I eat only animal products. Meat. Eggs. Cream. Cheese. Yoghurt.
People ask why. The answer is simple. I trust what I can trace.
Plants are chemical factories. Lectins. Oxalates. Alkaloids. Defense compounds, a biologist would say. They grow in soil that can hold cadmium and lead . Consumer reports pop up about heavy metals in so‑called health foods – dark chocolate, protein powders, rice . The contamination is uneven. I’d rather not gamble. That’s my risk profile, not a public health advisory.
Regulators set tolerable limits. The World Health Organization publishes weekly intakes for mercury, lead and cadmium . Those numbers exist because the body can excrete small amounts over time; they’re not arbitrary . I choose not to test those limits. “Within permissible” isn’t the same as “good for me.” That’s my choice.
Fruit means fructose. Fructose doesn’t stop at the same regulatory checkpoint as glucose; the liver handles it. It fills up glycogen stores, and when those stores are full (about 100 g in an adult), it does become triglyceride . I don’t enjoy playing liver roulette. The studies that claim “only 1‑10 % becomes fat” usually test fructose in isolation or after fasting . Not on top of a baseline of processed carbs. That’s not how most people eat.
Every food carries risk. I minimise mine by eating what my body uses efficiently, from sources I understand.
Ethics enter into it. But not the way people expect.
Cows and chickens exist in these numbers because we breed them. Without demand, most wouldn’t be born. Species we don’t eat — apex predators, rodents — we push out until they need legal protection. I’m honest about my place in that loop.
There’s a harder question underneath.
Life is mostly suffering. Not equally distributed — it concentrates toward the end. Disease. Decay. Predation. Starvation. A wild animal dies slowly, in pain, alone. A farm animal lives a controlled life and dies fast. Which is crueler? I don’t know.
We are the only species that knows this. We know that consciousness ends in deterioration. We know the arc bends toward pain. And we lie about it. We tell ourselves nature is kind, that animals live free, that death in the wild is dignified. It isn’t.
Ligotti would say consciousness itself is the crime. The animal that doesn’t know it will die doesn’t suffer the knowledge. The animal that does know — us — invents stories to hide from it.
So here’s the question no one wants to answer: Would you eat lab‑grown meat? Tissue with no brain. No nerves. No one home. No experience. No suffering, because there’s no consciousness to suffer.
Most people recoil. Why? If the objection to meat is suffering, and there’s no one to suffer, what’s left? Maybe the objection was never really about the animal. Maybe it was about us. How we see ourselves. What we can tolerate knowing.
Eating plants doesn’t free anyone from industrial agriculture. It shifts the impacts: monocrops, pesticides, soil depletion. Eating meat doesn’t make me innocent. I’ve chosen the risks I’m willing to live with. This monologue is an account of those choices, not a call for others to make them.
Life consumes life. Autophagy at the cellular level and at the biosphere level works the same way. The only question is what you’re willing to trace.