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It’s not that I care in any deep emotional way about my health or the environment or the feelings of animals. I’ve never cried about dolphins or lamented the plight of baby seals. It’s not that I’m trying to economize or localize or energize my best self through the wonders of a plant-based diet.
It’s just that I began to find it impossible to ignore the truth. I might feel nothing about these things, but that is no longer an excuse for doing nothing. Eating meat is unnecessary. And if you really think about it logically – if you force yourself past the dangerous process of mental abstraction most carnivores rely on to keep on swallowing our ham baguettes – it’s just flat-out wrong.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but factory farming, in particular, is unhealthy in every way. Unhealthy for the animals, unhealthy for those who eat the animals, unhealthy for the planet, and unhealthy for the profits of small-scale farmers. The one upside of factory farming is that it provides miserable jobs for low-wage workers in Brazilian slaughterhouses – and no one ever bought a KFC Bargain Bucket because of that.
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In the era of post-truth politics we must all make a profound decision: Are you going to go with your gut? Let your vague inclinations and anxieties, as cemented and reinforced by the silo-thinking of social media, guide you? Or are you going to search out the facts and act on them?
By relinquishing my burger, I am making a concession to the truth. Not the truth as I feel it (because eating the burger is what I’d very much like to do and I have a thousand plausible-yet-biased arguments for why it might actually be fine) but the truth as I know it to be – from the careful study of expert authorities and fact-checked news sources. Provable facts: the unicorns of our time.
If last year was the year of unsettling seismic events, then perhaps this will be the year of small changes. In the face of massive uncertainty we can, at the very least, focus on the little things. We can shift our bodies and ourselves incrementally in the right direction – not by going on temporary, up-ending idiot regimes but by making small and lasting changes. If last year was the year of how we felt, let’s make this the year of what we actually know.