Vegetarian in Expectation

Diary entries from a meat-eating vegetarian.

I like to call myself a vegetarian, even though I often eat meat. This surprising fact is both an abuse of English and a small revolution. The doubters just don’t see vegetarianism as I do. I went “vegetarian” this past October for solely animal welfare reasons. For me, vegetarianism is about being near-zero in your expected contribution to animal production and suffering. I care about what goes into the slaughterhouse—not what goes into my mouth. My weird philosophy can actually in many ways be stricter, and I often confront moral dilemmas on my plate.

Today, we’ll discuss four real encounters with meat and what went through my mind. Along the way, I’ll highlight some unintuitive twists that come along when you have a tyrannical focus on expected production. Criticisms are obviously welcome

Scene 1: Patronizing the butcherhouse

December 15, 2023

Jong Ga, Oakland; a rowdy AYCE KBBQ restaurant in downtown Oakland

I’m here for end-of-semester festivities for one of my clubs. I’m seated with a mix of vegetarians and herbivores. We ask the waitress for vegetarian options. She fumbles around while looking for the full menu (the not-AYCE-KBBQ one). We munch on banchan while we wait: kimchi, pickled radishes, potatoes, and more.

Now, I’ve written before about why I think some kinds of products—like eggs or fish-based kimchi—kill very few animals. It’s all about relative prices and you should read that post for more.¹

A more pressing question for me is—if I buy food from Jong Ga, does that revenue lead them to kill more animals down the line? On the one hand, much of the money will go towards restocking the vegetarian ingredients in my meal. But businesses make profit! One might easily imagine that the profits subsidize someone else’s steak or fund a new advertising campaign.²

The deeper question here is whether a business can, by investing money, induce greater aggregate demand for meat. If there was fixed demand for KBBQ, then any meat-oriented efforts would just cannibalize their competitors. But we know that humans respond to prices and marketing. If I give Jong Ga free cash to do whatever it wants, more people will eat meat overall. And that’s sort of what happens when you order vegetables from a meat-centric restaurant.

I nibbled on the side dishes and eventually ordered an omelet to split.

Scene 2: Don’t waste good steak

December 19, 2023

My humble abode in Berkeley

It’s the end of the academic semester and people are trickling out of town. My friend is leaving and offers to drop off some spicy tofu stew, telling me that it’s vegetarian. When I open the bag, I find a quarter pound of cooked pho steak. Now in usual circumstances I would give the meat to others, but here there were hardly any carnivores in town I could feed. Besides, I had to leave in less than 12 hours. If I didn’t eat it, it would go to waste. And we don’t like waste. What’s wrong?

Well first, there are a series of signaling problems. One of a vegetarian’s most important duties is to hoot and holler about the animals; fortunately or unfortunately, moral sanctitude is key to the ethos of the argument.³ If I think animals deserve equal moral consideration, yet I happily eat this steak, does that not make me a willing cannibal? Of course, if I denied eating it or never brought it up, no one would know.

There’s a deeper problem though, a problem of habit. There is always, it seems, a risk of relapsing into old consumption patterns. I can try to tread the expected vegetarianism line, but if you squint, it doesn’t look much different than a veggie-heavy herbivorous diet. If I eat meat today, will I yearn for more tomorrow?⁴ If I look at a steak and don’t see the cow, do I really “get it”? Am I not three months and two steps from a lifetime of meat eating?

I ate the meat.

Scene 3: Bundling effects

December 21, 2023

Bacchanal Buffet, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

There’s a world-renowned buffet in one of the biggest casinos on the strip called the Bacchanal Buffet. It’s known for three walls of food stations with cuisine from around the world, as well as delicious seafood. I made a beeline for the bivalves—oysters, mussels, clams, and scallops—which seem to not feel pain. After leaving a plate or two of shells, I head for the New England broil. It’s a mix of clams, crabs, crawfish, and shrimp. I stop myself. 

I’m not okay with eating most crustaceans and I’m particularly opposed to eating shrimp. I could happily pluck out the clams from the tray, but does this do what I want? I think it makes no difference. Other buffet-goers aren’t thinking about whether the broil has their desired bivalve-to-crustacean ratio. They’re scooping blindly and eating all of it. If I eat a pound of clams from the broil, then from the perspective of the other customers and the restaurant, I’ve eaten a pound of broil. When foods are “bundled” together, you can’t disentangle the good from the bad.⁵ There’s only eating from the bucket.

I skipped the broil. It was my cheat day, so I had prime rib. And a lamb shank. And a few other things.

Scene 4: The leftovers are a lie

December 30, 2023

Kimm Imm Thai, a cozy restaurant in Rockville, Maryland

I’m at dinner with some friends. They eat meat, so they order some skewers as appetizers. I finish my tofu pad thai, but I’m still a little hungry. There are still a few skewers left in the middle. “I don’t want it,” they say, “so you should eat it or else it’ll be thrown out anyway,” I can tell they’re mostly teasing and probably would finish the meat anyway.

If someone wants to take meat home as leftovers, that’s probably a good thing for animals. It means they will enjoy meat for a future meal. Besides filling them up, it might also satiate their specific appetite for meat. So if there’s any chance they could take it home, I should insist on it fervently and refuse to eat. But suppose I could follow them home, peer through their dinner table, and make sure that they genuinely would not finish the leftovers. Is that fine?

I still think I can’t eat it, for precedent purposes. If they know I will take home leftovers and happily so, that gives them the leeway to order more next time. For the same reason, I can’t pick meat off the plates of others. If they end up with less meat this time, they’ll order more next time.

I stayed firm.

1. Let’s do the math for kimchi. One quart of kimchi requires two tablespoons of fish sauce. And half a liter of fish sauce requires 350 ml of whole mackerel. Now a North Sea mackerel weighs about 2 pounds, we know there are 64 tablespoons in a quart and 32 in a pound, which lets us calculate that a tablespoon of kimchi kills (1/64*2*350/500/32=)0.0006835 North Sea mackerel. That seems fine to me.

2. Meat demand is certainly not inelastic and KBBQ places make a 10-20% profit margin on average. So maybe with some elasticity, about 5% of the price of my meal “purchases” meat?

3. At least it goes the other way around. People with strong moral feelings about animals tend to be full-vegetarian rather than near-vegetarian.

4. In fact, many do think about meat as an addictive good. Consumption in one period in and of itself influences future consumption, through both individual and social factors.

5. This is significant! You can’t cut yourself a cheese slice at a pepperoni pizza party, or serve yourself a veggie bowl when you get Chipotle catering. Because other people will mostly adjust to eat more meat, and demand for more meat-containing Dominos or Chipotle goes up.