Why I Used to Think None of This Mattered

There’s a book I didn’t read for many years. Not because I hadn’t heard of it. Not because it wasn’t sitting there, easy to find. I didn’t read it because I had a pretty good idea what was in it, and I didn’t want to know.

That’s a strange thing to admit. But I think it’s actually the most honest place to start.

A bit of context, briefly. I grew up in Nebraska. My grandpa ran a cattle farm that my dad worked on growing up, and that I visited as a kid. The cows seemed happy — they wandered around, ate grass, and we’d sometimes name them. Omaha Steaks is one of the state’s genuine claims to fame — the other famous Omaha export being Warren Buffett, who has so far not been served with dinner. Steak was delicious and there was no obvious reason to question any of it.

I mention it mainly because it means I didn’t arrive here through ideology or activism. I got here the slow way.

For a long time, my position on both climate and animal welfare was some version of the problem is too big for individual action to matter.

This argument has real logic behind it. The UK is roughly 1% of global emissions. I am one of 67 million people in it. The math of personal carbon footprint, taken seriously, is humbling — almost to the point of paralysis. And it turns out that framing is not entirely accidental. The concept of the “personal carbon footprint” was popularised by a BP advertising campaign in 2004. The oil industry didn’t invent individual guilt, but they did spend a lot of money making sure it was pointed at you rather than them. Worth keeping in mind.

Animal welfare felt even more hopeless — an industry operating at billions of animals a year, entirely legal, structurally embedded in the global food system. What exactly was I supposed to do about that by changing my lunch?

The intellectually respectable version of this position is that systemic change — policy, regulation, technology — is what actually moves the needle, and that focusing on individual consumer choices is a distraction, or worse, a way for corporations to deflect responsibility onto people who didn’t design the system. There’s something to that. It’s not nothing.

But here’s the thing I eventually had to sit with — I don’t apply this logic consistently. I vote, even though one vote has never decided an election. I tip, even though the restaurant industry’s wage structure isn’t my fault. I hold doors open for strangers. I try not to lie. None of these behaviours are justified by their aggregate impact on large systems. They’re justified by something more like this is just how I want to move through the world.

The argument was being deployed very selectively — specifically in the places where changing my behaviour would have been inconvenient. That’s not a philosophical position. That’s rationalisation with a philosophy costume on.

Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer had been on my radar for years. I knew roughly what it argued. I had a suspicion — not certainty, but a suspicion — that if I actually read it carefully, it would be hard to dismiss. And so I just… didn’t read it. For years. I had plenty of other books to read. Very busy. You know how it is.

You can maintain almost any belief indefinitely if you’re careful about what you expose yourself to.

What eventually broke the pattern was partly my wife, who is a climate economist and made the “I don’t really know enough about this” excuse increasingly difficult to sustain at the dinner table. And partly a Sam Harris podcast where he mentioned Animal Liberation and Singer’s argument on animal welfare was laid out as careful philosophy rather than activism — and something about hearing it in that register landed differently. Not as moral pressure. As an argument I couldn’t immediately find a hole in.

I read the book. The discomfort I’d been pre-empting was real. One image that has stayed with me. In standard poultry processing, chickens are hung upside down by their feet on a moving line and passed through an electrified water bath to stun them before slaughter. The stunning has to be calibrated within a narrow range — and the incentive structure pushes toward under-stunning, because too much current damages the meat. There’s no practical way to verify whether each individual bird was properly unconscious. At the scale of billions of birds a year, that’s not a minor detail. It’s just how the math works out, quietly, every day.

But the more interesting feeling was relief — the relief of at least looking at the thing directly rather than maintaining the effort of not looking at it.

The shift that actually changed my behaviour wasn’t learning new facts. I already broadly knew that animal agriculture involved suffering, that beef was carbon-intensive, that the scale of it was enormous. The information wasn’t new.

What changed was this. I stopped being able to pretend that my stated values and my actual behaviour were in alignment.

I think climate and animal welfare are genuinely separate problems, and I’ll tackle them separately in the posts that follow. They often point in the same direction — eating less meat is good for both — but the arguments are different in kind, and conflating them muddies both. Climate is about aggregate systemic effects. Animal welfare is about what happens to individual sentient creatures. You can believe one matters without the other, and the reasoning deserves to be kept clean.

Climate arguments still feel somewhat abstract to me at the level of personal action. The numbers are real but the causal chain between my dinner and a flood in Bangladesh is long enough that it’s easy to lose the thread. The BP carbon footprint point above is relevant here — I hold this one a little more loosely.

Animal welfare is different. It cuts through the agency problem entirely. It doesn’t require me to think about aggregate atmospheric concentrations or policy counterfactuals. Every meal involving factory-farmed meat is a direct transaction. Something suffered, quite a lot, so I could eat it. That’s either okay with me or it isn’t. The scale of the industry elsewhere doesn’t change what’s on my plate.

Answering that question honestly turned out to be the thing that moved me, more than any amount of carbon accounting.

This blog is me trying to write down the thinking rather than just carry it around in my head. It’s not a conversion narrative and it’s not a manifesto. My attitude right now is something more like this is where I’ve landed for now, and I reserve the right to keep updating. I’m interested in finding the lowest-hanging fruit — the changes that make a meaningful difference without making life miserable or dinner parties insufferable. I still eat meat occasionally, still eat fish, and have not become someone who interrogates menus or makes things awkward at the table. Plenty of people have been thinking about this for much longer than I have, so I’m not about to get on a high horse about changes I made recently.

The posts that follow tackle specific questions — which argument against red meat is actually strongest, what the emissions numbers really look like, whether organic chicken is a meaningful choice or an expensive conscience-soother, and whether any of this matters when you’re just trying to enjoy a meal out. Climate and animal welfare get their own treatment — they deserve it. I’m not an expert, just someone trying to educate himself, listen to people who know more, and make better choices — for myself, for other beings, and for the planet.