Two Penn’orth: All paths lead to veganism and / or meat

I used to eat fish but not “meat”, as fish in my system were extremely tasty plants from the sea. Part of my justification for this was that fish didn’t have any feelings or brain power. The other reason was that living without tuna sandwiches would not be a life worth living. I was prepared to give up burgers but I was only going to go so far. Then I started to incorporate fish into just about every meal – have you ever tried spaghetti bolognese with tuna instead of beef? It’s not too bad.

Eating meat doesn’t kill animals; it’s buying it that does by creating demand for meat production. So I could go to someone’s barbecue and eat Quorn burgers and the (much nicer) beef burgers that would otherwise go to waste. As perplexed people questioned, “What kind of vegetarian are you!?”, I would have to explain how it was totally philosophically coherent.

I was asked why I wouldn’t eat meat. I explained that if I was trapped on a desert island and a cow appeared on some passing driftwood, the cow was going to get speared and barbecued. But in absence of such a necessity, why kill a partial sentient purely for pleasure when I could live perfectly healthily without it?

This all seemed fairly logical, and then I found out just how much overfishing is damaging the marine environment.

As I ate my special fried rice without chicken and with extra prawns, I wondered whether in my seemingly moral act I was actually doing more harm than if I was just a straightforward callous meat-eater. I could eat chickens forever but at least I would know that chickens were never going to become an endangered species – quite the opposite.

And then I thought about the fact that I was having milk on my cereal. I imagined a world where no one ate cows but did drink milk. It would be a world with a total waste of land resources. Land would be used for cows to graze and cows would continue to be hardly able to walk, given how much milk selective breeding would make them have to carry. And then half the value of the land would go to waste as the cows would just be allowed to keep on living while not producing any milk.

I should be a vegan but I started eating chicken and drinking soya milk to become a pescetarian/vegan/joke.