Confessions of a Former Carnivore

Nearly two decades on, the mask worn by the anarchist revolutionary in V for Vendetta still commands attention. One recent afternoon, four black-clad figures, all sporting the same maniacal visage, stood back-to-back in silence on a pedestrian plaza in downtown Jersey City, video flat-screens slung across their chests. Strolling couples, commuters, delivery cyclists, and families paused to check out the show, and one felt a grim poignance watching their expressions fall in real time as the images on the screens, hazy in the glare of the June sun, gradually came into focus: baby chicks tumbling live into industrial grinders; pigs writhing and gasping for breath in CO2 gas chambers; steer bellowing in stunned agony after receiving a bolt to the head.

What might first appear an instance of street theater was instead a carefully designed intervention—known as a Cube of Truth—staged by the activist group Anonymous for the Voiceless. The video clips were from the documentary Dominion. Made up of hidden-camera and drone footage captured by animal rights organizers, the 2018 feature has won a slew of awards and been streamed more than five million times on YouTube. I urge anyone willing to contend with the less pleasant aspects of our food system to give it a look, but this is not light entertainment. The Internet Movie Database classifies it as “documentary/horror,” and the film’s website offers self-care resources for traumatized viewers.

Displaying clips of what some might consider a snuff film to unwitting passersby is undoubtedly a bare-knuckled strategy. But for AV’s devoted volunteers, such measures are the only way to counteract an elaborate apparatus of erasure—crafted over decades, inculcated by parents and teachers, financed by industry, subsidized by government, and underpinned by legislation—designed to sever the connection between the food on our plates and the industrialized mass violence that put it there.

There’s good reason for this obfuscation. Few of us want to see innocent creatures suffer and die, and we prefer to know as little about it as possible. (Congratulations on having read this far.) For members of AV, shattering our complacency is just the first step. Then comes what the group calls “outreach,” engaging onlookers in conversation about how their choices as consumers perpetuate practices they view as abhorrent.

At one point, I watched Vittorio Chiparo, a reedy 30-year-old Sicilian immigrant who became vegan three years ago, chat with a middle-aged couple. Warily, they agreed to give him just one minute of their time. After haggling to get an additional 30 seconds, he took a deep breath and launched into what was essentially an elevator pitch for basic compassion. “This,” he told them, gesturing toward the gruesome images on the video monitors, “is standard, even for products with the label ‘organic,’ ‘grass fed,’ ‘local,’ ‘humane,’ and so on. If you are personally against animal abuse, but you pay for these products, you’re basically going against your own values. And that makes you a hypocrite.” I thought I detected a stiffening in his listeners when he said the word. Chiparo then made a quick pivot, addressing his own culpability and offering a remedy. “So that’s what made me go vegan,” he went on. “I realized I was responsible for this pain and violence, and I knew I wanted to align my actions with my values.”

After an exchange of pleasantries, Chiparo moved along to his next outreach. I hung back to ask what the couple, who declined to share their names, thought of his arguments. The man said the spiel had been “overly simplified” before conceding that he had, after all, demanded the abridged version. He seemed to think “changing how we actually farm foods” might be a more reasonable answer than forgoing animal products entirely.

Neither he nor his companion was ready to go vegan, but the conversation had made them think. “When you’re honest, people appreciate it,” Chiparo told me later. “They get the urgency of the message. I’ve learned, speak the truth. Don’t just bullshit around. I call them hypocrites, and they want to shake my hand. They’re like, ‘Thank you!’”

Having adopted a vegan diet myself just a few years ago, following decades of blissful unconcern and another few years of guilty but defiant self-indulgence, I’ve found myself increasingly mystified by our culture’s intractable attachment to using animals for food. Why, given the growing plethora of decent alternatives and the many reasons to forswear meat, dairy, and, yes, seafood—self-evidently good reasons, involving ethics, personal health, environmental devastation, and social justice—aren’t more of us doing it? Why are so many otherwise thoughtful, conscientious, and deeply caring individuals so willing to cause so much suffering for the most trifling and transient of gratifications?

And relatedly, what took me so long?

There was a Brief moment when America’s postwar love affair with meat and dairy products seemed finally to be coming to an end. Vegan cuisine, long known for its sprouts-forward austerity, was embracing a decadent, sexy new aesthetic (e.g., fast-food chain Slutty Vegan). Google searches for veganism doubled. “Alternative milks” were elbowing the old-school stuff off supermarket shelves. Schools and workplaces were declaring Meatless Mondays. And alternative-meat startups were posting unicorn-level valuations. Beyond Meat’s 2019 IPO was the most successful by a major company in nearly two decades. Meanwhile, by 2020, Anonymous for the Voiceless, launched by two friends in Melbourne, had grown to more than 1,000 chapters around the world.

And then it all kind of fizzled. When the coronavirus forced a pause in AV’s in-person outreach efforts, the group’s momentum stalled. McDonald’s ended its experiment with the McPlant due to soft demand. As of early August, a share of Beyond Meat Inc. could be had for less than a four-pack of its Hot Italian sausages. Meanwhile, a slew of YouTubers who’d become successful touting the health benefits of various plant-based diets jumped on new wellness bandwagons, and the “Why I’m no longer vegan” volte-face became a genre of its own. “Me and a few other girls were vegan and all kind of denounced or went back on that, like, ‘We’re not vegan anymore,’” recovering wellness influencer Leigh Tilghman (@leefromamerica) told me. Those who become vegan out of concern for animal welfare, known as “ethical vegans,” are believed to be more likely to stick with it than those who adopt the diet primarily for health reasons, like Tilghman. Though her reintroduction of meat enraged some followers, she noted that it also juiced engagement (“Any big reveal is going to get eyeballs”). Indeed: Another popular influencer who made the switch, Alyse Parker, landed a segment on Good Morning America and a sponsorship deal with a meat subscription company.

And they don’t call them influencers for nothing. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans identifying as vegan has fallen from 3 percent in 2018 to just 1 percent now (4 percent profess vegetarianism, forswearing meat but not dairy and eggs).

When Noah Hyams, the founder of the “plant-based business community” Vegpreneur, held his first networking event at a New York restaurant in 2018, turnout was so large that late arrivals were kept waiting until the crowd thinned out. Many of those founders have since moved on to other endeavors, he told me. “There was a lot of hype,” he explained. Food startups were being treated like tech companies, and the enthusiasm may have inflated the industry beyond actual demand.

And yet the argument for a mass transition away from animal products has, if anything, grown more urgent. The cruelty inherent in the system remains, although an array of “ag-gag” laws have sought to protect the industry from public scrutiny. Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants exploit immigrant workers, some of them children, who routinely suffer serious workplace injuries. (When ninth grader Duvan Robert Tomas Perez was killed by a machine at a Mississippi chicken plant in 2023, he became the third worker to die in an accident at that facility in a year.) Meanwhile, even as the meat lobby leans into the free-lunch fantasy of “regenerative agriculture,” the vast majority of poultry and pigs (more than 98 percent) and even cows (70 percent) are actually the products of what the United States Department of Agriculture calls “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. Better known as factory farms, they are disproportionally sited in low-income and minority areas, where they issue hazardous levels of ammonia and animal waste and create ideal breeding grounds for new pathogens, like the avian flu, which has spread to cattle and humans, and may well mutate further, creating another pandemic.

As for climate change, animal agriculture accounts for as much as 19.6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to one recent estimate. That said, global warming is only part of the sector’s environmental footprint, as John Sanbonmatsu, a scholar of critical animal studies and associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, pointed out. “It’s depletion of the soil,” he explained. “It’s the way all the freshwater is being pumped out of the ground.” It’s deforestation “destroying all the biotic diversity of the planet.” Animal agriculture and the fishing industry, he asserted, “are the most ecologically destructive forces on the earth.”

Psychologist Albert Bandura pioneered the idea of moral disengagement, the psychological mechanism by which people preserve a belief in their own fundamental goodness even while doing harm. Bandura found practitioners of “self-exoneration” just about everywhere he looked—from cyberbullies and terrorists to gun manufacturers and the architects of the 2008 financial crisis. He also drew attention to the societal tendency to justify various atrocities by “dehumanizing” the victims—calling them beasts, animals, vermin, etc. But when it came to the treatment of actual animals, Bandura evidently practiced some disengagement of his own. The topic never appears to have come up.

Nonetheless, the so-called meat paradox—the common tendency to profess one’s love for animals even while unnecessarily exploiting them for food—has attracted considerable attention from scholars of social psychology, and for good reason. There may be no human activity at once as widespread, deeply cherished, and fraught with moral conflict. “People have a lot of sentimental attachments to animals,” Sanbonmatsu said. “And at the same time, the same people say brutally killing them in the billions and trillions is not only morally unobjectionable but it’s even the best way to live a human life.”

“It’s hard to think of a better example of routinely performing self-serving activities at a harmful cost to others,” agreed João Carlos Graça, a professor of sociology and economics at the University of Lisbon, and author of a 2015 study that applied Bandura’s framework to the consumption of meat. Indeed, the full menu of psychic evasions available to the guilty carnivore rivals the bounteous offerings of a typical Greek diner. Hank Rothgerber, a professor of psychology at Bellarmine University, has spent more than a decade studying the issue. “We can talk abstractly about certain values or beliefs we hold, but this is one where you can’t really fake it,” he said. “Diet is where the rubber meets the road.” In 2019, Rothgerber published a scientific paper in the international social science journal Appetite, in which he explored a phenomenon he called “meat-related cognitive dissonance”—a feeling of psychic distress, or “aversive arousal,” arising from the desire to eat meat while simultaneously maintaining one’s positive self-image.

Rothgerber has identified 14 distinct strategies by which people manage this psychological conflict. By far the most popular is to avoid it altogether, which turns out to be remarkably easy to do. Unless we stumble across, say, a Cube of Truth or a magazine article (again, congrats for making it this far), our choice to eat animal products will be validated at every turn. The conditioning begins in childhood, when we’re taught to love meat and dairy products before we even know what they are. Then there’s our language, which makes powerful use of euphemism. Philosopher Joan Dunayer, in her 2001 book, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation, declared words “that specify cut of flesh or manner of preparation”—cutlet, pastrami, sirloin—to be “morally irresponsible because they obliterate the victims and their murder.” (That said, lexical precision doesn’t always help; as Homer Simpson once put it, “Lisa, get a hold of yourself! This is laaamb, not ‘a lamb.’”)

Unsurprisingly, Dunayer’s preferred terminology (“cow-flesh industry” for beef industry, etc.) has yet to penetrate the mainstream, although when one activist at the Cube told me of his decision to renounce “animal secretions,” he extinguished for all time whatever secret cravings for mozzarella I still harbored. Meanwhile, Dunayer has hardly been alone in taking note of how consumer behavior is framed by linguistic choices. The meat industry has furiously lobbied to prohibit plant-based alternatives from using words like meat and steak. And as Dunayer reported, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has urged members to avoid the word slaughter, suggesting that they “substitute process or harvest, or say that animals ‘go to market.’”

Speaking of market, the old-school butcher shops, where customers might once have found body parts such as heads, intestines, blood, and feet, leading to uncomfortable associations with a dead animal, have long since given way to upscale groceries filled with neat packages of sirloin tips and breast tenderloins—“mechanisms designed to keep this illusion festering,” Rothgerber said.

Those of us who were around when New York’s meatpacking district was still “in transition” may recall the queasy experience of stumbling from a club in the wee hours only to encounter a throng of corpses swaying from hooks, effluvia blackening the cobblestones. But in New York as elsewhere, such displays have long since been shuffled out of view.

That said, willful ignorance still fails us on occasion, at which point, Rothgerber observes, carnivores are faced with a choice. Either alter their diet, or select from a bad-faith buffet of defensive countermeasures. Among the most potent are what have been termed the “4 Ns”: claiming that meat is necessary (Where else will we get protein?); natural (What do you think cavemen ate?); and nice (I could never live without cheese). Fortifying all of the above is the most overwhelming “n” of all, that it’s just normal. The most open-minded, progressive person will “still know lots of people like you who eat meat,” Rothgerber explained. “So you can use those individuals. ‘Well, if they’re still eating meat, it must be OK.’ There’s no panic or sense of like, ‘I’m out of step.’” Other “direct justifications,” as he terms them, include denigrating the victims (insisting that farm animals lack intelligence or the capacity to suffer) and claiming that our domination of the animal kingdom is divinely ordained or “just the way things are.”

Rothgerber said such direct strategies are more popular among conservatives, for whom moral arguments like those made by AV often backfire. In such cases, appeals to health tend to have more traction.

Then there are the somewhat more sophisticated rationalizations, the “indirect strategies,” typically deployed by those who, while ruefully condemning the practice of abusing animals for food, are nonetheless determined to keep doing so. Such people may convince themselves, as I long did, that they eat meat less frequently than they really do. They may highlight what they see as the negative qualities of vegans, framing them as annoying, fanatical, humorless, effeminate, or just kind of weird, what Rothgerber calls “do-gooder derogation” (a weapon long wielded against progressives of all stripes). Spotting perceived acts of hypocrisy among vegans is another favored approach, as if any hint of imperfection (“Is that a leather belt?”) instantly renders the issue moot. Off-loading responsibility to third parties—grocers or restaurants for failing to offer better vegan options, one’s children for being too fussy, or the factory-farm system as a whole—is another venerable technique. So is shifting focus to one’s other social contributions, such as donating to environmental nonprofits.

There’s at least one more popular escape hatch: buying “humane” products—free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, eggs from cage-free hens, and so on. “It’s what I call the myth of the Enlightened Omnivore,” said John Sanbonmatsu. “You look at the liberal left; they love the discourse of humane agriculture and sustainability. It gives them the patina of an environmentalist ethos without actually having one.”

Sanbonmatsu’s forthcoming book, The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals, and Ourselves, is a sharp denunciation of what he calls “the new American pastoral—a romanticization of what is in fact a relation of domination of humans over other beings.” As the title indicates, he is especially critical of Michael Pollan, whose 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma provided a “rhetorical scaffolding,” as Sanbonmatsu puts it, for maintaining eating habits that remain as destructive as ever. Nearly two decades after the book’s publication, he reports, “99 percent of meat, eggs, and dairy today still comes from animals raised in intensive confinement.”

Sanbonmatsu takes particular issue with what he considers Pollan’s central thesis, the idea that “simply by supporting local farmers, seeking out fresh foods, and sitting at table with family and friends for luxurious meals, we could all be food revolutionaries.” The incoherence of this vision becomes obvious “when you get into the nuts and bolts of how animal agriculture works,” he explained. “You’ve got to sexually reproduce billions of beings, you’ve got to house them, feed them, and then kill them—forever? And you’re gonna do that without causing them suffering?”

Pollan’s foodie bible is notably dismissive of vegans. The author declares animal rights an ideology that “could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world,” and describes the “vegan utopia” that rejects animal products as “parochial.” Perhaps more utopian, though, is the notion that the small-scale farms he mythologizes could ever begin to feed the world’s 8.2 billion people without a wholesale change in dietary patterns. While the United Nations has come out in favor of regenerative agriculture (a set of more sustainable farming practices), calling it “affordable and effective,” for example, it also nonetheless makes clear that a transition to plant-based diets is a “a logical first step as nearly 80% of total agricultural land is dedicated to feed and livestock production while providing less than 20% of the world’s food calories.”

Even as Pollan’s book was garnering ecstatic reviews, scientists working with the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization were readying a major report on the climate impacts of the livestock industry, which found that animal agriculture was “one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity.”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma doesn’t mention methane, the heat-trapping gas (some 28 times more potent than CO2) that wafts heavenward with every ruminant belch. It touches briefly on nitrous oxide (nearly 300 times as potent), critiquing the overuse of nitrogen fertilizers, but fails to note that a significant portion of N2O comes from animal manure. Pollan suggests that we could mitigate agriculture-related atmospheric warming by converting all the farmland devoted to feed crops to pasture instead. Unfortunately, no such conversion has happened; instead, the popularity of the sort of grass-finished beef championed in the book has led to rampant deforestation in Brazil and elsewhere, with the attendant collapse of biodiversity. Moreover, it turns out that transitioning the U.S. beef industry to grass-only feeding would require 30 percent more livestock—each of which would produce 43 percent more methane.

I hadn’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma until I began researching this story, but it was under the sway of the same Arcadian fetish Pollan helped popularize that my family and I decided, in the Covid summer of 2020, to decamp from our Brooklyn apartment to a tumbledown clapboard house on a 44-acre former dairy farm in the western Catskills. Like so many urbanites, we’d long harbored inchoate primeval yearnings: for dirt, physical labor, night skies exploding with stars. The virus, punctuated by the unceasing wail of ambulance sirens, supplied just enough urgency to get us moving.

In retrospect, I think I was less worried that the world might change forever than that it might not. Our lives, at least, would be different. I ordered a subscription to Self-Reliance magazine and assembled a library of Foxfire books and other back-to-the-land classics. We’d learn to pickle, can, chop wood, tap, forage, garden, fish in our own stream, and perhaps—if I could persuade our new neighbor to take me out one morning—even hunt. Eventually, I bought a used tractor (charmingly classified as a subcompact) and an assortment of 3-point implements. We built a big fenced-in garden, covered it with salvaged cardboard, and called in 15 yards of compost. Naturally, there was talk of animals: goats, pigs, maybe a mule. A neighbor had bison, which would cut a handsome figure, I thought, on our craggy hillside. We started small, with chickens.

Contrary to Pollan’s lofty claim, I think it was precisely our new experiences with the natural world—sharing a landscape with deer, raccoons, groundhogs, snakes, foxes, eagles, frogs, fish, and so on, and getting to know farmers in our area—that led us to begin appreciating living animals more than dead ones. One day, we all went to volunteer at a small cooperative farm run on regenerative principles, precisely the sort of place in which Pollan sees the possibility of a soulful agrarian restoration. My middle kid, Russell, chatted with one co-op member about his experience slaughtering broiler hens for the local community-supported agriculture group and was struck by how troubled the man was as he described the chore. By this time, Russell had come to know our own chickens as individuals, occasionally sitting in the coop while they crowded into his lap. A few days after our visit to the co-op, he announced his decision to go vegan.

In the weeks that followed, Russell and I had a series of dialogues about my ongoing carnism. I adopted a fatherly tone of broadmindedness and ecumenicism. The world is a complicated place, I sermonized, and that’s what makes it interesting. Black-and-white thinking, blind dogma, and reductionism are intellectual traps to be avoided at all costs. I pointed out that I’m a journalist and therefore strive to be objective, nonjudgmental, and adventuresome. I told him one must never say never. Unwittingly echoing an argument of Pollan’s, I asserted the value of being an easygoing guest when invited to dinner parties and barbecues. Besides, I insisted, “I’m pretty much vegetarian anyway.”

Though Russell was by this point impressively well-armed with an array of arguments—he had seen Dominion and was soon to don his own Guy Fawkes mask as a member of AV—he didn’t bother to recite them. I knew the broad outlines, of course, and he knew that I knew. Instead, he looked me full in the face, apprising me evenly, with a serious, uncompromising expression. “Dad,” he said. “This is really happening.”

Something in that clear, unimpeachable formulation, in the way it called bullshit on all my rationalizations in one go, was precisely what I needed to hear. Changing my diet was a process for me, as it is for many vegans. PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk, for instance, told me she was “slow to change,” making the switch “one animal, or taxon, at a time.” For a while, I still enjoyed an occasional egg from our chickens (that is, when I could snag one before Russell threw them into the run for the hens to feast on). And once in a while, on finding myself at a local diner and not especially tempted by the “side salad,” I’d indulge in a grilled cheese. Gradually, however, the appeal just sort of faded, until it became harder to rationalize the caveats than simply to move on.

Meanwhile, Russell’s admonition seems to have short-circuited a proclivity I didn’t even know I’d acquired, an ability to take in the dire facts of a given situation while distancing myself from their implications. In time, his words became a kind of gravitational mantra, pulling me back down to Earth as I struggled to absorb the latest news about the devastation of the climate, about the carnage in Gaza, about the sputtering of democracy, and on and on.

In the latter half of the last decade, as red-meat sales were declining and excitement about plant-based alternatives was reaching a fever pitch, the beef industry received a welcome gift in the form of an old-school TV drama. Debuting in 2018, Yellowstone was the defiantly atavistic saga of wealthy cattleman John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, fighting to hang on to his expansive Montana ranch. Despite airing on a second-tier cable network, it soon became the most popular show on television. Big Beef couldn’t have wished for a better P.R. vehicle—a gorgeously produced modern-day Western starring one of the world’s top movie stars, shrink-wrapping their benighted product in such all-American virtues as honor, hard work, family, cowboy stoicism, and the masculine exercise of power. Better yet, the only animals viewers would see getting brutalized were the human ones, a parade of city slickers, hired goons, journalists, and one very unlucky officer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who dared to challenge Dutton’s sovereignty.

The show didn’t take on animal rights directly until season four, in which dozens of activists arrive in town to protest “the mass murder of millions of animals every year,” in the words of organizer Summer Higgins, played by Piper Perabo.

“You ever plow a field, Summer? To plant quinoa or sorghum or whatever the hell it is you eat?” Dutton replies with withering contempt. “You kill everything on the ground and under it. You kill every snake, every frog, every mouse, mole, vole, worm, quail—you kill ’em all. So I guess the only real question is, how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?” (Stung and speechless, Higgins obviously has no choice but to sleep with him.)

Dutton’s argument is one often lobbed at vegans. As Pollan put it, “The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows.... If America were suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline.” What this rebuttal fails to account for is that around 40 percent of the world’s cropland is actually devoted to growing animal feed. So yes, some critters may be killed due to the industrial farming of soybeans, corn, and other crops, but a vegan diet is killing considerably fewer. Perhaps more important, studies indicate that global agricultural land use could be reduced by as much as 75 percent if the world adopted a plant-based diet. “Ultimately, we can grow more food on less land, and rewild the rest,” according to Nicholas Carter, director of environmental science for the Game Changers Institute. “Honestly, it’s a complete lack of understanding of how we use land around the world. I mean, how do you think these animals are fed?”

Yellowstone creator, showrunner, writer, and sometime actor Taylor Sheridan is hardly a neutral observer. In 2022, he became principal owner of the 260,000-acre Four Sixes Ranch in northwest Texas, which sells its products online (offering a Reserve First Cut Brisket for $75) and will soon be the centerpiece of its own series, 6666. Last year, Sheridan was a keynote speaker at CattleCon, the annual convention of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

Given that Yellowstone remains a phenomenon of the heartland, preaching largely to the red-meat choir, its ability to drive the public conversation is limited. But it represents just a small part of the multifront battle for hearts, minds, and stomachs being waged by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and other Big Ag lobbyists, P.R. flacks, industry-financed researchers, influencers, and advocacy groups.

These meat and dairy interests have been extraordinarily successful at shaping public opinion. Carter recently published a comprehensive study of industry propaganda. One of the most successful campaigns he found was a coordinated response to the 2019 EAT-Lancet “Food in the Anthropocene” report. If you’ve never heard of this extraordinary three-year study by an international commission of 37 scientists, which called for “a radical transformation of the global food system” and concluded that worldwide consumption of unhealthy foods, such as red meat and sugar, would need to be cut in half by 2050 to protect human health and that of the planet, there’s a reason. A week before its expected release, the industry-funded CLEAR Center launched a massive, coordinated internet campaign called #YesToMeat that effectively buried it. “When you have lots of time to kind of create stories and marketing, and you don’t need to necessarily use facts, you can win over lots of people and derail progress,” Carter observed.

Another more overt campaign was the handiwork of the Center for Consumer Freedom. An industry-financed astroturf organization, now known as the Center for Organizational Research and Education, it was founded by P.R. man Richard Berman in 1995 with funding from Philip Morris, in order to, as Berman wrote in an internal memo that became public as a result of the anti-Big Tobacco litigation, “defend ... consumers and marketing programs from anti-smoking, anti-drinking, anti-meat activists.” A quarter-century later, the front group was still at it, running a 2020 Super Bowl ad in which a series of young spelling bee contestants are bewildered by the ingredients used in plant-based burgers—part of a sweeping effort to demonize such products and clean up beef’s image. Another target is so-called cultivated meat, the manufacture and sale of which has already been banned in Florida, with the explicit goal of protecting industry interests. In all, Carter’s dossier runs to 120 pages.

Overwhelming as this sprawling effort may seem, it betrays a profound insecurity. Corporate purveyors of animal products are every bit as aware as the “abolitionists” of AV that our diet is largely a function of cultural norms, and that such norms are far from stable. That said, given our many political crises, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether a focus on animal rights isn’t a massive distraction. A Muslim American I met at the Cube of Truth wondered why activists were displaying images of animal cruelty rather than, say, the ongoing suffering in Gaza. “I think people believe that caring is divisible, and we only have so much of it,” Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, told me. But empathy, compassion, love—these are best seen not as finite substances to dole out sparingly, but as skills to be cultivated. They grow easier with practice. In that sense, eschewing animal products is an act of social justice, part of a comprehensive battle against sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression—one reason, perhaps, why vegetarian and vegan diets are more common among progressives, women, and Black Americans.

That also helps explain why far-right political figures champion the consumption of beef and milk as totems of masculinity and denigrate “soy boys.” (Never mind the evidence linking full-fat dairy consumption with reduced sperm quality, as well as cancers of the prostate and testicles.) If the elaborate social hierarchy that has long placed affluent white men at the top rests to some extent on a foundation of animal exploitation, rejecting our own place in this architecture of dominance, beginning with the food we eat, seems a logical first step in creating a more just world. “As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people,” Isaac Bashevis Singer said. “Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”

“Anima” is Latin for the life force, the spirit, the vital principle. The word also connotes wind or breath, a paradoxical essence at once invisible and replete with ineffable substance. It’s the root of animation, animism, and of course animal. This divine gift is what must be cast aside, through what can only be described as violence, in order to turn a cow into smashburgers, a sow into strips of bacon, a chicken into “tendies.”

While the statistics are staggering—the system churns through 150,000 animals every minute—these big numbers can make it hard to comprehend what is, to my mind, a more disturbing reality: Each “broiler hen,” each catfish, every single lamb, is an individual. While their inner lives surely differ from ours, they’re probably not as remote as we like to think. There’s a reason, after all, that people spend $136.8 billion annually on their pets and populate our feeds with videos of their antics. Not only do animals have unique personalities, readily apparent when we bother to look, they have desires, fears, and yearnings just as we do—less complicated perhaps but no less worthy of respect and decency.

The Inuit didn’t have a lot of plant-based options when anthropologist Knud Rasmussen visited the community of Iglulik more than a century ago. They hunted seal, caribou, whale, and other animals. But their understanding of what that meant couldn’t have been more different than ours. “The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls,” Ivaluartjuk, a grizzled ballad-singer, told Rasmussen. “All creatures which we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls as we have, souls that do not perish and which therefore must be propitiated lest they revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.”

What I find criminal about our food system is not so much that it brings so many innocent creatures into this world only to condemn them to suffer and die for our pleasure, but that it so ruthlessly commodifies the process, turning anima, like clockwork, into a waste product—life itself rendered a kind of refuse.

Russell disagrees. “No. It’s both,” he scribbled in the margin after I let him read an early draft of this essay: “Animals don’t care about our attitude when killing or hurting them.” As usual, my son has a point. And yet, as much as I’m disturbed by all the mistreatment and slaughter, and feel grateful to have finally stepped away from the overladen sideboard, I remain even more horrified by a collective madness that now imperils our own species and so many others, lunacy of which I’ve come to regard animal agriculture as only the most salient manifestation.

In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis put forth what they called the Gaia hypothesis, which proposed that living creatures and the environment co-evolved—shaping and nurturing one another over time. As the effects of global warming are increasingly apparent, this once radical-sounding idea has come to seem self-evident. Initially, some readers misunderstood the theory, imagining Gaia as a perfect self-regulating system that could absorb and counterbalance whatever damage humans saw fit to do. In The Ages of Gaia, Lovelock clarified his meaning. Gaia, he wrote, “is stern and tough, always keeping the world warm and comfortable for those who obey the rules, but ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress.”

Lovelock was wrong in one key respect. The destruction he describes has been visited mostly on the obedient—not only those nonhuman animals trapped in our food system, but the world’s wildlife, which has declined by two-thirds due to habitat loss since the Gaia theory was introduced. The transgression began centuries ago, when the grand prerogatives of scientific rationalism met the flywheel of capitalist exploitation—and then it just kept getting worse. Whether you prefer to conceive it in spiritual terms or purely as a matter of degrees Celsius, at some point we have to acknowledge: This is really happening.

Perhaps we resist this truth because we feel powerless to do anything about it, and as individuals, for the most part, we are. That said, the reason we’re omnivores in the first place is that our distant ancestors were forced to survive on a wide variety of foods, and then learned to use fire to make others more palatable. It’s only thanks to their dietary flexibility that we’re here at all to ponder our gustatory “dilemmas.” Altering our diet once more is something we actually can do—not only mitigating the ruination of the world that sustains our existence, but reimagining our relationship to that world and to the living creatures, human and nonhuman alike, with whom we’re privileged to share it.

Aaron Gell is a journalist who lives in upstate New York.