Why I’m Vegan

 CW Animal harm

I’ve been a lot less annoying about being vegan lately (I think) but I think it’s valuable to have written down how I arrived at this stance. This is going to be extremely personal to my experience, but some parts may be more universal.

I think the place to start is two events from my childhood. One was when we got a BB gun to keep chipmunks off our bird feeders. My dad wanted the bird feeders exclusively for the birds, and didn’t want chipmunks burrowing under our house. I only shot a chipmunk once, with my brother. It fell off the deck and we followed it and found it still alive, twitching, mouth open, expiring. It was horrible. The other event was when I went fishing with my dad and brother. We were in a two seat canoe, and since I was the smallest I sat on the floor so they could paddle. I caught an enormous catfish, the biggest fish I saw any of us ever catch. I was rewarded by my dad placing it on the floor right next to me, gasping and writhing, as we paddled back to shore. Obviously, these events did not immediately make me swear off eating animals, but I think they laid the groundwork for my acknowledgement of animal suffering.

Three more events, all in college, brought me to vegetarianism. The first was my experimentation with psychedelic drugs. I got a lot out of these experiences, but the relevant one here is how it made me think about food. When I was tripping, I only wanted what I called “clean” foods. For the most part, this meant raw fruit and vegetables. I found meat and super oily foods rather disgusting when under the influence, but since I was on drugs it was hard to say how much I could trust these impulses. The second event was my exposure to the excellent film Samsara in an elective film class, particularly this scene of live chickens being sucked up a tube to be processed into meat. The coldness of this process I found extremely disturbing, and if I can point to a single moment where it “clicked” for me, it would be watching this scene. Finally, I suffered a bout of food poisoning from eating undercooked eggs from my school’s food hall. This affected me enough that I stopped eating eggs and meat (but still dairy) for a few weeks afterwards, and I came to the resolution that once I got my own kitchen, I would become vegetarian.

In fall 2016 I got my own kitchen and became vegetarian. The reasoning I gave my family is this: I don’t want to eat anything I would be unwilling to procure for myself. I could never bring myself to kill an animal, so meat is forever off the table. I would milk a cow or harvest eggs though. 

I didn’t find it to be very hard to do, and my biggest meat cravings were for general tso’s chicken and italian sausage in my pasta sauce. My mom suggested putting fennel seed in the pasta sauce, which helped. Also on my mom’s friend’s recommendation, I bought Moosewood Cooks at Home, a great book of simple vegetarian recipes. Since it worked so well for me, this is usually my recommendation for others who are trying to start eating vegetarian. 

I got into online vegetarian communities (I was on reddit a lot at the time), and was exposed to /r/vegancirclejerk. I liked it because I liked memes, and because it’s really easy to make fun of meat eaters who haven’t thought very much about the food they eat. However, of course, scorn was equally leveled at vegetarians. They called us hypocritical for supposedly caring about animal welfare while still eating eggs and dairy. Once I learned about how those products are made, I realized they may have had a point. Just in case you didn’t know, cows do not just produce milk automatically. Like any other mammal, they produce milk only after they give birth, to feed their calf. Since we want the milk, we separate mother from child, and usually send the child to a veal farm. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you about why veal is disturbing. We continue this process of forced birth and child stealing until the dairy cow is spent. There is almost no situation in which I think it’s ethical to consume milk. 

This is not true for eggs, since hens actually do just lay eggs no matter what. My wife and I frequently talk of our dream of having a chicken coop in our backyard, where we can compost food scraps for them to eat, and I can harvest and eat their eggs without being concerned about mistreatment. On an industrial scale, chickens are of course greatly mistreated. Egg laying hens are kept in tiny cages with holes in the bottom so their eggs will drop through. They do not stand on solid ground their whole lives. Male chickens are killed at birth in egg operations, since they do not produce more eggs. It’s hard to say who has it worse.

Armed with this knowledge, in June 2018 I made a pledge to myself that the non-vegan products that were currently in my kitchen would be the last I ever consume. I’ve basically kept that promise, though since you were all good in reading my screed I’ll give you a few concessions as a treat. First, I still eat honey. I admit that I still do believe in a bit of a “hierarchy of sentience”, and that it’s more abhorrent to eat, say, a dolphin than a shrimp. Unfortunately for bugs, I do not value them very highly. Gimme that honey. Second, I have begun to adopt a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy on vacations, especially in foreign countries. In some places, it’s simply not very reasonable to be vegan, and eating local cuisines is a big reason why I visit other countries in the first place. For example, when I went to Poland last year I got a plate of mushroom pierogies which almost certainly were cooked in butter, but I ate them anyway. Sue me. 

I’ve allowed myself these exceptions because I’ve realized being hardline doesn’t really matter to anyone except me. At a certain point refusing food is just being narcissistic. I am just one person, and being blunt, if I really truly want to not bring any harm to any living creature the best thing to do would be to kill myself. And I’m obviously not gonna do that. With that in mind, I have promised my wife that if/when we visit Italy and Japan, I will indulge in some cheese and fish, respectively. It just feels wrong to go to those places without having some.