Vegetarians are Evil (and Other Hard to Digest Truths)

It feels so good to get this off my chest. I hope you don’t choke on it.

I’m an evolved human being. I try to live the best life I can, including enjoying myself, and I try to not hurt anyone else in the process. But vegetarians, oh man, they’ve got some splainin’ to do.

First the fact that there’s even a conversation about what is appropriate to eat and what isn’t. Humans have eaten whatever they want for millennia, and somehow now there’s an expanding belief that meat is bad for us?

You can argue until the surviving cows come home about whether there is any nutritional advantage to a meat-inclusive diet vs vegetarian vs vegan. For every study your knuckles drag forth supporting one diet over another, I can ask ChatGPT to give me three more that dismiss your study. One of two of them will certainly be real.

The universe has provided a plethora of food options for us, as well as a plethora of things we can’t eat because they will kill us, and somehow we live in such abundance that we can choose what to eat? To have a preference rather than eating to just continue living?

Did our cavemen ancestors who didn’t have access to soy, tofu, and triple-half-caf lattés somehow live in moral squalor because they ate whatever gave them sustenance and was fun to poke with a sharp stick, rather than choosing to focus on plants that didn’t even fight back? Did eating meat become morally bad at some indeterminate point in the past, or has it always been the repugnant choice?

Maybe you say, hey, it was OK to eat meat when you had to go out and kill it yourself. But what is going to the local supermarket other than the modern evolution of hunting? I took my life in my hands heading to the local Wal-Mart to get my hands on some life-saving Coke Zero during COVID. Surely that’s comparable to some 14-year-old in a loincloth clubbing a baby cow. How much danger was Bam-Bam actually in?

Vegetarians are evil because they choose to have an identity that simultaneously excludes half the world’s edible biomass from consumption, that causes everyone else to have to take their preferences into account when preparing food, and that implies that anybody who isn’t vegetarian is beneath them on some value scale that is very very important.

Evil is about selfishness, not about wanting to do harm to others. The simple focus on oneself rather than taking into account everyone’s interests is what makes for a good evil persona. The more you value your own identity and preferences over those of others, the more evil you are.

And here is where it gets interesting. On the definition of what group constitutes ‘others’. If you define humans as ‘us’ and delicious animals as ‘others’ to consider, then we have a moral problem and you should probably step away from the pepperoni. But if you fail to include non-human animals in the conversation at all, then no moral problem. Animals aren’t ‘others’ for you to be concerned about.

If you’re an incensed vegetarian right now wondering what the hell my point is — here it comes. If you define ‘others’ as animals that we should take into consideration, then why the fuck do you think plants aren’t part of the consideration as well?

We have plenty of evidence already to posit that plants have intelligence and that plants feel pain. But that isn’t even my point. Humans are biological, animals are biological, plants are biological. How smart or quick they are doesn’t enter into the equation. If you think eating animals is abhorrent, then I double-damn you for eating plants.

Just give up, lie down and wait for sweet release. Nothing on this planet is sufficiently devoid of worthiness for you to feel morally superior for tearing off a piece with your very sharp incisors and gulping it down. I feel bad for you, because I’m not evil. But you did it to yourself.

Wow, that felt really good to get off my chest. And there’s even a small amount of truth in the rant, but here’s what I really believe.

We’re custodians of this planet and the ecosystem, just by virtue of being the most powerful biologicals around. We should take absolutely everything into account as ‘others’ when determining how to live our best lives. And the most powerful argument I’ve ever heard for not eating meat is, because we don’t have to. (Michael Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma).

Yes, we’ve evolved as a society to be able to grow or manufacture edible calorie-dense foods that don’t require any living being to be sacrificed to get us through another day. I don’t condemn any individual for choosing to continue to eat meat, but I hope you recognize that you don’t have to. That’s a choice you’ve made.

Yes, we’re fortunate to live in an age where we have choices our ancestors didn’t have. And yes, that means our moral choices won’t be the same as theirs — our option set is different. Be mindful of the choices you make, including what you choose to put in your mouth and in your stomach, because it is indeed a choice.

I’ll eat anything you put in front of me if I’m your guest, and I do fault vege-whatevers sometimes for expecting their preferences to be taken into account, but it’s my choice to have them as friends, and for some reason, most of them are awesome, possibly even delicious, if we ever turn out to not be the most powerful biologicals around.

If that happens, I sure hope the new bosses are more evolved than we are.