Jesus Christ.
What’s up with my fellow omnivores? Seems like the amount of people I feel I have to apologize for grows more and more (I have a lot of privilege). Like, literally no one is telling you to do shit.
That’s a fine part of a vegetarian meal, but if I’m serving a full meal, and not a snack, i like to include enough calories to feel full, and a decent portion of protein.
Oh, yeah, I know I’m not the average person. I can’t eat as much as I did when I was younger. So, a “full meal” is often something I can’t finish or I need a doggy bag.
It’s not as simple as either environmental or health or sentimental reasons. It’s certainly not judgemental any more than we’re all constantly judgemental of people for all kinds of silly reasons. I judge people for liking rap music because it’s ugly and sexist (though admittedly often quite clever) but rap music listeners all seem to being doing just fine despite my harsh eye rolls.
When asked, most of us* pick environment, health or sentiment and mumble something in hopes of being left alone or we will ruin the picnic. And even then we get thrown at us that we’re ruining the picnic and we shouldn’t be so judgmental and guilt isn’t going to work on them etc (never mind that guilt is a pretty decent motivator for behavioural change, like the social version of pain — feel guilty? consider it…)
Actually talking about it is far too exhausting for a picnic but I think you sort-of asked? I guess if I had to ruin the picnic all in one go, I’d say: I don’t eat animals because of the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly, now.
Walk humbly, now.
Love mercy, now.
You are not obligated to complete the task but neither are you free to abandon it.
It’s from a Talmudic scholar and I repeat it to myself to try to hold on, because the truth is that I am often daunted. I still think of little Alan, face down on the beach. Everyone else forgot about him and all of Europe, in all our education, comfort and history, seems to be gripped with the fear of hordes of brown people crossing the Med to get here, like this is the issue. Meanwhile, 2025 might be the year the Gulfstream collapses so then I guess it would solve that ridiculous problem because they wouldn’t want to come here anymore, would they?
The permafrost is melting. The oceans have warmed up and we’ve fished them to death, so the photosynthesising algae that produce 70% of our oxygen are collapsing (they need whale poop and they need the whales to sorta swoosh them around between ocean layers).
The difference if we stopped keeping animals & fishing would be massive. We can provide enough plant-based protein for 10 billion people on an area the size of Greater London (from George Monbiot and even if it isn’t quite true, even if it’s 2 Greater Londons or all of England, imagine the difference). All that land could go to rewilding, imagine the trees, the life! The restoration.
My mum moved to the north of France and driving there, all you see is fields for cattle and feed for cattle and pigs. The pigs are hidden away in large, ugly barns but you smell them. It’s so sad and inefficient to see. All that dead land, sprayed within an inch of it’s life.
We’ve destroyed the soil’s microbial life. Farmers are getting Parkinsons at unprecedented rates from the pesticides.
I take B12 as a supplement, but everyone is supplementing it too, just less efficiently. Where do you think the cows get their B12? Where do gorillas get their B12? B12 is produced by bacteria that live in soil. But we killed them, so now we supplement it to cows.
Bird flu is now everywhere. It has reached the penguins on Antarctica. In North Africa there’s a strain that sometimes infects humans from birds and the death rate is 50%, while in the US a different strain is probably already transmitted among cows (cows being more similar to us, so more risk). We just had a pandemic that came from a zoonotic virus, but we’ve had plenty of problems before. Q fever left loads of people with, basically, long covid but we just forgot about them because examining this stupidity we’re engaged in is uncomfortable.
Eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel cancer and bowel cancer is rising in younger people. Although healthcare is advancing, it’s also collapsing. We can do more for people but people need more and want more and there aren’t the people to do the care. (Partially because we burnt them out in the zoonotic pandemic.) In the Netherlands, we’d have to have 1 in 4 people working in healthcare to provide the standard that we expect, in a few years time. But of course, the real scare is those brown people crossing the Med, wanting to work here, to take care of our Baby Boomers dying of bowel cancer — let’s keep them out. Little Alan, face down on the beach. For fuck’s sake.
Chickpeas provide more protein and more iron per gram than steak. Of course it comes with a nice amount of fibre which helps protect against bowel cancer. Again, we could feed 10 billion people plant-based protein on an area the size of Greater London and they would be healthier. And we would maybe not destroy our healthcare workers in another pandemic. (Enormity of the world’s grief. For fuck’s sake.) For people who really can’t handle too much fibre (for most it’s simply that they need to adjust) you can get chickpea protein powder and all sorts. You can whip chickpea water (aquafaba) into stiff white peaks for meringue, that’s how much protein — and you get to keep the beans.
The soy that destroys the rainforest is fed to cattle. The soy we eat directly, at least in Europe, mostly comes from France and sometimes from Canada. There are some farmers producing it in the Netherlands. My local tofu makers hope to be able to use that soon, but they explained to me that they need a very stable product, all the beans need to be the same, for the machines to work. So hopefully soon my tofu will be entirely local. For now, don’t let 'em confuse you: tofu for humans doesn’t destroy rainforests.
So maybe we Easter-Island destroy ourselves in giant whirlwind of gluttonous cruelty that we had to struggle so hard to suppress. Because I see that head-in-the-sand suppression everywhere and it looks like hard work to me. Many of my friends are veggy but there are maybe 5 or so who eat animals and who have young kids in the animal-love phase right now. And all of them have explicitly said they are postponing telling them what meat is. So we read books about cows and sheep and talk about favourite animals but they mustn’t know. They know that they wouldn’t want to eat them, these animals we are taught are our friends. There would be crying and they would see their parents in a different light and then they would have to make changes and it would be hard so they postpone. And then when they finally find out, they’ll be inducted into this conspiracy of pretence where first we tell them that the animals live happy lives on happy farms and we kill them quickly and painlessly. You see, you have to make them complicit first.
I grew up around a few very nice farms. My childhood friend’s farm no longer exists but her father called the dairy cows by name. Even there, in the early nineties, we weren’t allowed to go to the pigs because of the diseases.
Most farms are all pus and antibiotics, pain and fear. We lop off body parts and tell ourselves that that’s much nicer for them. We grow chickens so their legs collapse under their own weight, but only just when they’re the size we want to eat them. We keep pigs in tiny cages so they don’t lie on the too-many-piglets we make them have. We debate if it’s better to leave the calves with their mothers just that bit longer, or worse because they become more attached. Only sometimes does the horror intrude upon our lives. When my youngest sister had just been born and my mum was full of hormones, they separated the lambs and ewes in the fields around our house in Wales. We had to go and temporarily stay elsewhere because my mum couldn’t stop crying. I was a vegetarian already, my mum is now too, now she finally let it in.
Because it’s letting it in, the enormity of the world’s grief, that’s the problem. Most animal transport they try to do at night; certainly the stops for petrol or food in places with other people. Because people don’t want to see that we separate little baby calves from their crying mothers and transport them for hours, from Lithuania to the Netherlands in one go. Legally they need access to water, so they have drinking nozzles they can’t use because they’re babies that need an udder. Then they get here and they’re briefly fattened for slaughter in factories that we call “farms” and the people who run them are millionaires who don’t own muddy boots but that we call “farmers”, who influence our politics by blocking motorways and convincing the population that the real problem is little Alan, face down on the beach. For fuck’s sake.
We need to import people to work in the slaughterhouses, because the work is so horrible it destroys people and the only way they do it is if they have absolutely no other option. So we have crooked employment agencies that lure desperate people from Eastern Europe with promises of work but when they get here payment goes partially to the leaking hut with mouldy bed they share with the other shift, so they never get ahead while they are slowly destroyed.
There were people on our block, on the far end where there are cheap flats, who I found out after a while worked in a slaughterhouse. They lived in an upstairs flat but their cat would escape from the window and we would message them to pick him up at the end of their shift. They were usually high out of their minds by the time they got here. Sometimes sober. They weren’t ok. It’s hard to guess how old they might be. I brought the cat around to them sometimes, though I never went further than the stairs. It had at one point been carpeted (maybe the seventies) and there was a crack all the way down the wall that looked structural. I couldn’t really converse much with them, though I tried and they had bits of various languages I speak. They gave away the cat but sometimes I see her and if she’s high she throws her arms around me and kisses my face and sobs.
Read Slaughterhouse, if you can manage. One excerpt was enough for me, guess I am easily daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. It’s the experiences of many different people who have worked in slaughterhouses. Most people are gone in a few hours, those who stay are either destroyed or they are horrendously dangerous. The rate of domestic violence and even murder of humans is bananas. (One of the most dangerous jobs in the world is observers for the standards on fishing boats, they’re out there at sea and they just don’t come back.)
Here’s someone’s description of his slaughterhouse work:
You’re already going to kill the hog but that’s not enough. It has to suffer… You go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would be just looking up at me and I’d be sticking, I would just take my knife and — eeerk — cut it’s eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream. One time I took my knife — it’s sharp enough — and I sliced off the end of the hog’s nose, like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kinda stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into its nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left over in my hand — I was wearing rubber gloves — and I stuck the salt right up the hog’s ass. The poor hog didn’t know wether to shit or go blind. I wasn’t the only one doing this kind of stuff. One guy I worked with actually chases the hogs into the scalding tank. Everybody knows it, all of it.
Other descriptions include people intentionally holding an electric cattle prod in an eye or anus. Stuff like that. They hack at them. The line must keep moving because delays are costly. So while they are meant to be stunned with a bolt, if they aren’t they just go through conscious. And often, percentages vary wildly of course, they aren’t killed properly either. So then they are dunked, screaming, into scalding hot water until they drown. Sometimes, though it’s far more rare, they survive that and are slowly cut up in the next phase.
They know that this is coming, of course. They smell the blood and hear the screams. Fight, flight, freeze and there’s fawn. Sometimes the pigs will nuzzle the workers in an attempt to fawn. They are hacked at by the workers, for fun. Because the only other option they have is looking into the that enormous pit of the world’s grief.
The only people we can get to do this work are desperate and we need to keep them in conditions close to slavery or they will try to get out. The people who stay because they want to, well that’s its own terrifying problem.
Theoretically there are inspections. The slaughterhouses have negotiated for inspectors to look on from one particular area and they pay them off, anyway.
I have always had dogs and cats. They love, deeply and honestly. They have their own opinions, their likes and dislikes. I saw my dog experience wonder the first time she got to the top of a mountain and looked over the other side. She experiences “missing someone” and it hurts her. I can’t say my husband’s name more than 10 minutes before he gets home because she’ll start pining. This dog and my last both, after a few years, started to refuse to say goodbye if I’m leaving. One of my cats is the responsible one. When I was sick with long covid, he stopped asking me for stuff (getting up was too much and he saw that) and he would bring me completely dead “gifts” rather than half-alive. They love each other, kiss and cuddle each other. Wait for the other to come home. When they are afraid or in pain, they seek comfort from me. My last labrador, when she was very old, the vet was stretching her joints as I said “good girl”. She asked me to try a few times and then said: “She stretches harder for you and it hurts.” My current girl, she’s a gun dog (see *) and she gets nervous when we go to school — she loves it but she really wants to be a good girl. I remind her that she is always my good girl and we will do everything together.
Animals feel, deeply and intensely. I see no way of logically describing their feelings as any less than ours. It would need some pretty special pleading. They don’t make it into a narrative but then that equally means that when the present is nothing but pain and fear, there is also no hope. And for the vast, vast majority of the animals we eat, their short, brutal lives are nothing but pain and fear.
So you see, it’s not just one thing. It’s the totality of it. The enormity of the world’s grief. And this is just scratching the surface, of course. There are the Palestinians and Rohingya and the Tibetans and the Uyghurs. American women being left to die with their unborn, decomposing fetus. The bleached coral reefs, the turtles full of plastic, the disappearing insects, the species we never even knew, the orang-utans whose forests are burning and the starving polar bears and the last rhinos and last river dolphins and on and on.
So I mostly make my own clothes (not everything, obviously) because the clothing industry is vile and destructive and full of child slavery. Not so much because I think it will make a difference but because I can and because there is a point where you are just sick to death of the enormity of the world’s grief and you don’t want any of it near you anymore.
But it would be really hard, too much to ask, for you all to make your own clothes. I understand. That’s just a thing I prefer because of the aforementioned enormity of the world’s grief and sometimes it feels like at least fucking something, you know? At least I don’t have to wear ill-fitting, sticky plastic clothes made by children?
But not eating animals is easy and cheap. The only reason meat is cheap at all is those ridiculous subsidies (oh god I missed those? so yeah, that, for fuck’s sake, and treaties keeping the countries we raided and colonised poor, to suit us). You think it would be difficult to make the change and it would inconvenience others but imagine how inconvenient things are about to get, the permafrost melting and the gulfstream giving out. You think “but cheese, I can’t give up cheese” — and yes, at first you miss it. That’s because the casein works on your brain like cocaine (coincidentally also why your dreams are wild after a cheese board). Once you give it up, you’re fine.
You just don’t want to accept the enormity of the world’s grief and it’s easier to look away and claim it’s fine because you try to eat a bit less (meat consumption is rising despite vegetarianism also rising) and you mostly buy organic (see… everything above, basically it still farts and it goes to the same slaughterhouse).
We were all indoctrinated into this cult as children and quickly made complicit, which makes it hard to examine and change. So we go along in the charade we were taught: the animals are our friends, they live happy lives on farms, their deaths are quick and painless and farmers are somehow very important and good for the environment. Because if that weren’t true, surely someone would do something?
All of that is kind of a mouthful and as you can see, it ruins the picnic. So we just mumble something about “oh I just prefer vegetarian” and hope one day you’ll look up and see the complete, horrific picture of how we’re blindly Easter-Islanding our way outta here. Or maybe you’ll make a list with on one side all the shit I just wrote down and in the other column:
- but I like it
- I don’t want to inconvenience others
- vegans are annoying
- how will I get protein and B12
and then read over it a few times and… yeah… (a friend of mine literally did this and is, needless to say, now vegan).
So in short: we don’t proselytise at the picnic because it’s too long and we don’t want to ruin things any more than anyone else wants to, some people may proselytise online because it’s a helluva lot easier when you’re not being interrupted by people telling you vegans are annoying. (I have never written it all out before and never told anyone my reasons besides other veggies who asked. But you sort-of asked…)
Do I judge people for what they eat? Sure. I judge people for a lot of shit. Frankly, most people are stupid and disappointing. I’m sure you’ve noticed. They watch stupid shit on tv, they vote for lying, stupid scum, they treat other people like shit, they listen to ugly music and they cannot hold in their minds the many facts, theories and experiences that together might allow a glimpse of understanding. But this is the only world we have and this is the only way I can fight for it. And for the stupid, disappointing people, who I love anyway. Hey-ho, this is a pretty great picnic.
And also, it’s super easy. I started when I was eight and there were no Beyond Burgers. You just fully accept the darkness and despair, decide you will not be daunted and take a step. “You do not have to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.”
- I say most of us because I have a lot of friends who don’t eat animal products to various degrees and we talk about it among ourselves, usually in small snippets because it is exhausting. And I see what they answer, when asked at the picnic. We talk about the various choices we make and our motivations for different things. I eat eggs from a local place and from friends’ chickens. I eat local oysters, local razor clams, I eat honey if I know where it’s from, snails locally if I know where they are from and cooked in vegan butter, cricket meatballs made locally and I eat animals that have lived in the wild and I know the person that shot them. I pick up with my dog (but rarely) and usually if I eat any animals it’s small game shot by my dad and as part of game keeping, e.g. the geese that will fly into planes or destroy fields of local farmers. I wear leather shoes that I take care of and last me years (I got my walking boots when my feet stopped growing). I wear wool if I know where it’s from or if it’s second hand. And I’ll break these rules when something is served with mayonaise because I said that I do eat eggs and so on and so forth. I don’t even know how to say “what” I am and I rarely say it at all.
Can you expand on that a little?
j/k. Good post!
True, but there’s no need to convert hard-core vegans; they’re perfectly content munching on their veggies and steering clear of anything that harms animals. Take my vegan daughters, for example—they won’t even touch honey (aka bee vomit) because commercial honey production often involves practices that can harm bees.
It’s the meat-eaters who need convincing. If lab-grown meat is tasty, affordable, and involves a fraction of the animal suffering, it shouldn’t be a tough sell. After all, the suffering involved in retrieving a few cells from a few animals is minuscule compared to the mass slaughter of millions. I wouldn’t hesitate to take my grandmother for a doctor-ordered biopsy, but I’d be pretty hesitant to send her to the slaughterhouse.
Now, my ex, on the other hand…
I feel like I have extra challenges because my husband is allergic to many vegan staples. Or even just people staples. He can’t have tomatoes at all, so that rules out a lot of Indian recipes (though I have found some.) He can’t have soy, so no tofu or seitan. I’ve always had to put extra effort into our meals just to work around his allergies. Even with those challenges, I’ve found vegan meals to cook. The internet is overflowing with them. But it is a lot of extra work.
My kid, OTOH, would probably die without chicken nuggets. Removing anything from his diet at this moment is not an option. We don’t try to hide anything from him, the truth of what animals are. He hasn’t made the connection yet but I’m pretty blunt about it. We’re blunt about death. I see no reason to try to shield him from reality.
But his understanding of reality is, shall we say, limited. For example, after watching Honey I Shrunk the Kids, he thinks there is a nonzero chance of him shrinking and getting swept up into the garbage, and I know from previous conversations that he thinks people become babies again after they die. If he ever decides he doesn’t want to eat meat, and god help us is willing to try something else to replace it, I’ll be right there for him.
(I have been curious to try toasted chickpeas with him. Maybe some edamame. He likes crunchy.)
Excellent, thought-provoking post. I wish everyone would just acknowledge the facts. Truly acknowledge, not simply hold a sort of half-formed thought. Not just, “there is a certain amount of animal suffering in factory farming.” No! It is horrific suffering, it is cruelty and misery that is heartbreaking! Acknowledge the environmental impact and suffering required so that you can have a steak.
I don’t think most people truly do, because I think most people are basically decent. It’s a fleeting thought if it’s a thought at all. Because a person who had a true, full appreciation of what factory farming entails who continued to eat meat (assuming alternatives exist)—well, that person seems monstrous, at least as it relates to this.
Well, if nothing else came out of this thread, I decided to stop eating beef. I have one pound of ground beef left in the freezer that I plan to consume because, well, that ship has sailed. But after that, no more beef.
Steak is probably one of my favorite foods on earth but I don’t eat it that often, just on special anniversary dinners and such. I’m going to have to find a new favorite meal.
Good on you! 
Yes, good on you!! And I hope you remember: you are not obligated to complete the task, just not quite free to abandon it.
(Thanks for saying nice things, @Tibby & @Stratocaster, it really was exhausting to write. Grateful someone read at least some of it ugh — really, thanks!)
I have known this, known it for years but have managed to keep avoiding the reality of it. And that I was supporting all that suffering with my grocery choices.
so now I can’t avoid it, because you wrote a post I accidentally read - all of it, I mean, not just skimming - and I swear by all that’s holy I’m done with the “factory farmed” meat and eggs.
I know local people who raise animals for slaughter but they tell me it’s humane and I hope they are right. It’s more expensive but I’ll cut back somewhere else.
I’m done with “factory” meat and eggs. I knew it was cruel but kept supporting the system anyway.
I’m done.
it was horrible to read so it’s hard to say “thank you”.
but thank you.
That is so awesome to read.
Oh wow, this really made me cry. I’m sorry for how awful it is, really. I promise there is a kind of peace in not being a part of it. It might be hard at first but it becomes easy, or at least normal (life isn’t all that easy, is it?)
I cook a lot from Ottolenghis cookbooks (not strictly vegetarian but a lot is), also “East” and a book called “Vegarabia”, which may be Dutch only. These are my current favourites. Just thought I’d mention them for anyone feeling daunted.
Wow. Sorry I’m so late in saying that’s awesome!
I’m really happy about that!!
Yep great post @gracer, but to carry the conversation on, I thought I’d take issue with a couple minor things in the set up 
It’s strange people in this thread are almost all using the word “sentiment”. Is it because I’m British and it has a significant difference in American English? Because to me, it implies something like nostalgia.
Double-checking my understanding with googling, we get definitions like “exaggerated and self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia” or “feelings such as pity or love especially for things in the past and may be considered exaggerated and foolish”.
I don’t think anyone here meant to poison the well, it’s just strange is all.
Well I don’t think you should because firstly, most of the songs aren’t meant to be taken that way. Rap and hip hop is more about rhythm, and braggadocious verse that flows with that rhythm. It’s not meant to be a set of instructions and few songs make coherent sense in total.
Secondly, a lot of rap is actually about social issues. Probably more than other genres of music. So there’s a bit of everything there.
Finally of course there are genres of music that have at least as high a proportion of songs with negative lyrics. e.g. death metal is of course often about murder and violence. Here in the UK at least, while I’ve often heard people criticizing rap themes, I’ve never heard such criticism of death metal.
In that context, I interpret “sentimental” as roughly synonymous with “emotional.”
In @gracer’s context I agree with @Thudlow_Boink .
In the context of posts by others upthread, including me, “sentimental” appears to mean “unjustified hyperemotionality” bordering on “childish emotionality”.
That quote really resonated with me. Not just for this but for all things including my work in the social justice sphere and my attempts to deepen my spiritual practice. Because the task is so enormous there is no possible way to complete it, but if we can just chip away at it consistently, we can make a difference. I’m not a theist but part of dealing with the inherent meaninglessness of all existence is forging my own meaning and I can’t think of a better one than to reduce the suffering of all beings. This is resonant with the Buddhist Boddhisattva vow.
I travel and spend social time with a lot of people who have diets different from my own, some vegetarian and vegan. If we’re eating together, I’ll generally join them in their mode. If they’re coming to my house, I’ll shop for them. Some are more emphatic than others, but I don’t see any reason to argue (or in some cases, to participate in a discussion). If they post horrific photos on social media, they get the same treatment as people who post abortion or pimple-popping photos, which is Snooze for 30 days, then re-assess whether to follow their posts.