More Ethical to Eat Less Poultry and More Pork?

“Figuring out how to make your diet responsive to the true suffering of the animals you consume.”

My diet is a huge hole in my moral life. I eat beef, eggs, kale, rice, carrots, peanut butter, bananas, and sourdough bread. I chase affordability and simplicity and, for the most part, I avoid fully examining the moral ramifications of these actions. Part of this is because I have some sneaking suspicions that I, and most other humans, require meat consumption to meet our full physical potential (for another post), but it’s also because the arguments for ethical veganism are pretty damning…

I have a hard time understanding how ethical vegans can maintain sanity in their day-to-day lives, walking around with the full conviction that the diet of the entire world is built on the unjust slavery and deaths of billions of animals. Damn. I sort of unconsciously choose to live in ignorance. Ignore my own choices as much as I can. Slowly, though, I am coming to terms with some taking some intermediary steps toward outright veganism which are responsive to the suffering of the animals I live off of.

Many of my friends are ovo-lacto-vegetarians or pescatarians or just anti-red meat. In our folk understanding of ethical eating, red meat is the most contemptible. I think part of this is caused by the very controversial and mostly debunked series of propagandistic Netflix documentaries, Cowspiracy and What the Health. These taught us to blame climate change and water shortage on meat consumption…