"I'll Just Eat Less Meat"

“I don’t even eat that much meat anyway. I only really have chicken. Having less meat is good enough, right?”

This was the initial position that I was going to take when I first started thinking about all this. I thought that I would only eat meat at restaurants, parties, or if there were leftovers. Any reduction is better than nothing, right?

But if it was going to be that easy to reduce my meat intake, I had to ask myself why I wasn’t just aiming to stop entirely.

Only on Weekends

If I have critically looked at an action I’m doing, recognised that it causes direct, unnecessary suffering, and decided that it is wrong… isn’t the only logical next step to stop doing it entirely?

Imagine if I used to commit [insert heinous crime here] all the time, every single day. One day, I think about whether committing [insert heinous crime here] is wrong, and I realise that it is. But instead of stopping completely, I decide to only commit [insert heinous crime here] on weekends.

I would have reduced how often I commit [insert heinous crime here], but the moral problem hasn’t been solved. It has merely been postponed to Saturday.

Rules are meant to be broken

The term for someone who just eats less meat is a flexitarian.

The rules… well, the rules are flexible and it’s just eat less meat. It’s definitely more achievable for me or anyone else to just cut back, and it absolutely does make a difference!

But flexible rules only make sense to me when I am the only one affected. Going to the gym three times a week instead of five doesn’t affect anyone else. But an animal still has to die to end up in that Pepe’s chicken ‘n’ rice box on a Saturday evening.

Veganism, for me, is a boycott of factory farming and of killing animals for food when it isn’t necessary. I’m not going to take a break from a boycott just because it’s convenient or because I feel like it. I’m not perfect, and I don’t have to be. But not eating animals who can suffer is my moral baseline. It’s not a goal I’m casually working towards on good weeks.

When I first thought about all this, I recognised that eating meat was wrong for me. So what exactly was I waiting for?