By Matthew Kessler
Twenty-two heritage breed turkeys. Sixteen chickens. Three geese. The farm crew, all five of us, knew our assignments. We were out in the field early that Monday morning before Thanksgiving. I still vividly remember the line of four cones strung between trees to contain the chickens’ necks; the bumps and sounds created by the violently rotating 27-inch rim plucker; and my cold, visible breath as I walked down the hill that morning in the Moapa Valley desert in Nevada. I didn’t stop eating meat on that day, fifteen years ago — but it did profoundly change my relationship with eating animals.
This wasn’t my first or final shift. A few years earlier, when I turned twenty, I accidentally became a vegetarian.
I was living on a farm in Hawaii, eager to learn some skills I missed while growing up in the Long Island suburbs — skills like growing my own food, basic carpentry, and how to skip winters. It turns out the pests enjoyed the “winter skipping,” too, and they made vegetable growing a lot harder.
In addition to producing locally grown value-added products like hot sauces and banana breads, the farm had a sizable kitchen garden. This produce went straight to feeding the ten people working and living on the farm. We grew some vegetables alongside perennial shrubs and fruit trees — mango, avocado, banana, papaya, and starfruit trees — and lilioquoi (passionfruit) vines grew throughout the farm. And the kitchen garden contained no livestock, unless you count the earthworms.
After half a year on that farm, I hardly realized I wasn’t eating meat. The flavors, colors and smells were so new and exciting, so incredibly different from what was available in the suburbs I grew up in, that I hardly noticed. I didn’t crave the Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich that I ate for lunch most days in my senior year of high school. Becoming an incidental vegetarian wasn’t about making a point, taking the moral high ground, or thinking about the environmental impact of eating animals. It was much more about fitting in.
Over the last two decades, I’ve eaten animals from time to time, but not routinely. I’ve worked on farms and kitchens across the U.S. and a handful abroad. Over the past five years, I’ve worked at TABLE, a global platform that approaches food-systems debates with a commitment to understanding competing perspectives similar to Tangle’s. That work has brought my attention squarely back to the question of meat.
At TABLE, I led a two-year podcast project exploring four different futures for meat: efficient meat, less meat, “alternative” meat, and no meat. Alongside the researchers on the project team, I spoke to livestock farmers, vegan activists, investors in lab-grown meat, and scientists of all disciplines to try to understand the different motivations, evidence bases, and visions behind a “good” meat — or meatless — future.
Occasionally, I was confronted with two wildly different worldviews on the same day. In the morning I’d interview an entrepreneur who wrote a book laying out the case against eating meat, and in the afternoon, a poultry geneticist would tell me why their research on optimizing feed conversion was crucial from a social and environmental perspective.
I was struck by how every person I spoke to was acting in good faith, working towards their version of a just world, yet arriving at almost opposite conclusions. The primary difference between the people I spoke to was a different set of values, formed through life experiences, education, jobs, politics.
To illustrate this, consider how much you agree or disagree with the following two statements:
- It is immoral to kill and eat animals when alternatives exist.
- It is unfair that some people can access nutritious animal protein while others cannot.
The vegan writer and entrepreneur I spoke to would strongly agree with the first statement, grounded in a moral commitment to minimizing harm to other sentient creatures. The poultry geneticist would strongly agree with the second, rooted in the belief that access to affordable, nutritious food is a matter of equity and social justice.
When values sit this deep — touching morality, dignity, and responsibility — we rarely approach the evidence we encounter neutrally. We tend to, often unconsciously, seek out facts and arguments that affirm what already feels right.
