Making Sense of Making Sense of it All: Some food for thought

Recently I very suddenly gave up being a vegetarian. And in lieu of the recent visit of Michael Pollan to our campus, I was feeling somewhat guilty about my food consumption and decided to open the floodgates and begin to once again consider the ethical implications of my food consumption. What I wasn’t prepared for is that consciously considering the ethical implications of your eating can have sickening ramifications. In short, simply thinking about the repercussions of eating a single meal is enough to make you puke in your soup.

During the latter half of my high school experience I suddenly stopped eating meat for apparently no specific reason. I simply stopped, and, to be honest, it really wasn’t difficult. But then, like I said, I abruptly started eating meat again, and since then I’ve frequently been asked why I started eating meat again. And the thing that I really resent about this question and why I do my best to dodge it whenever I can is that I really don’t have an answer for them, at least not a good one. What I don’t admit to these various questioners is that I don’t really have any good justification for why I’m eating meat now.

So I’ll come clean and very frankly divulge a few reasons why I’m eating meat now:

1) Very simply: it tastes good, usually. I know many vegetarians and vegans claim they’re repulsed by even the idea of eating flesh (have you ever noticed how really preachy vegetarians or vegans always employ the word “flesh” over the less repulsive “meat”?). But despite all the environmental/ethical/economical implications of eating meat, the fact still remains that for most of us meat has an incredibly sensuous taste, one of which I am enamoured.

2) Now, this one I’m even more ashamed of: it’s easier to eat meat. This may seem to run contrary to what I said previously about how it’s really not hard to refrain from eating meat. But what I’ve discovered after starting to eat meat again is that eating meat is so much easier because it allows me to refrain from thinking about whether or not any given meal I eat is good for me, either nutritionally or ethically. When I began my stint as a vegetarian I was ardently passionate about what I was eating and where it was coming from. But in time I got what is commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming claustrophobia and weariness induced by being constantly aware of eating nutritionally and ethically.

From what I’ve seen, people don’t often talk about how debilitating being morally aware can be, maybe because we’ve conditioned ourselves to abstain from continuous moral awareness. We retreat into the narrow confines of being comforted in an innocent form of thoughtlessness. As far as I can tell, it’s natural to do this, but it’s also terribly sad that we do this so casually everyday without even realizing what we’re ignoring.

In the end, I suppose we can find some sort of consolation in that we’re all guilty of this thoughtlessness, in one form or another—but this also seems to me to be terribly sad as well, i.e., that due to our incredibly convoluted and mass-marketed culture we as humans are now incapable of truly living an idyllically moral life. Another fact I find distressing is that I can’t realistically foresee myself being a vegetarian anytime in the near future. Likewise, I can’t see myself faithfully staying literate of domestic and world news for a long time to come—for the simple yet despairing reason that it’s all so awfully difficult and depressing. Ultimately, this may make me appear as a bad or lazy person in the eyes of you, dear reader. But I’d ask you to bracket your diagnosis of my character for a moment and remember something we all lose sight of during the dangerous game of high-stakes day-to-day existence: I’m human, so are you, and there are limits to our abilities.