Context Warning: Descriptions of horrific cruelty to animals.
So, since this month marks four years since my decision to give up meat, I thought it might be interesting to talk about why I decided to do this. It’s not technically true that I haven’t consumed any meat since this time. For example, I go to restaurants where the vegetarian meals are cooked in the same oven as the meat, so it’s a near certainty that meat particles got on my food, but I think avoiding this situation would make my life too difficult. I’ve also been in situations where I’ve eaten half of a meal, then looked at the ingredients, and, uh oh, there’s meat in that, but since I’ve started eating it I might as well finish it! So I suppose the best way I can describe it is, I haven’t deliberately eaten meat in four years.
For years before I gave up meat, I always felt a certain uneasiness about it. There’s no avoiding the fact that you are eating an animal, and I had ways of putting it out of my mind, but it would always come back again. In 2015 I made an attempt to reduce my meat consumption, so I mainly replaced meat with Quorn, but this didn’t last long, mainly because I didn’t put much thought into how the diet was going to work.
But in 2019, I decided to give meat reduction another go. In July and August of that year (I think it may have been earlier I’m not sure), I decided to limit myself to 3 servings of meat a week. And, to be honest, I was surprised at how easy this was. I never had more than 2 servings, most weeks I wouldn’t even have one, and during this time, I happily went a whole 2 weeks without eating any meat. So I decided, for the month of September, I would see if I could eat no meat at all. And I managed it easily, so, I decided I could probably go the rest of my life without eating meat. The only reason I could see myself going back to eating meat is if there is some unforeseen health complication from not eating it, but the last 4 years have been fine, so it looks like it’ll be okay.
And a few weeks into not eating any meat, it was like a switch flipped in my brain, that’s the best way I can describe it. I thought of when I’m going along on my bike, and I encounter a dead cat, or a dead bird, and when that happens, the last thought in my mind is, that looks tasty! And I thought of how there is no functional difference between these, completely not appetizing things, and a dead cow, or a dead chicken, or a dead pig. So yeah, outside of unforeseen health complications that force me back on meat, I don’t see myself going back.
So, why did I stop? Some people go vegetarian for health reasons, but that wasn’t me. If I have gained some health benefits from not eating meat, great, but I ate a lot of junk food then and I eat a lot of junk food now, so I’m not sure what if any health benefits I’ve gained. The main reason is that, basically, animals, such as cows, pigs, sheep, or chickens, are not just basic lifeforms such as single celled bacteria. They feel pain, they feel fear. I could put up videos that demonstrate this, videos I have watched that helped me decide to stop eating meat, but, I’ve decided to spare you these videos, because they are literally, and I mean this very literally, painful, agonizing to watch. While I like this blog to be as evidence based as possible, I just don’t know if I want to have links to such really upsetting videos on it, I could put content warnings sure, but I’m still worried about someone accidentally clicking on them.
But I’ll say this, I have watched a video of pigs being slaughtered, over, and over, and over again. It is years since I watched this video, and I stopped watching such videos shortly after I started watching them, in order to preserve my own sanity. But, I’m still close to tears thinking of the video in question, even though it was four years since I saw it, because the sound of a pig screaming sounds very, very similar to the sound of a human screaming. If you distorted the sound quality just slightly, you might well mistake it for the sound of a child screaming. And this is what happens, every single day, all over the world, over, and over, and over again.
So, the consumption of meat and animal products obviously causes a tremendous amount of suffering to animals. There are about 25 billion chickens in the world:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263962/number-of-chickens-worldwide-since-1990/
And there are about 8 billion people on Earth:
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
That is, if we count just chickens, let alone other animals, a number of animals 3 times higher than the human population, brought into existence just to suffer. But, the consumption of meat and animal products, okay, let me back up a bit, I need to address the elephant that I refuse to eat in the room.
I still consume animal products. I don’t eat animals, but I eat things that come from an animal.
I try to cut down on things that come from animals. The milk I drink is almost always oat milk, or sometimes soy or coconut milk, and the only time I drink cow’s milk is when plant milks aren’t available. However, I still love the taste of eggs, and I eat them, despite knowing about the cruelty involved in the production of eggs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
And I love chocolate, despite the fact that, I think cows are wonderful gentle animals. When I walk through a field I just want to give all of the cows a big hug! Which I wouldn’t do because cows are bigger and stronger than me so if they got pissed off that would be the end of me. I don’t eat cows sure, and I drink mainly oat milk so I reduce my consumption of their milk, but I eat chocolate and, yeah, chocolate is just as cruel as eggs. Here’s a video by Ed Winters talking about the cruelty of the dairy industry. I’m a big fan of Ed Winters and he’s a big part of the reason why I went vegetarian, though I should stress that Ed Winters does not advocate “stopping at” vegetarianism but advocates for going fully vegan:
I sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable talking about my vegetarian status, because everything I’ve learned about the mistreatment of animals calls for me to go fully vegan, not vegetarian. After learning about the horrific, barbaric treatment towards pigs, I’m quite happy that at least these animals are safe from me, but it still means I’m complicit in supporting industries that are cruel and inhumane to chickens and cows, and it can be a very difficult thing to live with at times.
Another difficulty I have is, I’m just not what you’d call an early adopter, never have been. Vegetarianism is a much more, for want of a better word, “established”, diet, there are much more vegetarians than vegans, so it’s easier to learn what you need to do to stay healthy with it. But I feel because the number of vegans is so few, going longer term vegan still fields like too much a blind leap for me in terms of my health. So we’re at an unfortunate paradox, I don’t want to go vegan unless loads more people do and I can see how they get on, but everyone else could be thinking the exact same thing. I’m lucky I’m not a robot or the contradiction would destroy my robotic brain.
But, this segment of the post has gone on so long that you’ve probably forgotten that it’s actually technically speaking, a digression. I’ll come back to this, the fact that I still eat animal products, but now I’d like to get back to what I was going to talk about originally, which is, our consumption of animals and animal products isn’t just bad for animals, by definition, it’s bad for us.
The consumption of animals and animal products is a big contributor to climate change:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/how-many-cows-are-there-in-the-world.html
Cattle are the cause of 18% of greenhouse gases, that’s more than that caused by transport! By our excessive consumption of animal products, we are not just assuring the misery of these animals, we are assuring our own misery. Horrific weather conditions are on the cards if we don’t mitigate climate change (yes, stopping it is too late, we are into the territory of reducing the damage), and a big part of that will be in reducing our consumption of animal products.
The consumption of animals, and animal products, causes antibiotic resistance. This is because factory farmed animals are given antibiotics to fatten them up, and also to keep them alive because the conditions they live in are so horrific. Yes, if you’re thinking we have entered the territory of cartoonish supervilliany, you’re not wrong. Ed Winters talks about this in his video released when Covid-19 had just started, back when we didn’t know the world was going to shut down for two whole years:
But hang on, time to address a different elephant that I refuse to eat in the room, the world shut down for 2 years, that’s 24 months, or 730 days, or 63,072,000 seconds, and, I’m not getting into picoseconds because I’m already after confusing myself. The point is, this virus came from a meat market in China:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7092803/
I remember being cautiously optimistic in 2019, so many tasty vegan products became available that year, maybe, just maybe, humanity would finally reduce its consumption of animal products, as I had that year. Then, Covid-19 came, 2 years of the world being turned upside down by a virus that came from meat, and, nothing. Not even a campaign for meat free Mondays. Almost 2 years after those 2 years, and it still looks like business as usual, not even the world being thrown into absolute chaos can even slow down the consumption of meat and animal products.
We have seen what happens when we consume meat and animal products to an unbelievably excessive degree. We have seen how we can lose at least 2 years of our lives in an attempt to stop the spread of a virus. As I said earlier, there are 25 billion chickens on Earth. There are 1 billion cows on Earth. Isn’t this, given that we’ve already seen the consequences of this with Covid-19, a bit excessive?
Just Do What You Can
It would be hypocritical to end this with a call to go vegan, since I haven’t managed that myself. But if you think you’re able to be healthy and happy on a vegan diet, go for it, hopefully some day I’ll be able to join you. But, my advice to people is, just do what you can. If you think all you can manage is a meat free Monday, just do that. Are you consuming so much meat that it’s bad for your health? Why not just reduce your meat consumption to a more healthy level? I think once you really get into plant milks, you realize that cow’s milk tastes like piss. Why not try having oat milk in your tea instead of cow’s milk? Vegetarianism is much much easier to manage than veganism, so why not quit the meat and still have those delicious chocolate and eggs? (Not together at the same time though, that would taste disgusting.) Maybe you could only have meat as part of a Sunday dinner?
Many, many times, I have talked to people who have stated that they tried veganism, or vegetarianism, or pescetarianism (this is where you eat no meat except fish), and for whatever reason, it didn’t work out for them, so they went back to eating animal products at exactly the same level that they used to. To me this is like deciding you want to get more active, so you run up Carrauntoohill five times a day, and when this proves too much, you go back to sitting on the couch, as opposed to, you know, running maybe 2 miles a day on a flat surface, or hell, even walking 2 miles a day on a flat surface, and seeing if that works out for you. Because here’s the thing, 10,000 people who reduce their consumption of animal products by half does the same amount of good as 5000 vegans. It is the same amount of animals being spared. It is the same reduction of the dangers of antibiotic resistance. It is the same contribution to hopefully avoiding the next Covid-19. It is the same benefit to the environment.
It’s intuitively obvious that more people are going to be willing to do something that is relatively easy that something that is hard. There are going to be more people who are willing to reduce their consumption of animal products by about 25% then there are people who are willing to go vegan. So, 10,000 people who agree to reduce their consumption of animal products by 25% does more good then 1000 vegans. This is not to in any way knock the dedication of vegans in trying to create a better world for humans and animals, and some day, I hope I’m able to be vegan myself, but the numbers are what they are, a lot of reducers does more good then a small number of people who give up animal products entirely.
That’s why I think we’ve got to get away from all or nothingism. If you give people a choice between all or nothing, they will choose nothing. If you say to someone, “If you have a meat free Monday, you are still hurting animals six days a week”, then, instead of going vegan, they might simply not bother with the meat free Monday. This is not to dispute the fact that meat free Mondayers still hurt animals with their dietary choices. I still hurt animals with my dietary choices. But, “why not try this small change and see how you get on” I think is likely to work better than, “Give up all of this food you really love or you’re still hurting and killing animals”.
I’m a big fan of Tobias Leenaert, his work really got me to make sense of the fact that I don’t feel able to give up animal products completely, and I really like his strategy of saying “go vegan” to those who are likely to be receptive to this message and saying “just to try to reduce” to those who will be receptive to that message. Here’s a video where he talks about this topic:
Now, don’t get me wrong, I hope some day, many decades from now, the whole world is able to go vegan, whether that’s achieved through lab grown animal products or through some other means I haven’t even considered. Bringing animals into the world, just so they can live a miserable life, I realize that it almost certainly won’t happen in my life, but I would like very much for it to happen that it enters the same level of absurdity in the human mind as human sacrifice, it is something that we simply do not do, something we simply do not even consider.
But, billions, literally billions of animals are suffering, and their suffering is contributing to our own suffering, we lost 2 years because of it. We can not change this overnight, so, why not have a look at the vegan options in your supermarket today and see if there’s anything you might like? I remember when veggie burgers were “weird” but now I can’t imagine my dinner plate without them! Let’s save the world, one dinner at a time! That was a really cringey way to end this post, I admit it!
Ponderings Of An Autist 