why vegan? why not?

People often ask me why I'm vegan.  It's a question I've been thinking about in some form or another (with "vegetarian" replacing "vegan" until about five years ago) since I was twelve and stopped eating mammals.

Let me first say this: I did not stop eating meat because I didn't like how it tasted, or because I thought eating meat was "gross."  I actually loved the taste of meat, and the idea of one animal eating another animal's flesh for food is not a gross or unnatural idea to me.  

But just because it makes sense for some animals -- including some people -- to eat other animals, I decided that, on balance, it just does not make sense for me to eat them (or products that come from them).  

The summer I was twelve was the first time I ever spent any significant time thinking about what "meat" really is, and connecting it in a conscious way to the animals I'd grown up with on the small farm in Norway I spent my summers at, or to the animals I read about in books or saw in fields on the side of the road when I drove through rural parts of the US or Norway. 

And it was the first time I ever thought about how these magnificent creatures -- the cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens -- that I saw on farms transform into the skinless, boneless, limp rosy lumps lying on a rectangle of black styrofoam and wrapped tightly in glistening Shrinkwrap. 

The entire industrialized world is constructed around the idea that we are not meant to think about that process.  Grocery stores do not want us to think about it.  Parents trying to get their children to eat their dinners do not want us to think about it. 

But I did think about it, a lot, and then I began reading about it, or trying to as best I could in a pre-internet world.  I could go on for paragraphs about what I learned -- about the environmental destruction caused by the meat industry, the inefficiency of feeding grain to livestock instead of to directly to people, the inhumane conditions that farm animals exist in from birth to death, the unnatural chemicals and medicines we pump animals full of to keep them alive and germ-free and growing as big and meaty as possible . . . but there are countless books and articles that have spoken much more eloquently on these subjects than I can here. 

In the end, I realized that the only reason I could think of to continue eating meat and animal products was that it tasted good.  That's it, pure and simple.  I do not need to eat animal products to meet my nutritional needs, as some animals and even some people in the remotest corners of the earth do.  It is no sacrifice to be vegan: the world of plant-based food is vast and deliciously varied, with a wider spectrum of color and texture and flavor than most of us have ever experienced.  

I realized that if I placed deliciousness on one side of a scale, no amount of it could come close to outweighing the discomfort, boredom, grief, fear, and pain that animals must be put through to transform into those rosy lumps in shrinkwrapped packages.  Imagine a see-saw with a small child on one side and a sumo wrestler on the other: no contest. 

Why am I vegan?  Why not? 

p.s. 

Some interesting facts and figures about the global impact of meat consumption are here:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat