In a previous life, I wrote about videogames for a living. Game design and animal welfare don’t often overlap, so I was intrigued to stumble on a small browser game based on a simple concept: You’re about to be born again.

Lottery of Life reincarnates you as a random animal, selected at odds based on the real world. By default, the pool is the roughly 102 billion land animals born outside the wild each year, overwhelmingly on farms. Statistically, most players get the same result: The odds of spawning as a broiler chicken are about one in 1.3.

A lottery implies chance, but nothing about these odds is chance. There are more than three broiler chickens born for every other animal in the game, as in the real world, because we made it this way.

Weigh the animals instead of counting them, and the picture is much the same. Humans make up 36% of the world’s mammal biomass. Livestock and pets make up another 59%. Every wild mammal on the planet — every fox, whale, elephant, deer, wolf, bat, and mouse — accounts for roughly 5%.

This is a remarkably recent arrangement. A hundred thousand years ago, almost all land mammals were wild. Since 1850, the total mass of wild mammals has fallen by roughly 85%, even as the mass of humans and livestock has exploded. We’ve replaced much of the wild with a handful of species built to our specifications.

The boredom is the point

Players might go into the game expecting something like a nature documentary — a heron, a sea turtle, a fox. What they get instead is a warehouse: chicken, then chicken again, then again.

There isn’t much to do. Lottery of Life hardly qualifies as a game: no skill, no choices, no way to win or lose. You press a button, find out what you are, putter around a bit in cramped conditions, and reincarnate again.

That boredom — in the outcome and in the play — is the most accurate thing the game has to teach. A broiler chicken’s life is as empty as this gameplay: an overcrowded shed, a feeder, tens of thousands of birds, and a clock running down to slaughter weight. The player quickly gets bored and closes the tab. The chicken doesn’t get to.

We tend to picture the animal world as vast and unknowable, crowded with creatures we’ve never heard of. The game samples the world as it is today, and what comes back is a monoculture.

The game looks like it’s simulating nature. It’s actually simulating us.

As Hannah Ritchie and Fiona Spooner illustrate in Our World in Data, the collapse of wild animal life isn’t some inevitable price of human progress. Much of it comes down to how we use land, particularly how much of it we devote to raising animals.

And that means the game’s odds aren’t fixed, either. They aren’t a constant of nature. They’re an annual snapshot of human appetites, recalculated every year.

In a less dystopian world, Lottery of Life would be harder to predict. You’d press “spawn again” and have no idea what was coming: a starling, a vole, a trout in a cold river. The day players stop getting “chicken” ten times in a row, the game will have changed, and so will the world it reflects.

PS: PC Gamer even made a video about it.

A New York Times investigation into the U.S. government selling off protected wild horses for slaughter led the paper’s front page on August 22, 2026. That alone is remarkable: I spent several hours looking for the last time an animal welfare story did the same, but couldn’t find one. The paper has been around for 175 years.

The piece concerns the Bureau of Land Management, which rounds up wild mustangs from public land to keep herds “sustainable,” then holds them in feedlots while it looks for adopters — finding homes for about half. The rest sit in “the holding system,” 58,000 horses at a cost of roughly $100 million per year, until the agency performs a piece of bureaucratic sleight of hand. When a horse is listed for adoption three times with no takers, it becomes legally “unadoptable” — and therefore sellable instead, for as little as $25. A sold horse, unlike an adopted one, loses its federal protections, and can then be flipped to a middleman who never signed the government’s no-slaughter contract. From there it can end up on a truck to Canada, legally, and then on a plate somewhere else.

“There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye,” Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary in Oregon, told the Times. “And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”

There’s an obvious reason this makes for a powerful investigative story. It has the shape investigative journalism knows how to tell: a rule, a bad actor working around it, a federal agency turning a blind eye. There are paper trails, names, dollar amounts, a legal technicality being abused. Perhaps most importantly, there’s a promise being broken.

Mustangs occupy a very particular cultural slot: not quite livestock, not quite wildlife, but something closer to American folklore. They’re iconic symbols of freedom and the open range, animals whose expected trajectory leads to adoption, sanctuary or release — not slaughter. What makes this story land is that sense of betrayal: a promise made and then, through cunning paperwork, silently broken.

Cows, pigs, and chickens, of course, never get that promise in the first place. They’re property from the moment they’re born — there are no adoption listings, no protected status to strip. There’s no loophole required, because there was never a barrier to get around. The wild horse story is horrifying specifically because it shows animals crossing the line from protected beings to disposable commodity plainly, on the record, with a paper trail a reporter could follow. For animals deemed “livestock,” there was never a line to cross, no moment to catch.

It’s worth noting, too, that mustangs aren’t wildlife in quite the same sense as bison or elk. They’re feral, descendanding from domesticated horses that escaped or were let loose, some traced back to Spanish colonial and ranch stock centuries back. Their protection isn’t some biological classification; it’s actually a 1971 act of Congress, which passed because enough Americans found it objectionable that horses were being shipped to slaughter and fed to pets.

No comparable law exists for chickens. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the baseline federal statute that governs how farmed animals can legally be killed, explicitly excludes poultry — the single most numerous animal raised for food in the country. One formerly domesticated species got a law named for it, while chickens, killed by the billions, were actively written out of the one law that could give them modest protection.

The difference in scale is almost absurd. About 73,000 wild horses live on federal land. Roughly 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food in the U.S. every year. One of those numbers gets a New York Times investigation with a named trader, a dollar figure per head, a border-crossing paper trail, and a legal technicality being visibly gamed. The other does not.

Investigative reporting is good at identifying a rule and then showing how someone broke it, evaded it, or profited from someone else’s failure to enforce it. It’s much less willing or equipped to interrogate a system in which the suffering isn’t technically in violation of the rules, but rather the intended outcome of them.

And it’s not just that those stories don’t get written — it’s what happens on the rare occasions something adjacent does. I’ve read entire pieces, in the Times and elsewhere, about bird flu outbreaks requiring the “culling” of hundreds of thousands of birds, and about factory farm barn fires that kill tens of thousands of pigs in a single night, that make zero mention of the animals as beings capable of suffering. The story is told entirely in economic and human terms: supply disruptions, egg prices, a farmer standing in the wreckage describing what the loss means for his family’s finances. The animals aren’t even characters in these stories. They’re inventory, destroyed.

We have a fully developed journalistic vocabulary for the human cost of a mass-casualty event involving animals, and almost no vocabulary for the mass casualty itself.

None of this is an argument against the piece running. A story built on the premise that killing animals for human convenience is morally objectionable getting the most prominent placement in the paper of record is a good thing. The question is what had to line up to make that possible: a mythologized species, a promise the government made and then broke, a paper trail a reporter could trace across state lines. The result is the New York Times running a lead story that is, essentially, an animal-rights story: the wrongdoing is measured by how it affects the animals themselves, with the animals centered as the victims.

Take any one piece away, however, and there’s no story, regardless of how many animals die. Ten billion animals are killed out of view from the public every year without a single one of those conditions in place.

The question isn’t whether the horses deserved the coverage. It’s whether the outrage it’s generating can survive being pointed at an animal nobody ever promised anything to — an animal whose suffering isn’t a violation of the system, but the system’s intended outcome.

One of the most remarkable things about Jack Hancock-Fairs’s new documentary The Dying Trade is how little it feels like a “vegan documentary” in the way people usually mean it. It isn’t preachy or interested in overwhelming the viewer with statistics, arguments, or graphic footage. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to corner the viewer.

It’s quiet, personal, and mostly about people. The film follows Jack as he tries to make sense of the fact that his dad has spent his life working in a slaughterhouse, while Jack has built his life around animal advocacy.

Jack’s dad isn’t flattened into a villain — he’s warm, funny, complicated, and clearly someone who loves his son. The same empathy extends to a former slaughterhouse worker Jack interviews, who speaks candidly about what the job did to him over time. Nothing is excused, but nothing is reduced either.

The Dying Trade is about trying to understand how people end up where they are — across families, across generations, across systems that people adapt themselves to in order to survive.

Watch it. Feel things. Share it with friends and family. Screen it in schools. Work like this makes it easier to imagine a future where mass violence against animals is no longer accepted as normal. I can’t recommend it enough.

In a rare moment of veganism becoming part of mainstream internet discourse, Billie Eilish recently said something that caused a minor earthquake online: “Eating meat is inherently wrong. Two things cannot coincide: ‘I love animals … and I eat meat.’ You can’t do both.”

The right was out in standard form: Liberals want to take your burgers. Wealthy coastal elites hate normal people.

My interest was in the online left, once again immediately liquefying into incoherence the second the conversation turned toward animals. It’s bizarre to watch people who spend their days talking about systems of oppression, solidarity, collective action, and moral urgency begin frantically searching for reasons why this particular form of mass cruelty is simply too complicated to meaningfully resist.

Their arguments were also familiar: There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. Growing vegetables harms animals, too. Indigenous communities hunt. Veganism is for the white/rich/privileged.

It’s remarkable how moral standards become so transparently different the moment behavioral change is involved. The left routinely asks people to inconvenience themselves for ethical reasons. Boycott this company. Divest from this institution. Show up. Protest. Donate. Organize. Defend the vulnerable. Align your actions with your politics. And yet veganism — or even simply reducing one’s participation in animal exploitation — is treated as uniquely unreasonable.

Animals occupy this bizarre conceptual dead zone where nearly everyone agrees that torturing and killing billions of animals is bad in theory, but the moment avoiding it requires any sustained inconvenience, the conversation abruptly shifts toward why meaningful change is impossible until society itself transforms first.

But society is people. Markets are people. Culture is people.

If even a relatively small percentage of self-described progressives committed to materially reducing their participation in animal agriculture, the landscape of convenience would shift rapidly. Capital chases demand with astonishing speed when enough people decide something matters.

Instead, we get this kind of theatrical helplessness. Veganism is framed as impossibly burdensome because the world hasn’t already been reorganized around making it frictionless. Vague “health concerns” and mysterious illnesses associated with plant-based diets are weaponized, despite zero data showing that meat- and dairy-heavy diets are at all beneficial for human health.

The conversation so often collapses into this all-or-nothing binary. If someone truly believes factory farming is grotesque — as most of these people claim to — why not become as vegan as possible? Why not stop buying animal products, making occasional exceptions for genuinely difficult situations? If “health reasons” are your justification for consuming animals, why not move meaningfully in the direction of reducing suffering instead of constructing elaborate ideological defenses for maintaining the status quo entirely, and consuming whatever miserable flesh and fluids you desire?

Leftists will speak movingly about hierarchies of domination and systems of violence right up until the victim is a pig or a cow instead of a person. Then suddenly the tone changes. The moral language softens. Everything becomes nuanced and “complicated” and culturally relative.

You see this especially in the way certain leftists hide behind marginalized groups they themselves don’t belong to. Indigenous hunting practices become a shield for urban meat consumption. Food deserts become an excuse deployed by people with Erewhon delivery apps on their phones. Entire oppressed populations get rhetorically summoned to defend someone’s personal unwillingness to stop drinking bone broth. Why does the existence of food deserts somewhere become justification for your DoorDashed cheeseburger?

Regardless, I’m glad based vegan Twitter was out in full rhetorical force:

Conservatives are often honest about their fundamental, rancid belief that animals exist purely for human use, and don’t particularly care whether anyone finds that cruel. A surprising number of leftists seem to agree. They just prefer to route it through the language of anti-capitalism first.

Veganism doesn’t make someone pure. Buying oat milk doesn’t make you revolutionary. But it’s revealing how aggressively even mild moral clarity around mass cruelty to animals gets resisted, especially by people who otherwise define themselves through the language of justice.

The left likes to talk a lot about standing with the oppressed. Animals, apparently, remain too oppressed to count.

Just a few years ago, veganism felt like a surging cultural force in the US. Documentaries found huge audiences, fast food chains raced to add plant-based options, and celebrities and athletes framed it as the future. For a moment, it seemed like veganism might become part of a broader, values-driven politics.

To be sure, both here and around the world, material progress is definitely still happening. Schools are introducing plant-based days or entirely vegan menus. All 11 public hospitals in NYC now serve plant-based meals by default, while Lebanon now boasts the world’s first fully vegan hospital (if the Zionist terror state hasn’t destroyed it yet). Several municipalities, including those in London and São Paulo, have begun serving only plant-based food at official events. Plant-based meat sales both in Europe and globally are on track to rise for the third consecutive year. Jeff Goldblum recently announced that he’s stopped eating meat. These are all good things.

But in the US in particular, the energy that once made veganism feel like an inevitability has quieted. Sales of plant-based meat have been spiraling downward for several years — down 7% in 2024 and another 17% in 2025, with Americans buying 75 million fewer units than in 2022. Beyond Meat, once valued at $10 billion, has lost 99% of its market cap (as well as the word “Meat” from its name). Just 1% of Americans identify as vegan — a figure that’s remained stubbornly flat for decades. What felt like the beginning of a sweeping movement now feels like a plateau. What happened?

The vibe shift that ate the movement

Part of the answer lies in the broader culture shift of the past half-decade. Where the late 2010s were marked by climate protests and youth-led movements, the 2020s have largely been defined by burnout, irony, and political entropy. The stakes got so high, the systems so unresponsive, and the corruption so glaring that for many, the idea that individual choices — or even collective pressure — could meaningfully change anything started to feel naive.

Remember when we all learned the Swedish word flygskam, or “flight shame” — the feeling of guilt associated with air travel? There was a brief moment when people felt morally obligated to do things like fly less, bike more, and cut back on animal products. But that window closed quickly. The world didn’t change fast enough, and neither did the people in power. And so the pendulum swung — not just back toward indulgence, but into a kind of cynicism.

As Henry Mance recently wrote in the Financial Times, liberals once prepared to make sacrifices for a better society have lost faith: “Faced with overwhelming bleakness — Covid, Ukraine, high energy costs, Donald Trump’s re-election, Gaza — they understandably wonder if small changes matter; they want to escape to the things that bring instant joy — meat, cheese, long-haul holidays.”

Protein panic and the “processed” trap

Of course, veganism’s stumbles also can’t be separated from the rise of two overlapping food trends: the current protein obsession and the backlash against “ultra-processed” foods.

Influencers, athletes, and food companies have all relentlessly promoted the idea that we’re in the midst of a protein deficit, even though Westerners already consume far more protein than they need. Protein has become shorthand for strength, virility, and health. And for most Americans, that still means meat, eggs, and whey.

At the same time, a cultural recoil from ultra-processed foods has cast suspicion on vegan alternatives. The meat industry has pushed hard into this framing, branding plant-based burgers and sausages as fake, artificial, and unhealthy. Beyond’s Ethan Brown admitted recently that the industry “did a masterful job, convincing people that there was something wrong with [our] products.”

Research has consistently shown that plant-based meats typically have less saturated fat, more fiber, and roughly the same amount and quality of protein as their animal counterparts (I hope you’ll enjoy watching Andrew Huberman struggle to process this information as much as I did in the clip above). In the popular American imagination, however, “plant-based” has become another word for “processed” — and therefore suspect.

Culture war casualties

The political context has only deepened the problem. In the US, meat isn’t just dinner — it’s identity, myth, and belonging, tied up in ideas about masculinity, self-reliance, and national character. In the Trump era, meat has once again surged as a culture war weapon: proof of strength, self-reliance, and resistance to “woke dogma.”

On the left, meanwhile, the old consensus around consumer action has fractured. Veganism is often dismissed as a distraction from pressing human struggles like colonialism, labor rights, racial justice, housing, and healthcare. The effect is that veganism gets vilified by the right and sidelined by the left.

It’s tempting to see all of this as proof that veganism was just another fad. But the recent cultural decline of veganism isn’t about the failure of its ethics; rather, it’s about the cultural mood that once made those ethics feel contagious. “It’s not our moment,” Ethan Brown admitted recently. “You’d be crazy to think it is.”

And yet, the exigencies of veganism — mass-scale animal suffering, ecological collapse, public health crises — are only intensifying. The question is whether animal ethics can be re-rooted within a broader politics of care — one that resists cynicism without collapsing into purity traps, one that connects food to systems of power and harm. As Mance wrote, veganism can regain momentum “if the public regains a sense of possibility.”

That possibility isn’t entirely hypothetical. Two major US cities now have democratic socialist mayors. Young people are far more open to plant-based diets, with roughly 8% of both Gen Z and Black Americans, respectively, identifying as vegan or vegetarian. The cultural headwinds are real, but so is the demographic shift.

The next wave of veganism won’t look like the last. It won’t be driven by hype cycles or celebrity endorsements, but by something slower and harder to extinguish: a communal refusal to keep treating cruelty as normal. Whether that takes hold depends less on markets than on whether people can recover a basic sense that their choices matter — that care itself isn’t pointless, even now.

I was recently at a family member’s small birthday gathering. Someone showed up with a cake that didn’t have eggs or dairy in it, on account of me (and by extension my kid). I appreciated it. This is in Los Angeles, where acquiring such a cake isn’t that big of a deal. Everyone ate it. It was good. No one seemed betrayed by the absence of butter.

At some point I heard the person who brought the cake grumble from the other room, regarding it being a vegan cake, “because it’s always about Evan.” It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t even serious. Said with a laugh, a shared eye-roll.

What still gets to me is how refusing to consume the products of tortured animals somehow turns one into a pain in the neck. That the cake existed to satisfy me, rather than to avoid something most of us would claim to oppose if it were described plainly. By refusing, you’re making it about yourself — needlessly high-maintenance at best, insufferable at worst.

I don’t feel persecuted. I’m not wounded. I’m just so damn tired of how easily this gets framed as “a preference” instead of what it is: a refusal to subsidize animal suffering. There’s a difference between “I only eat corner pieces” and “I don’t want to pay for the confinement, forced impregnation, and slaughter of gentle, helpless animals.” But socially, those two things get flattened into the same category. I’d argue that most people even perceive the latter as being more selfish.

We all know, at some level, how this system works. We know animals aren’t volunteering. We know what has to happen for milk and eggs and body parts to appear cheaply and endlessly. But the charade continues.

And yes, I’m mortified that I even have to sit here and try to articulate this, once again centering myself in what is ultimately about the animals, and sparing them from lives of abject misery. Perhaps someday this will feel less like a favor and more like the only reasonable choice.

It does not feel like a time of progress for animals. Industrial meat is expanding, and animal suffering remains structurally essential to how the global food system works. The dominant political response to ecological instability has not been restraint but defiance: more extraction, a doubling down on consumption as identity. And yet, in a few places, small institutional shifts are beginning to sketch a different way forward.

Switzerland’s new animal-product labeling law, for instance, brings animal agriculture more in line with its institutional peers: namely, the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. In a food economy built on distance and concealment, Swiss labels on meat, dairy, eggs, foie gras, and even frog legs must now say whether animals were subjected to specific painful procedures without anesthesia or stunning — castration, dehorning, tail docking, beak trimming, force-feeding, the cutting of frogs’ legs. The goal isn’t prohibition or public shaming, so much as a small rupture in the seamlessness of consumption — a subtle addition of plain facts to the soft-focus assurances. It’s a modest act, but there’s precedent for similarly modest acts shifting markets — once egg cartons in Switzerland had to state their production method involved battery cages, sales of eggs from caged hens dropped sharply.

Nearby, Amsterdam has moved to ban outdoor advertising for meat and fossil fuels. It’s an acknowledgment that ads in public space don’t just sell things; they script what feels normal and inevitable. Taking burgers and oil off billboards won’t end their consumption, of course, but it does chip away at their aura of inevitability. (Amsterdam’s move brings it in line with other cities across the Netherlands — Utrecht, The Hague, Delft, and Nijmegen have already introduced similar initiatives.)

Mexico, meanwhile, has amended its constitution to recognize animal welfare. Constitutions don’t micromanage daily life; they sketch the outer boundaries of what kinds of suffering a society is prepared to ignore. By writing animals into that frame, Mexico creates a baseline from which stronger protections can be argued without first having to prove that animals count at all. Colombia has gone another way into the same terrain: animal protection education will be compulsory in schools. This will include curricula around “ethical animal guardianship, biodiversity conservation, prevention of cruelty, and recognition of animal sentience,” pulling respect for animals into the realm of shared knowledge.

None of this is a breakthrough. The machinery of industrial violence still hums along, and reactionary politics are busy welding more armor onto it, casting domination as heritage and restraint as weakness. But these developments matter because they make suffering a little harder to hide, desire a little less automatic, and compassion slightly more legible inside the systems that quietly steer everyday life.

On the subject of things that inspire a bit of hope, I’d like to salute the fact that 80% of Wu-Tang Clan remains vegan. In the words of Masta Killa aka High Chief aka Jamel Irief:

I recently spent some time in Japan. Nearly fifteen years after my last trip, I regret to report that eating vegan there remains remarkably difficult — not just inconvenient, but structurally hard in a way that feels baked into everyday life. You sense it quickly, less as hostility than as absence. The idea itself never really made it into the system.

There are exceptions: a small but committed vegan community, and a handful of great cafés and restaurants, many of them kept afloat by Western and South Asian tourists passing through. Living there and cooking most meals at home from basic ingredients would, of course, be different from wandering around as a tourist and eating mostly on the go. But the fact remains that for most people, most of the time, the idea of abstaining from meat and dairy barely registers. Menus don’t anticipate it. Packaging doesn’t signal it. Compared to the US — ethically incoherent, wildly excessive, but at least accustomed to labeling and accommodating vegetarian and vegan choices — Japan feels like a place where animal products are still always assumed.

It doesn’t help that the food looks and smells incredible. Walking through any given market’s prepared food section in Tokyo as a vegan, especially a hungry one, is an almost comically challenging experience. Everything is so precisely prepared and composed, mouthwatering, and plentiful. If you’ve ever struggled with lingering food desires, it can be a shock to the system. The pull still works on me.

Fish stock alone takes care of most of it. It’s in soups, sauces, rice, and nearly everything else; even foods that read as “plain” often hide dashi, meat, eggs, or mayonnaise somewhere in the ingredient list. Asking questions feels awkward, substitutions are rare, and the burden is squarely on you to adapt or go without. It isn’t really about tradition in the romantic sense; it’s about defaults, the quiet assumption that soup tastes like fish and rice comes with meat. There’s a glorious, glowing konbini (convenience store) on nearly every corner, its shelves generously stocked with all manner of immaculately prepared and packaged foods — and often the only vegan option is “salted rice ball”. I ate a lot of salted rice balls.

None of this is meant as a moral indictment of Japan, or a claim that things are better elsewhere. Restaurants in US cities have more vegan options on their menus these days, but this country also consumes a staggering amount of meat and dairy — the average American consumes over 2.2 times more animal foods by weight than their Japanese counterpart. In one place, veganism is visible but marginal; in the other, nearly invisible, yet oddly imaginable in a different way.

What Japan clarified for me is how much being vegan depends on infrastructure most of us barely notice. When systems are built around animal consumption, opting out becomes a highly specialized skill. The difficulty isn’t ideological resistance, but friction.

Despite how challenging it is to be vegan in Japan as an individual, it also feels easier to conceive of a significant decline in animal consumption there if it were framed as a collective issue rather than a personal one. If the state decided that meat, especially fish, needed to be reduced for supply, sustainability, or environmental reasons, it’s easy to imagine people complying. Veganism in the US often functions as a subculture or identity; in Japan, it is easier to imagine something like it emerging from policy and shared norms.

There are already plenty of examples of coordinated behavior change. Recycling is taken seriously, with various packaging materials meticulously separated by type in every household. Trash is effectively nonexistent in public places, and public smoking — ubiquitous in my previous experiences in Tokyo, both indoors and out — has been rapidly eliminated in just the past several years, accelerated by preparations for the 2020 Olympics. People wear masks in public when they feel ill, refrain from eating on sidewalks or trains, and behave as if public life is a shared project. It isn’t blind obedience so much as a kind of everyday social contract: when conditions change, behavior adjusts.

That idea sits uneasily with how animal ethics are usually framed in the West. Here, morality is treated as something you choose and express. What you eat becomes a signal of who you are. Veganism, in this context, often reads less as a response to mass harm and more as a personal identity — one that’s expected to justify itself constantly. The implicit theory of change is that enough individuals will wake up, shift their purchases, and drag the system along behind them. Individuals are asked to swim upstream inside systems designed to make animal products cheap, convenient, and everywhere.

Japan isn’t a place that celebrates ethical eating as self-expression, and it certainly doesn’t center animal suffering in public discourse. And yet, it’s also a place where large-scale behavioral shifts happen with relative ease when they’re framed as necessary. If the same machinery that enforces recycling rules and smoking bans were pointed toward reducing animal consumption — by reshaping school lunches, public procurement, convenience store offerings, or subsidies — everyday diets could change without anyone having to announce a new identity.

When behavior change is treated as a shared expectation rather than a personal stance, it carries less emotional weight. There’s less defensiveness, less need to explain yourself. No one asks whether recycling aligns with your values. You do it because that’s how things are done. The conflict happens at the level of policy, not at every meal.

Of course, food is more intimate than recycling or smoking. It touches memory, family, pleasure, ritual. Japan’s food culture is deeply tied to care and craftsmanship, which makes the idea of altering it feel especially sensitive. But intimacy doesn’t protect systems from limits. Fisheries don’t respond to nostalgia. Supply chains don’t bend to tradition. At some point, constraints force change, whether people are ready or not. For animals, those constraints aren’t abstract: they determine how many are pulled through these systems at all.

Japan’s reliance on seafood in particular isn’t just cultural; it’s ecological and economic. The country faces diminishing fish stocks, aging fisheries, and rising climate risk, and is already experimenting with alternatives. There’s growing interest and investment in cultured meat and especially cultured fish, including eel, driven less by a sudden moral awakening than by food security concerns and consumer interest in keeping familiar dishes on the table. We might not need a mass ethical awakening about animals; pressure, scarcity, cost, and instability are alternative drivers.

Japan doesn’t feel hostile to veganism so much as indifferent to it. Animal products aren’t defended or celebrated; they’re simply everywhere, embedded so thoroughly that questioning them feels like questioning the weather. If avoiding harm requires perpetual effort, then harm will persist — not because people are cruel or unaware, but because ease usually wins. For animals, that ease adds up to trillions of quiet, automatic harms that few specifically choose, but nearly everyone participates in.

In the end, this trip made something plain that can be easier to miss elsewhere: when avoiding harm demands constant, vigilant attention, most harm will continue. Systems are better at reproducing themselves than individuals are at resisting them. The question isn’t whether ethical choices are possible, but how much effort they demand — and who is expected to supply it.

A confession: I compulsively track The New Yorker’s coverage of issues relating to eating animals, mostly because I’m a masochist who loves being disappointed by the liberal weekly of record. Like most of its media peers, coverage of animal rights or veganism in The New Yorker is almost nonexistent; love letters to the scrumptiousness of dead animals, however, make very regular appearances. I read it anyway, because watching very educated writers elegantly sidestep the screaming ethical void is, in its own way, instructive.

Food critic Helen Rosner’s latest essay on Thanksgiving certainly fits the bill. It begins in exactly the register you’d expect from a year like this one: rueful, world-weary, alert to the barbarism of contemporary American life. She writes about a nation “actively working to become more brutal, more indifferent,” a place where suffering is meted out as punishment for being poor, or sick, or born on the wrong side of a border.

And then, without missing a beat, the piece plunges directly into an ode to butchery, blind to the connective tissue between our appetite for violence and the food on the table. “Priority for the turkey legs should go to those under the age of six,” she writes, because it makes “terrific photos.” The cook and carver, she insists, should pluck away “the crispiest bits of skin” and the “loveliest little morsels of breast and thigh” while carving the bird’s body open. Later, she passionately declares her belief in the “supremacy of the turkey carcass.”

It makes sense, of course, that the dead body of a terrified, factory-farmed animal remains the civic symbol around which we gather to remember who we are as a country. This is America. Brutality is our inheritance, and selective empathy is one of our foundational myths.

But it’s impossible to imagine these words written about a cat or a dog — or even another bird, like a sparrow or a blue jay — because doing so wouldn’t be acceptable in polite society. For the countless poor baby chickens and turkeys born into lives of abject pain and suffering on factory farms, though, it absolutely is.

The myopic gesturing toward moral clarity is in no way limited to Rosner. She’s simply speaking the native language of American liberalism, which is fluent in the suffering of some, but mute on the suffering of others — particularly the animals we eat, even when we describe their body parts with the forensic intimacy of a pathologist.

“A turkey’s meat is mostly forgettable, chicken with the volume turned ever so slightly upward, but in water its flavor transforms and deepens to create something of heady, chest-thumping bravado,” she writes. “There’s no need for a recipe: collect all your turkey detritus in a big pot, toss in any vegetable or herb scraps that seem appealing, add cold water, and set the mixture to simmer for as many hours as you like. As the skeleton softens and yields, the kitchen fills, for the second time that day, with a warm, meaty aroma.”

It’s illuminating to watch a writer move so fluidly from the horrors of the political moment to an almost erotic relationship with a dead bird’s skeleton. The shift is so smooth it feels like cultural muscle memory: the ability to acknowledge suffering in abstract form and then immediately participate in it in concrete form. There’s even a line in the piece about how Thanksgiving traditions are “optional,” how the holiday offers fertile ground for “willful rebellion.” Except, of course, for the one tradition that remains unexamined: killing an animal, because it’s tradition to do so.

To see what an alternative looks like in (relatively) mainstream media, Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova remains a rare voice of dissent. Her most recent Thanksgiving counterpoint is no exception. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll leave you with a few choice excerpts:

Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?

Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.

In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.

From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”

On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.

Imagine an alien civilization intercepting fragments of human discourse-not our art, not our philosophy, but the way we speak about the bodies we consume. They’d hear chefs and foodies gushing about the tenderness of a cow’s flesh, about the most delectable ratio of intramuscular fat to muscle. Menus boasting of a pig’s ribs so tender the meat “falls off the bone” and “melts in your mouth.” They’d find journalists detailing, with cool detachment, the optimal way to extract the most flavor from the bodies of sentient beings that once moved through the world under their own power. What conclusions would they draw about us?

These visitors might also be struck by how this objectifying, fetishistic language is at odds with the way farmers, chefs, and people generally talk about animals while they’re still alive. Take the line of thinking from Dan Barber, the celebrated executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, who was recently featured in this Modern Farmer article for choosing to serve beef from dairy cows at his high-end restaurant. (Dairy cows have historically been considered a “secondary product”, with the animals slaughtered after their productive dairy lives end, and their meat primarily used for cheaper cuts and pet food.)

“Blue Hill Farm, my family’s dairy farm in the Berkshires, had an older dairy cow ready for culling at least once or twice a year,” Barber says. “I bet it was my proximity to these exceptional ladies—spending years, in some cases seven or eight or more years, getting to know them well—that made their inevitable fate of becoming dog food feel disrespectful.”

He then goes on to explain that the “incredible, idiosyncratic flavor” of their flesh was why he’d chosen to serve it at his restaurant. Barber’s implication, of course, is that this intimacy conferred a kind of respect for the animals; that he’d forged an emotional bond with them, that he’d grown to appreciate their characters, their temperaments, their personalities. But if he truly felt this way, would he send these “exceptional ladies” to slaughter? What does it matter to these dairy cows if their bodies ultimately become dog food or served as a course in a $300 prix fixe meal? Would it seem anything other than pathological to fire a bolt gun into the brain of a dog, cat, or chipmunk, and then hang them by their throat to bleed out — despite our professed affection for them — because we enjoy the way their flesh tastes?

The language of consumption is full of these quiet betrayals. Using the word “cull” sanitizes, suggesting necessity rather than choice. “Harvesting” animals makes them sound more like crops, conveniently erasing the part where they struggle to survive slaughter. Even the way chefs discuss taste is revealing-muscle isn’t just muscle, it’s “product,” its worth measured in tenderness, marbling, yield. The implicit framework is not one of living beings, but of resources to be optimized. Perhaps what makes the way we talk about animals so dissonant isn’t the detachment, but the closeness-the faux tenderness, the reverence laced with butchery. The fact that we seem to see them, truly, and then render them into parts.

The way we talk about animals in the kitchen is a reflection of a much larger epistemic structure-one that categorizes non-human life into hierarchies of value and utility. Cows, pigs, and chickens exist within the language of food; dogs and cats do not. If Westerners were to hear about someone slow-cooking a golden retriever, the horror wouldn’t just be in the act itself, but in the language’s failure to accommodate it. There’s no established culinary vocabulary for a dog’s body in Western culture, designed to shield us from the violence.

The article’s discussion of dairy cow beef sustainability also leans on a familiar sleight of hand—framing a marginally less harmful practice as an environmental virtue. Barber has long been celebrated for his sustainable, ethical approach to food, and this notion of using dairy cows for expensive beef is posed as an environmental win. It’s true that culling spent dairy cows for beef doesn’t require additional breeding, grazing land, or deforestation—that is, beyond the massive amounts of each that have already been committed for milk production. But this doesn’t magically make beef a “sustainable” choice; it merely shifts the accounting. It’s a fact that dairy cows alone contribute more than 10 percent of total US methane emissions. The core problem remains: producing any kind of beef is an ecological catastrophe. Whether it comes from a dairy cow or a steer bred for slaughter, beef is still the most resource-intensive, greenhouse gas-emitting, and land-hungry form of food on the planet.

The rhetoric surrounding “sustainable beef” is a study in selective framing. Advocates focus on efficiency gains within an already ruinous system-how much methane can be offset, how much feed can be reduced—without ever questioning the baseline assumption that beef itself should persist. It’s exactly the same logic that brings us carbon-neutral flights and “clean coal”—marketing spin that tweaks the optics without altering the fundamental destruction at work.

All of these deceptions are merely attempts to make peace with something environmentally and ethically disastrous. The alien observer, listening in, wouldn’t understand our distinctions at all. They’d hear a species capable of great empathy and rich moral reasoning, twisting language into something that allows them to eat their subjects of concern—like the “exceptional ladies” Barber speaks of. They might wonder how a civilization could develop so much art and philosophy, and still be unable to recognize the abject cruelty sitting on the plate right in front of it.