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A Short Reflection on Vegetarianism

When I was 12 years old, I knew a kid named Brent who was a few years older than me. He was a vegan punk-rock kid with neon green hair. He gave me some PETA pamphlets and showed me videos of factory farms. I thought about the arguments he made: "Don't you think these animals are being subjected to an insane amounts of abuse, cruelty, and suffering? Don't you think they should have rights, too?" and so on. There were a ton discussions we had about the topic over a span of months. Brent gave me books from a philosopher named Peter Singer, and I had come across the song "Cats and Dogs" by the hardcore band Gorilla Biscuits. I was going to punk shows at the woodcock township building in Meadville, PA and met a guy named Greg who was a local Spanish Teacher, who was also a vegetarian. He would make vegan food for the shows. He had a gentle approach. These things all made some kind of vague impression on me. After awhile, I decided vegetarianism was something I wanted to try.

My family was not exactly supportive at first, with the exception of my mom, who made some attempt to entertain my dietary choices, This was at a time where one couldn't find vegetarian sections in all the major grocery stores. I also noticed that it was a very morally heated topic. Each side would quickly become morally outraged.

I remember having a visceral reaction to the images of animals being slaughtered. One could perhaps just chalk it up to lack of exposure, but the whole things turned me off and made me feel sick to my stomach. Of course, one can point to the form of the propaganda that is used: the emotional music, the imagery, etc. The way it is delivered is designed to have a heavy emotional impact on the viewer.

Even though I stopped being vegan, I didn't stop occasionally thinking about the topic. More and more it appealed to me that vegetarianism, and especially the reasons for mine, was simply an attempt to evade the fact that life feeds on life. For whatever reason, something didn't seem fair about this fact that all life contains a seed of death, that life on earth is in the end a dense web of organisms killing and eating each other, and without death, there just can't be any life. That's not exactly a comforting thought at first glance. But whether or not a thought is comforting has little to do with its truth. Of course, this also isn't to say that there are never instances of mutual aid or cooperation, but in the end, death always wins out and there will be organisms there to catch a bite. Bon appétit!

Vegetarianism -- especially in its most moral forms -- attempts to spare one's own feelings of complicity, as if one was ever complicit in the first place. One isn't. But if one grants the logic of complicity for the sake of argument, one also notices the inconsistency within which one becomes trapped. One feels guilt free, despite killing creatures that can’t scream or be seen. The cutoff point at which a thing is deemed worthy to spare is arbitrary, or at least only following a "human" metric. Every glass of water contains a universe of microorganisms that humans have hardly wrapped their heads around. Growing vegetables implies killing tomato hook worms or cucumber beetles, etc. Even if you don't kill them yourself, you have organized the conditions under which the sparrow will come and pluck the worm from the branch. More and more, I began to think that my veganism was an ascetic retreat from life. This was even a point of honor for me at the time. There seemed to be something appealing about self-denial as a proving ground of my exquisite virtue. "I can deny myself: isn't that tough and cool?" I realized my veganism was an attempt to remove myself from nature, to obscure the fact of my embeddedness in this world. Rather than to embrace nature and plunge into it, rather than to accept what one could see, I avoided what it presented as clear as day. I did not want to think that we exist by killing, and that there really is no way to avoid it no matter how hard one tries.

It took a long time to own up to that fact. I ended up being a vegan for 4 years before breaking "vedge". I just went on with my life. I didn't feel guilty, and I had even come across some Marxist analyses of economics that convinced me of the futility of individual consumer protest. I was certain that factory farms would never end because you decided to buy soymilk instead of regular milk or eat tofu instead of eggs or meat. It was such a naive view of things, but one that certainly felt good and was pretty easy, when everything was said and done. One really didn't have to change anything at all except one's own moral attitude and a few products one put in the fridge.

I had never killed an animal in my life until I was 22 years old. My family didn't hunt, and I don't think my parents would have been particularly enthralled if I showed an interest in guns at the time. I was always more interested other things anyway, like playing guitar in bands or going to shows. How I first came to kill an animal for food is a different subject. The veganism now just seems like the ironic prelude to developing an interest in hunting. Perhaps I will write about it at another time. It involved reading Jack London's "To Build a Fire", Joe Bageant's "Deer Hunting with Jesus", and William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses!"

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