I am accepting of people’s dietary choices. There are, of course, certain things that some people eat that I have a problem with, but rather than make a list, I’ll outline a few, broad categories:

• Food that is produced through the inhumane treatment of animals
• Food that is produced through the depletion of a threatened or endangered species or scarce natural resource
• Food that is produced in a manner that pollutes the environment or damages an ecosystem
• Food that is produced in a manner that abuses or exploits people

So basically everything.

It’s easy to stop there. All food is bad, so eat whatever you want. There’s no difference between an organic apple and a shark fin marinated in the tears of veal calves with some foie gras on the side. After all, apple trees replace valuable wildlife habitat; organic pesticides still kill bugs; apples are harvested using shady employment practices and migrant labor; apple cores end up in the landfill instead of in compost heaps where they belong. Let’s face it — organic apples are a nightmare. Who’s with me?

Anyone?

OK, maybe there is —some— difference between apples and my shark/veal/goose liver concoction. Maybe eating ethically isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition; perhaps instead it’s about educating ourselves — truly educating ourselves, not merely taking propaganda at face value — and deciding where we each will draw the line.

This is actually the position I’ve held for most of my life. It’s not about a rigid set of rules, but rather, thinking about what we eat and making informed decisions. It’s also about changing our minds when new information becomes available.

Of course, if you’re a vegan, there is a rigid set of rules. That’s not uniquely vegan — lots of people subscribe to specific dietary restrictions for religious, medical, or ethical reasons — but what sets the vegan lifestyle apart is that it’s the only one, at least that I know of, that seeks to reach an unobtainable ideal.

Let me say right here that I’m not vegan-bashing. You absolutely have the right to choose that lifestyle, to promote it, and to participate in the debate over animal exploitation. You have the right to sell your vegan, or “plant-based”, products in the public square, so long as you don’t lie about what you’re selling. In fact, you even have the right to judge non-vegans and talk as much shit as you want. While I find it to be counterproductive, I’ll always defend anyone’s right to be an asshole. That said, I don’t meet many long-time vegans who actually are assholes. As with any religion, it’s usually the recent converts who put the stink on everyone else.

A vegan friend of mine put it best when she said, “He’s an entry-level vegan apologist; he’s attacking everyone, but he’s not even making our best arguments.” When you’re new to something, you often don’t yet know enough to know how much more you don’t yet know, which is to say that the less you know, the less you think there is to know, thus the more you think you know, when the more you actually know, the more you know you don’t yet know, you know?

Long-time vegans know that you don’t just declare yourself to be a vegan, stop eating animal products, and congratulate yourself on your moral superiority. The vegan lifestyle is about making informed decisions every day, not just about food, but about the other products you use, the companies you support, the activities you take part in. It’s about reducing your negative impact, while acknowledging that you are going to fall short of the ideal.

If you’ve chosen the vegan lifestyle, I support your choice. If you’re new to the vegan lifestyle and you think I’m a piece of shit because I raise animals for meat and eggs, here are a few things I’d like you to consider.

• That so many vegan diets include meat substitutes is a pretty strong indication that your body is craving meat. Just sayin’.

• All commercial agriculture, whether it’s organic or not, kills animals. I won’t go into every detail, but rest assured, at a minimum, invertebrates and rodents are killed in the process of producing a crop.

• Farms destroy habitat. Many of them look nice and green and ‘natural’, but they are not native habitat and they do not support the area’s naturally occurring ecosystem. Some farmers like me attempt to share the land with wildlife, but there’s a limit to what we can do and still produce food on the land. Even a permaculture food forest alters the ecosystem.

• All food that is transported to the grocery store kills animals, from the insects, mammals, and birds that are killed on the road to the animals displaced by the construction of the road itself, to say nothing of the carnage incurred by the manufacture of trucks, or the packaging that produce and plant-based foods are shipped and sold in. And if you want to be really particular, the fossil fuel the trucks run on comes in part from dead animals as well, though they died millions of years ago. Of course, the fossil fuel industry is a massive killer of wildlife right now, in our own time.

• Lots of things you do are harmful to animals. Animals were killed or hurt to make many of the things you own — basically everything you own. The materials used to build your home were extracted by logging or mining. They were processed by methods that damaged the environment and exploited laborers, maybe even killed some of them. Wood comes from trees — trees that housed and fed lots of animals before they were cut down. Logging doesn’t take a break to wait for baby birds and squirrels to leave their nests, and felling trees displaces many animals on the ground as well. Another ubiquitous building material, concrete, is not a vegan product either; it’s made from limestone, which is the skeletons and shells of tiny sea creatures that collected and compacted over millions of years. Even if fossil products don’t count, walking on a sidewalk can’t be considered a vegan activity, because sidewalks are death traps for earthworms. What you wear when you walk on them is also problematic. The clothes you wear came from either commercial agriculture, which kills animals, or from petroleum, which pollutes the environment and kills animals. Your car is a death machine. Your bike is made of metal, which comes from mining, and plastic, which is petroleum, and rubber, which comes from rubber trees, which displace native trees and contribute to deforestation and the loss of endangered species. And don’t get me started on that iPhone. Or the little matter of the water you drink. In fact, depending on where you live, your tap water may not be vegan (or kosher). And even if it is, that doesn’t mean all your food and other stuff was produced with vegan water.

• The companies that sell produce and plant-based foods almost always sell animal products as well. Most of us don’t have access to a vegan grocery that only buys from vegan suppliers, so if you buy your food, as opposed to growing all of it yourself, you’re supporting the meat, egg, and dairy industries.

• The vegan diet is lacking in several vitamins and minerals that you need to be healthy. We can argue over the details, but let’s stick to the best available science — do your research on this — and say that vegans generally need to take supplements or eat fortified foods to get the necessary amounts of certain vitamins and minerals that most omnivores don’t need to even think about. Does this make the vegan lifestyle ‘wrong’? Of course not — it just means it’s not the natural, human diet, and that the vegan lifestyle prioritizes eating ethically over eating naturally. And that’s fine, even admirable. The modern vegan diet, with necessary supplements, may in fact be the healthiest of all diets, or at least the healthiest diet for your body. Or it may not be. Let’s just dispense with the lie that prehistoric human beings were somehow living a vegan lifestyle and getting enough B12.

This brings me to my big, philosophical discomfort with the vegan lifestyle.

I’ve already stated above that the vegan diet isn’t natural. That’s really not a big deal — modern omnivore diets aren’t exactly natural either. (I usually try to avoid the word, natural, actually, because I think it’s largely a meaningless construct that we use to fool ourselves into thinking that we’re somehow separate from ‘everything else’; I think we’re better off discussing what’s healthy or beneficial as opposed to what’s natural. But I’m using it here, so deal with it.) I would be a fool to extol the virtues of grain-fed beef over a plant-based diet that merely requires a B12 supplement to be viable. But through the majority of human history, and all of pre-history, our species didn’t give two shits about other animals. You’d also be hard-put to find another animal species that has a similar concern for the rights or the treatment of any species other than its own. Certainly there are exceptions, but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. The lioness who adopts the orphaned gazelle; the gorilla who saves the toddler who fell into her zoo enclosure. The only scenario wherein animals routinely care about other species is in symbiotic relationships, in which it can be argued that one species only tolerates the other because it gets something it wants out of the deal. You pick parasites from my skin, so I tolerate you walking around on my back. You help me get food that I’d have trouble getting on my own, so I’m willing to share my territory with you. You protect me from my enemies, so I’m willing to feed you — this was, in fact, the origin of the human-dog relationship. There are myriad examples of symbiosis, but in truth, few rise to the level of actual concern for another species. Even the domestication of the dog by early human beings involved a hell of a lot of human beings getting bitten and a hell of a lot of wolves being killed, and probably eaten.

Animals kill and eat other animals, and we call it the natural order. We might not be entirely comfortable with the details, but we choose to be OK with it. Until fairly recently, human beings were just another animal. We didn’t sit around and debate what behaviors of ours were natural or appropriate for our species, we simply did what we felt like doing, and therefore that was our natural behavior. The deductive reasoning looks something like this: Human beings are part of nature; a human being did a thing; therefore, that thing was a natural human behavior. In this sense, even aberrant behaviors are natural.

A few weeks ago, one of my ducks ate a young starling, or at least part of it. This was unusual, but was it unnatural? I once saw the same duck eat a small rat, which she bobbled around in her bill until she got it positioned just right so that she could swallow it whole. Clearly, she likes to supplement her diet with meat, to a greater degree than my other ducks do, but her behavior is certainly still the natural behavior of a duck, because she is a duck, and it’s what she does. I definitely didn’t train her to do it.

Not only do animals kill and eat each other, they seldom concern themselves with making the kill quick and painless. Wild animals die in only a handful of ways, none of them pleasant: being eaten alive by other animals; starvation; dehydration; overheating or freezing; from an untreated disease or injury; from an accident, like falling or drowning. (Human beings have brought a few, often-quicker ways to die into the mix: getting shot, and getting hit by a car.) We call all of these ‘natural’ deaths, and we do not place value judgments on them. Yet we hold ourselves to a different standard. (And I think this is a good thing, but stay with me.)

If human beings and animals are of equal value and importance, it stands to reason that we should live by the same set of rules, which is that there are no rules. This is just basic fairness. So if a mother orca can torture a sea lion for hours in order to teach her calf to hunt, is factory farming really any worse? I think it is, but why do I think that?

Is it because cattle and pigs are sentient beings? If that’s the standard, I fear we’re entering dangerous territory, because sentience is highly relative. Infants and coma patients beware.

Is it because animals have equal rights to those of human beings? If that were the case, it would follow that because we afford wild animals the right to brutally kill and eat each other, we have that same right ourselves, as well as the right to murder each other and do pretty much anything else we want to do. I don’t like that idea.

Is factory farming bad because cattle and pigs don’t want to die, and chickens don’t want to live in tiny cages? Well, almost no one wants to die or be in pain or discomfort, but those things happen to all of us. Where our individual rights are concerned, we have to draw a line somewhere. I don’t have the right to live forever, but I do have the right to not be shot, stabbed, or pushed in front of a train. I don’t have the right to be free from pain, but I do have the right not to be intentionally hurt, or hurt by someone’s negligence or carelessness.

What makes humans unique among animals is that where most animals simply avoid pain as a self-preservation instinct, or mask it to hide their vulnerability, (a massive proportion of human beings never operate beyond that base level, either, by the way, and that’s not a snotty, elitist comment, that’s a comment on how poorly we take care of our own) we actually have discussions about it, and we talk about things like compassion, and we create entire economies around the idea. We decrease our own comfort, or even risk our lives, to increase the comfort or safety of others, be they our own species or a species dramatically different from us. Hell, I’m writing this thing, right now, about this subject; dolphins, rats, and millipedes don’t do that. Which is why we’re better than them, and if we’re better than them, we should be able to control and use them in any way we see fit… No… if we’re better than them, we should protect them, which is also a form of control… OK, we’re not better than them, we’re all equal, so we should have equal rights, but animals don’t afford each other any rights, so… Alright, I think I’ve got it. We’re not better, but we’re also not equal. Those are just constructs. We’re just different. So instead of subjecting animals to our rules, or subjecting ourselves to theirs, we evaluate the ethics of a given behavior on a case-by-case basis and make decisions that we believe will create or maintain the world that we want to live in, for ourselves and the people, and animals, that we care about. Basically, what we do, we do for ourselves, and if it reduces suffering beyond ourselves, that’s good for us too, because we’re products of the world around us, even as we shape it. We build the machine that builds us.

That might be why so much of the vegan literature these days focuses on our health, as opposed to animal suffering. Or maybe they just know that the animal rights brand is toxic. Don’t @ me — it’s that way because the architects of the movement designed it to be.

So here’s what I’m saying — the vegan lifestyle is full of contradictions. It still kills animals. It’s supposed to be healthy, but there are specific health problems directly associated with it. It’s supposed to hold animals in high esteem, but it necessitates that we see ourselves as separate from them, or even superior to them. The good news is that being able to recognize contradictions and hold contradictory beliefs in balance with each other is something many of us just call being a fucking adult. (Some people call it “adulting”, but I hate those people.) None of this is much of a problem for long-time vegans; they know that perfection isn’t the goal. They’ve found a way to live ethically that works for them, and most of them recognize that other people have found other ways to do the same. The problem isn’t that we’re doing it differently, it’s that so many aren’t doing it at all, not even because they don’t want to, but because they’re just trying to survive.

My argument against the vegan lifestyle, if you can call it an argument against, is pretty simple: it’s not everything it purports to be, and I can be an ethical person without being vegan. A quick way to find out whether or not a vegan really ‘gets it’ is to ask, “Can I be an ethical person if I eat meat?” I’ve also tried going vegan, more than once, and it didn’t make me healthier or make me feel better. It that’s an argument against it for me, not for you. It’s not an argument against veganism in general. I’ve seen people adopt the lifestyle and lose weight, gain energy, save money, get more boners— it works for them. I’ve also seen people abandon being vegan after several years in favor of a vegetarian diet or a diet with small amounts of ethically-sourced meat, which is, frankly, the diet the vast majority of us would be healthiest eating.

I could end here, but I think I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you what eating ethically means to me, so here it is:

Humane treatment of animals makes us feel better about ourselves, and it makes the world around us a little less ugly, but it also improves the quality of animal products. Chickens that free range and eat grass and bugs lay infinitely better eggs than battery hens. Heritage breeds that have fewer health problems also produce better meat, with more complex flavors, and you don’t need to eat as much of it to feel full. Compare a factory-farmed pork chop to a pasture-raised pork chop; which one would you prefer to eat? They call pork “the other white meat,” but it’s not even supposed to be fucking white. Good job, America; we don’t fix the problem, or even deny the problem, we turn it into a slogan to convince people it’s not a problem at all. Imagine if instead of passing clean air legislation we just started teaching kids that the sky is brown.

Humanely slaughtered meat tastes better, too, because it doesn’t have toxic, stress hormones in it that damage it physically and chemically and affect its flavor. We can debate all day about the reasons why an animal shouldn’t die a slow and painful death, but in the end we should all agree that it shouldn’t suffer, and for meat-eaters, one very good reason is that every second it takes for that animal to die reduces the quality of its meat.

Humanely raised animals have less impact on the environment. Where factory farming uses massive amounts of water and produces greenhouse emissions and other pollutants, pastured animals don’t present this problem. They drink an appropriate amount of water for the amount of land they occupy, and they drink less water than animals that are given a feed ration that dehydrates them. Their burps and farts are offset by the pasture itself, as the grass and trees take up CO2 and the soil acts as a carbon sink. Appropriate grazing practices can even improve habitat for native species, because our livestock can fill the role once occupied by the extinct megafauna that used to live here, before early human beings wiped them out.

Ranchers can take pasturing to great heights by introducing methods like rotational grazing, mob grazing, silvopasture, non-lethal predator control, alternating grazing with field crops… this is the stuff that gets me really excited. Like, never stop talking about it, bore the living shit out of you excited.

Humanely raised and slaughtered animals make for better working conditions and better conditions for neighboring communities. There has been a lot of attention given lately to the pork industry and all of the associated health problems in communities where there are large swine operations. These issues disproportionately affect communities of color, and if that surprises you, I want to congratulate you on the flexibility of your spine, the elasticity of your rectum, and your ability to survive lo these many years with your head up your ass. Good job.

It’s not only animal products that pose ethical dilemmas. Google palm oil. Google avocados. Google chocolate. We have to make decisions about everything we eat. I wrote a little in 2020 about the wastelands that are commercial banana plantations. But whether it’s a plant or an animal product, this is one of those rare cases where what’s best in quality is usually what’s best ethically, too. Of course there are exceptions, but here are some basic suggestions.

1) Refine your palate. Ethical food usually tastes better.

2) Avoid ‘decadent’ foods unless you know their origin. Luxury items like foie gras and beluga caviar tend to be the exceptions to the ‘tastes better’ rule. As far as foie gras is concerned, I suggest you watch some videos of the feeding process; I raise geese and I have force-fed a lot of birds, so I see this process through a slightly different lens, and I’ve seen foie gras operations that look perfectly humane to me, while others look like nightmares.

3) Local if you can get it — we can’t always get local food, but if you can, choose it over stuff that had to travel a long way to get to you.

4) Research food. Learn about ingredients. Learn about farming and food processing. You will make decisions based on this knowledge.

5) Be science-literate. Learn, or re-learn about the scientific method, read science journals, scrutinize the studies and evaluate the data yourself. There’s no reason you need a science-challenged journalist to digest the information for you, especially since they usually misunderstand the studies they’re reporting on and turn minor details into headlines.

6) Cook more. The more you make from scratch, the more likely it will contain ethical ingredients. So much of what is bad that’s in processed food is stuff you don’t even have access to as an individual consumer.

And that brings me to my final note, which is what this entire stupid blog is about in the first place — to the greatest extent that you can, grow or raise your own food! My goal is to produce 95% of my food on my own farm, and to source the remaining 5% from trusted sources elsewhere. It’s a steep climb, but even if I fail, it’ll be worth the effort.