffering but also has significant negative environmental impacts on people and the planet. And yet, it is only over the last half a year that I’ve been eating semi-vegetarian, as I persist in the consumption of fish, cheese, eggs. I’ve long made an effort to eat less meat, and my choices are at odds with my beliefs about what is right. I am internally conflicted, especially when I smell roasting animal flesh.
I expect I am not alone here. Lots of folks are aware of the negative impacts of their habits, eating or otherwise, but they persist. Why? Taste? Habit? Culture?
I was raised in a household that ate a largely plant-based diet, and my sister and mother were both vegetarian over different periods of time, but beginning around the time that I started to work in a burger restaurant in high school, my meat consumption really took off. Cooking meat, being around meat, and enjoying the taste made it really hard not to participate in carnism. This persisted through college, and into my one-year stint as a full-time cook. I stopped thinking about the negative impacts of my meat-heavy consumption habits by rationalizing them
Over a few years of traveling and living abroad, it was impossible not to see the massive dietary limitations experienced by my vegetarian friends. They ate beans, vegetables, and starches and had to turn down some of the most delicious and nutritious food options available, often to the confusion of their hosts. Although beans and boiled starchy bananas were better than I expected, the variety that meat provided kept things interesting. In Tanzania, although I cooked vegetarian, with a wonderful selection of vegetables available at the local market, I ate a lot of fried goat, goat soup, and a variety of other Tanzanian meat specialties. In rural Tanzania, goats wandering around eating freely, before being placed in the back of bicycles to be transported, sold, and slaughtered. There was no factory farming of these animals, and Tanzanians – at least rural Tanzanians – were connected to where their meat was actually coming from. On Sundays, a kitimoto area of the nearby market would slaughter hogs and fry pork. This felt like a more natural way of consuming meat.
I had a similar relationship with meat for the couple of years I lived and taught in Somaliland. We mostly ate vegetarian as a school because we had a number of vegetarians on the staff, but the meat we did eat was typically locally sourced. At one point, I participated in the killing of a goat for a school feast after years of asking myself whether I could kill an animal for food. Although it was sad – the goat had lived on our school campus – it also felt empowering to know that I could actually connect meat to living flesh firsthand, and feel alright about it. And yet, what right do we have to take the lives of animals even if they have lived good lives and probably wouldn’t exist without human intervention?
In the years since then, I’ve never cooked meat that regularly, although I would typically purchase one ‘meat’ option at the grocery store for one meal. I eat and cook a lot of beans and lentils and vegetables, but despite being very aware of the horrific circumstances most of the meat in the United States is raised in, as well as the negative environmental impacts, until this January I continued to eat it in restaurants, and with friends. It was easy, delicious, and possible to maintain cognitive dissonance.
But for some reason I can’t quite identify, reading Melanie Joy’s Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows was a sort of final straw for me. I say sort of because I’m not a vegan or a vegetarian. I have, on a couple of occasions, eaten meat. I’m not trying to be dogmatic about my eating habits, and I am still continuing to order fish at restaurants, and cooking with eggs and cheese at home, despite the compelling argument that Joy makes for veganism. After finishing the book, I felt I had to make more concrete steps and commitments to reduce my consumption of animal flesh in particular, and so this is my commitment to making progress.
My wife likes to tell the story that her first memory of me is of me telling – partly facetiously – a group of our peers that I was going to eat as much fish as I could before overfishing leads to the collapse of the global seafood industry. Although I am still eating fish, I don’t think I’d make that joke today. I feel more of a moral weight about my consumption habits, even though it’s easier for me to imagine that fish don’t experience that much suffering and that have a less significant environmental impact. I am trying to have more sustainable, and less disconnected eating habits by moving my eating habits in the right direction and building the habit of not ordering meat. And overall, to be honest, I haven’t missed pig, cow, chicken, and goat flesh that much. One step at a time.