I don’t refute that there’s far too much callous cruelty in the production of meat products. I hope there’s a greater push to, at the very least, reduce the suffering to as minimal as possible for the duration of the animals’ lives. I worked on farms growing up, but never factory farms or anything larger than 20-30 cows and flecks of sheep or a barn of egg-laying hens, but the cruelty of factory farms and the shit stained floors and the breeding cages and the systemic abuse, it’s all on another level far above what I’d consider humane.

Unfortunately, I grew up and had to work on farms, both parents worked separate shifts to have no babysitters best they can, and whatever was cheapest or easiest to shove in our guts is what we were fed. I will attest to the ‘brain washing’ element through the everyday normalcy of buying the cheapest frozen bag of gigantic chicken breasts, but that’s also all my mother and father could afford to feed us, and we didn’t live in a location that had many options for grocery stores (a ‘local owned’ kroger/owens, and a Walmart if you drove another 15-20 minutes the other way). I definitely think, if they had had the training or information or the time and cash, they’d have fed us better meals (I don’t think either of my parents know a single vegan friendly dish).

All of that to say, myself and many other people were living in conditions incongruous with the forethought and planning necessary to even attempt veganism. The few vegan locations I was able to find when I went to college were terrible, the food wasn’t good, or at least I didn’t like any of it. I’ve had good vegan dishes, but I have to make them, every single one, or I stomach food I don’t enjoy. I can live on apples for lunches, I’ve gone many a day eating throw-together salads, I meal prep grains and veggies each week so that a majority of my meals are already set. But I want meat dishes sometimes. And until there’s a more affordable way to get lab grown meat, the only way I can dive deep into a MASSIVE section of the culinary arts, is through engaging in capitalism that supports a horrific industry.

In fact, I can’t eat my bananas without inadvertently funding the violent private militias enlisted to put down dissent among the local farmers. My wife has to buy all of her beans through a local seller who supposedly employs previously indentured coffee bean pickers and gives them a fair rate, but surely she can’t only drink coffee she’s made from home, so we’ll try local places (boycotting Starbucks still, options very limited) and not all of those places buy from that bean seller so it’s not all confirmed ethical. The list is exhaustive, and so my minor attribution to the slaughter or those animals is, to me, the same contribution I make to the military juntas who ensured I could buy a banana, and the same as the polluting of the rivers for any manufacturing process or project. Although not worthless, I do value human life above animal life, and so dealing with those internal struggles and questions and navigating where best to purchase fabrics because of the indigo staining children’s hands who wash jeans, to me, are all above the suffering of animals, the sheer number of those animals (the 90 billion figure) does not hold any weight, to me, when comparing the two. So I am just as culpable, to myself, for engaging in those other acts of violence through capitalism, as I am for engaging in eating meat.

So, I try to buy less bananas and less fruits out of season that aren’t grown locally wherever possible, but I will eat at dairy queen and order a banana split. I reduce the total red meat in my diet because I want to impact the problem where I can, but I do like the taste and I don’t believe that consumption of another animal is wrong, so a dozen cows over my lifetime will bother me morally as much as driving my gas car (I’d do electric, but I couldn’t afford it the 8 or so years ago I bought the car), which is to say, I don’t love it, but I won’t lose sleep over it.