How and Why I Became a Vegetarian

I became a vegetarian in November 2012. Although I don’t remember the exact day, I know the year and month because I remember that I was on my way to watch the newly released Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee (it wasn’t that good, even though I think that Lee has directed excellent movies, including one of the best movies ever, Brokeback Mountain). I was walking on Michigan Avenue in Chicago to the theater, when I encountered an anti-fur march. Because I was early, I joined the march. One of the marchers started talking to me and gave me a pamphlet (nowadays easily obtained) containing descriptions and pictures of the appalling conditions that animals constantly endure in factory farms.

Since I was a child, I had a natural repugnance to red meat. In Beirut, where I am from and where I was raised, my Mom used to call the butcher early in the morning to request the meat that she needed to cook for that day’s lunch. Sometimes, because the butcher could not deliver the meat at the time that my mother wanted it, she would send me to pick it up. I remember very well how I could never step inside the butcher’s shop. I stood outside and shouted to him to please hand me the “Halwani order.” (Indeed, after a while my meat phobia became a running joke in the butcher’s shop: “Raja is here. Send the delivery boy to deliver the meat to him!” which sounds much funnier in Arabic.) And if there were any traces of (ground) meat on the paper bag that was handed to me (because the butcher’s hands often had meat particles on them) I would pick and carry the bag using only my thumb and forefinger. I would hurry back home, deposit the bag on the closest counter in our kitchen with a loud “Ugh!” and wash my hands at least twice with a thick foam of soap.

Irrationally enough, I ate red meat in Beirut, especially in Arabic dishes (e.g., stuffed eggplant and stuffed zucchini). I also ate hamburgers in (now non-existent) restaurants in Beirut like the Wimpy and Modca. However, if the meat looked red—if it had not been thoroughly cooked or brown—I would not touch it. I simply could not bring myself to eat it.

After I moved to the United States, I stopped eating red meat altogether. For some bizarre reason, I thought of red meat in the United States to be more disgusting than that in Lebanon, and I simply stopped eating it, brown or not brown. I did eat voracious amounts of chicken, however. Chicken was one of my favorite meals of all time, and I almost always ordered a chicken dish in a restaurant. I cooked and ate chicken at home at least twice a week. (I also liked hot dogs, but I ate the vegan variety, Smart Dogs.)

I had known for a long time at a gut level—back then I had not yet fully reasoned my way through it—that eating meat was morally wrong. My reasons, half-baked as they were, were unclear, but they had to do with at least four thoughts: that eating meat was a close relative to cannibalism, that tearing flesh in our mouths (chewing meat) was unappetizing, to put it mildly (I used to form the image of red meat mixed with saliva as a person ate it), that when we raise and kill animals for our own consumption they suffer, and that animals were not ours to do with them as we pleased. I had known that I needed to stop eating all meat. I was lucky with red meat: not eating it came naturally to me, given that I had been increasingly finding it disgusting. Fish was easy too, as I had never been much of a fan. Chicken was my stumbling block. I loved it, and its taste and the anticipation of its taste constantly weakened my will. It was the only barrier between vegetarianism and me. (It’s funny: in some parts of the world, when I tell people that I don’t eat meat, they reply, “But you do eat chicken, right?” to which I reply, with smugness laced with attempted humor, “Have chickens been re-classified as plants?”)

I should mention that before I converted to vegetarianism, I had met a colleague of mine who became one of my closest friends. She was (and still is) a moral exemplar by any standard (and certainly not one of these boring moral saints about which some philosophers have, somewhat shallowly, complained). Of course, she was (and still is) a vegetarian (almost vegan). So her influence added to my conviction that I needed to become a vegetarian and get it over with.

So on that day on my way to the movie, when that wonderful man gave me that pamphlet, I decided then and there to become a vegetarian. I have not relapsed since (though I’m sure I ate food that contained meat or meat stock in it—meat and meat derivatives are omnipresent these days, so they are hard to avoid all the time). At first, I missed chicken, but now I do not. Far from it. The idea of eating chicken leaves me cold. Oddly enough, I miss fish quite a bit—I miss its taste and its thickness and its feel in my mouth (tuna is my weakness). This is odd because, like I said, I never was much of a fan of fish when I was a meat-eater. But I resist eating it, and it is not hard.

So I am a vegetarian not because of health reasons but because of the animals, because they should not have to suffer at our hands. We have killed them for sport, we have relied on them for agriculture, we have used them for our entertainment, we have plundered their bodies for products, we have tested on them for our health, we have depended on them for companionship, and we have eaten them for our gustatory pleasure. Yet animals occupy this planet in the same way as we do, and it does not seem to me that our intelligence, which I grant at least for the sake of the argument is superior to theirs, is a morally relevant factor in deciding how to treat them. After all, intelligence is a morally neutral category (intelligent people can run the gamut from the saintly to the evil). So much as we should be able to make the best of our lives, so should animals.

Some people say that it’s okay to eat meat if the animals are killed humanely. I know people who buy their meat from special farmers who treat the animals well and who kill them (supposedly) painlessly. I am not going to argue that there is no such thing as humane killing. Let’s grant that there is. Still, killing animals brings them harm because it brings them death. That is, because death is a harm to the creature that dies, killing animals is a form of harming them, even if done painlessly. Think about it: when someone dies, even at an old age, we mourn their death, and we mourn it not just because we will miss them, or because the world is poorer without them, but also because we think that their life has ended, that they suffered a loss. The same applies to animals. And when we grieve for someone’s death while also feeling relief because death has ended their suffering, the same can be true of animals—think of how many of them we have to euthanize to end their suffering.

Of course, people will argue that sometimes we have to kill animals or that inflicting harm on them is justified (in the name of, say, medical research). Maybe there are such cases. But this is mostly irrelevant. We do not need to decide on every actual and possible case of conflict between human and animal to recognize that as a matter of principle killing animals for our own benefit, especially for our pleasure (assuming, somewhat plausibly, that pleasure is a benefit), whether gustatory or otherwise, is wrong.

Today, I do not see animals as a source of food. Indeed, I do not see them as a source of anything. I see them for who they are: as creatures driven by their own life-forms to survive and, if they are lucky, to live a pleasant life (for animals living in the wild, life is never easy: watching a single episode of a nature show can easily show you that their lives are actually Hobbesian—"poor, nasty, brutish, and short"). The least we can do is not make it worse for millions of animals by creating animals destined to live miserable lives, only to be killed for food.