I used to think what I ate was a private matter. For years, when the topic came up, I would use the socially acceptable script: “Oh, it’s just a personal choice.” It was a convenient way to end a conversation before it could begin, a tool to avoid being labeled as preachy or difficult. But I’ve come to realize that my “personal choice” was never personal at all. It was, and is, a political act. And my silence about it was a form of complicity.
The switch flipped for me while watching a documentary, I think it was Food, Inc. There was a scene that laid out a stark reality of the capitalist world we live in: every single time you buy something at the grocery store, every item scanned and added to your bill, is a vote. It’s a small ballot cast in a massive, daily election that determines what our world looks like. In that moment, I understood. I could no longer, in good conscience, cast my vote for the sprawling, brutal system of factory farming and fishing. My decision to stop eating meat wasn’t about taste or diet; it was my verdict on an industry I refused to fund.
But then, a strange thing happens when you make a decision like that. The system pushes back, not with force, but with language. My political protest was constantly reframed by others through the comfortable, apolitical lens of personal preference. It was a “diet.” A “health kick.” A “quirk.” This language cleverly strips the act of its power, turning a systemic critique into a harmless, individualized choice. It domesticates dissent.
And for a long time, I let it. I repeated the script. I said it was a “personal choice” because I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be the person who “convinced” others. But what I’m now questioning is the value of that comfort. Who does my silence serve? It certainly doesn’t serve the principles that led me to this decision in the first place. By staying quiet, I was participating in the very depoliticization that neuters the impact of such choices. I am reconsidering that silence. I am starting to believe that the values behind my choices are worth speaking about.
This brings us beyond my own journey to the plate in front of you. The comfortable narrative of “personal choice” allows us to avoid a much more challenging question. So I’ll ask it now.
In a world where we have so many alternatives, do we really need animals to be produced and to suffer at a large scale just to feed us?
That’s not a question about personal taste. It’s a question about necessity, about compassion, about the kind of world we are actively building with our votes, three times a day. And it leads me to a belief I hold strongly: one day, we will look back at the act of eating animals in the same way we now look back at the act of owning slaves. We will see it as a barbaric practice that was upheld by a system that normalized the unthinkable, and we will wonder how we let it go on for so long.
