How to Become An Overnight Social Outcast

Make a decision to lose weight, change career, or have children, and friends and family generally meet the change with excitement and words of encouragement. But tell them you no longer eat meat, fish, or dairy, or even that you’re just thinking about it, and you find yourself being interrogated.

If your reasons for dietary changes are health-based, you risk the usual ill-informed response that you can’t be healthy without meat. But if your reasons are ethics-based, be prepared for an even rougher ride. Overnight, you will have become a tree hugger, a bunny hugger, an animal activist, pigeon-holed with all the negative associations.

What’s your argument for not eating animals then?

If this question is put in a way to invite healthy discussion, then take up the opportunity. But if you sense you’re the defendant in court, it’s probably best to decline. You shouldn’t need to defend yourself as though you’ve committed a crime. Your actions are motivated by morality not immorality!

The animals will die anyway and we’ll eat them, so what does it matter how they’re treated?

This reasoning is often used to justify large scale farming of animals as though they are inorganic, without sense or feeling. We’ve been guilty in the past of treating older people or people with…