Why am I Vegetarian? I think maybe because I’m Selfish.

I have come across this question many times, why am I vegetarian, when being the only person eating plant-based food at a lunch table when all my colleagues are cherishing their beef-patty-burgers/steaks/Minced Pies, or at those fancy restaurant dinners when I’m faced with very limited choices/options. But this question does become more important when I introspect and reason myself.

For me as a person, being vegetarian or not being one, it all comes as a conscious choice, I am independent and empowered(by my family/parents/friends) to make my own decisions. And I cannot just follow a lifestyle because someone says so, no, I need strong scientific and emotional reasoning to back my decisions(yes, Emotional Quotient is as important as Intelligence Quotient to define a person).

So why am I a vegetarian? Well, it’s not an easy question to answer. I am not vegan and I have consciously made this choice too, to not be vegan. To define Vegetarianism, it’s a lifestyle where you depend on food sources that do not come at a cost of animal-life, so no animals are killed to be served as food. Veganism takes this further, veganism defines that neither any animal was killed nor were they hurt to serve your dietary requirements. Ahhh, what’s the difference you may ask, see those cows/buffalos who are domesticated for milk, they don’t live a free life, their whole life is turned into a cycle of getting-pregnant, giving birth to a calf, who is then taken away from them and malnourished and let to die if its a bull calf and the milk which was meant for calves in a way is stolen for you. Also, those chickens who are caged in farms, live their whole lives in man-made prisons, just to lay eggs.

When I initially moved to London, I was living in a shared household with two other flat sharers. One of my flatmates who were from Italy was Vegan(I believe she still is). She did try to convince me to turn vegan but at that point in time, I was fascinated by all the different types of Cheese I had discovered, and hence I was not up for the challenge.

So why have I not turned vegan yet, and why the heck am I vegetarian? Sitting in a restaurant on one of those team outings, I was a bit disappointed by the menu, seeing how limited the Vegetarian options were. So one of my teammates suggested, why don’t you eat fish, fish is vegetarian. I stumbled a bit. No, fish is not vegetarian. Again I was asked the question, but what’s the harm in eating fish, they are caught directly from Sea and are not killed as in a butchery and even plants which we eat are a part of a living ecosystem, so what’s the difference between all this? It was a genuine question, no one was mocking me, and the questioner was genuinely interested in knowing more. I didn’t have a clear answer, I took a few moments to introspect but in those few moments, I knew why am I a vegetarian.

See plants breathe, and so when we consume plants for food, we are in a way taking away life from some form of living creatures. If that’s the case then why am I a hypocrite about animals? Well, those few seconds of introspection at the lunch table brought all the clarity and reasoning I ever needed.

I am vegetarian because I don’t want to be responsible for the perceivable pain a creature suffers when killed. Perceivable is the important term here, or let me rephrase, human-perceivable. I don’t want to be responsible for any human-perceivable pain a creature suffers when killed. And to reiterate the same, I do so for my own selfishness, I don’t know if this will make the world a better place or not(yes I know the high levels of greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions from raising animals for food but then in cold tundra regions like Siberia, transporting plant-based food will cause more harm to the surrounding natural habitat, so from an environmental perspective no one lifestyle fits it all).

So, I am a vegetarian because I’m selfish, I’m selfish that I don’t want to be the reason for any human-perceivable pain suffered by creatures when killed. This means, that if I see a chicken being butchered, I’m fine with it, but I don’t want to be the reason for that pain. And hence I’m Vegetarian because of my own selfish reasons(and it has got nothing to do with making the world a better place).

Veganism, why not, I do question myself and I think I would turn vegan in the next few years. Currently, I’m not Vegan because I’m fine with human-perceivable pain suffered by Dairy animals when living a restricted life but I draw a line at pain/emotions suffered by animals when killed which I believe is higher. And again the day I turn Vegan, it will also be for my own selfish reason i.e, ‘I don’t want to be responsible for any human-perceivable pain whatsoever, suffered by any animal’.

And if you are Vegan/Vegetarian/Non-Vegetarian, what is your reason?