Choosing not to eat meat

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico

I read activists and revolutionaries who are determined to overthrow the system. I see what they see—the scale of our destruction, the countless human and non-human casualties—but I can’t imagine a better world wrought through revolution. Maybe it’s history or my conviction that people are neither wholly evil nor predisposed to do no harm. Maybe it’s the lack of a blueprint or roadmap to that better world, or the rhetoric that seems so hostile towards humanity telling me I should want to go there. I’m reluctant to deny personal responsibility, although I know my choices won’t end sweatshops or factory farming. It’s easier to blame the system and say I have no choice. But “the system” is made of people too. At what point am I affirming my own powerlessness by participating and at what point am I simply perpetuating injustices? If eating factory farmed meat is ok because I didn’t build the infrastructure that tacitly endorses torture, is it ok to work in a slaughterhouse? To manage the kill floor? To oversee inspections for the USDA? To be a PR rep for Tyson? What about board member, stockholder or CEO? The intricacies of industry make determining the least destructive option difficult, to be sure. But once you have, it becomes difficult to maintain the moral high ground that nothing I do matters.

I draw that line at agency, I suppose. It’s so clearly wrong to systematically torture animals and so easy not to participate. Crops kill animals and so do dams, but crops are needed to make meat, and nothing systematically tortures animals quite like a factory farm. Saying I don’t want to eat that isn’t enough—it won’t stop those farms from existing and it won’t meaningfully change anything. But I still believe it matters. I’m not absolved of guilt or responsibility. I eat things that are still killing the planet, if a bit more slowly. I can’t articulate exactly why I feel so strongly about this, but I know absolutely that I do. Some things matter, and how I choose to live my life is one of them. I can’t change the world with that I eat for dinner, but I can help clarify my own vision and start painting a path to the world I want to live in.