Drowning while trying

Brain Baking recently posted a piece in which he admitted no longer being able to not eat meat. His children won’t eat what he serves them, and this can’t be a hill for him to die on. It sounds like a problem that any parent has, but he has taken his readers with him on his parenting journey for some time now, and to me, it feels like he is all but drowning. It’s not what he writes. It is his tone that makes his frustration tangible. I think it is extremely brave of him to write this down for us to read.

Just yesterday I found out that while my family and I have been card-carrying vegetarians for about a year now and have limited our meat consumption to one day per week at most for much longer, but we took the easy road, and now we feel like drowning too.

Becoming a vegetarian is a lifestyle change. You have to relearn to cook. You obviously can’t just exclude the meat because plates would be half-empty. Dishes are different, so if even your kids can watch the telly on their own for more than five minutes without fighting, you still have the challenge to learn an entirely new thing every weekday. To make it easier, the Dutch supermarkets offer so-called meat replacements, fake meat, plant-based processed food with all the important vitamins and minerals that look like meat. They approximate the taste and, most importantly, take over the function of meat on your plate.

There were two companies making them, Vivera and De Vegetarische Slager (the vegetarian butcher). Both were on a mission to make vegetarian cuisine more accepted. Both were sold to Unilever, who sold them to JBS. JBS, a Brazilian company, is the largest meat producer in the world. They are responsible for massive cutting of tropical rainforest and abhorrent worker conditions, their owners bribing politicians to cover it up and serving jail time for it before being rehired at the top. JBS moved its headquarters to the Netherlands to gain access to American investments. That’s how I even found out.

By buying those fake meat products, we are supporting a company that hurts the climate in unfathomable ways, causes irreversible ecological damage on a massive scale, and uses living and feeling animals as an industrial resource, all so that one unscrupulous family can get even richer. It would be objectively better to eat locally and biologically grown meat than their fake meat products.

Morally, I don’t find eating meat wrong in itself, as long as it is done sustainably and animals are treated as animals instead of as industrial products. The reason I don’t eat meat any more is that I find the industrial way meat is produced too objectionable to help enable.

Everybody drowns in their own way, I suppose.