There are people who become vegetarians after reading philosophy. Or watching lectures. Or having long, morally rigorous debates with themselves about suffering, ethics, and the meaning of life.

That’s it. That’s the origin story. No TED Talk. No intellectual awakening. Just me, mid-bite, happily eating a chicken drumstick like a normal human being, when I noticed a thin blue vein running between the bone and the meat.

And something in my brain just… short-circuited.

It wasn’t “food” anymore. It was a body.

I put the drumstick down. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t replace it with anything. I just sat there thinking, I can’t do this anymore. And that was that. No announcement. No transition period. One minute I was eating chicken, the next I wasn’t.

That was ten years ago.

Since then, I’ve lived in what I would like to call moral consistency and what is, in reality, a slightly chaotic patchwork of emotional logic. I stopped eating animals. Chickens, cows, lamb — all off the table. I couldn’t reconcile calling myself an animal lover while eating them. It........

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