The prices we pay

The setting was a familiar one to me as a vegetarian. I’m with a group of friends and work buddies eating dinner out on the town in Asheville, and the subject of my meatless plate comes up. “How can you live without meat?” is followed by “I would die if I couldn’t eat steak,” and my general response, with its usual diplomatic give, is, “It’s a choice I make—keep your steak and I’ll happily munch away on my salad.” [This] tends to put my vegetarianism in the same category as a fashion statement or hairdo that says, essentially, to each his own.

All of this makes sense in my independent world-view of personal rights and freedom until I start thinking about the collective costs of those individual choices, and then the picture gets very blurry. One cost is of turning a mysterious and ancient animal kingdom into mass-marketed units of production that are caged and slaughtered by the billions; another is the medical burden of heart disease and stroke that results [from] high-cholesterol, meat-heavy diets; or, the environmental costs of leveling whole forests into pasture for livestock. There is a final cost to every person on the planet: My daughter will be raised in a world that treats living beings as objects for consumption, and every time a nameless, faceless animal is consumed on a plate, humanity becomes more cruel, more destitute, ever more ready to sacrifice its empathy for the benefit of a taste of flesh. This cost is impossibly high, but explaining that over the ease of putting fork to mouth is lost, once again.