PU#246 - SO I EAT FISH NOW - On Unbecoming a Vegetarian
I became a vegetarian in 1998, the summer I took my GCSEs. I will never forget that it was the summer I took my GCSEs because I had made the moral decision to stop eating meat already, but didn’t want to mess with my diet during the exams in case it had any impact on my concentration and focus. So I vowed to go veggie the moment I finished, and after my last exam I went home for lunch and made my first bean burger.
At this point in the story I usually say “and I haven’t eaten meat since.” But last April that stopped being true after an ordering snafu in a Brooklyn bar led to my wife accidentally ordering us a real avocado, bacon and tomato sandwich instead of the one with fake bacon in it. We didn’t notice the difference, as fake vegetarian bacon these days is pretty good, but did notice that the “meat” looked pretty realistic for tempeh. It turned out that was because it wasn’t tempeh.
I remember waking up the next morning and discovering that we had eaten real meat and being surprised that there had been no negative impact from doing so for the first time in twenty-seven years. My stomach had digested it without issue and, if anything, it explained the buzz of energy I’d had all evening the night before. I felt bad morally for the death of the pig that I had accidentally contributed to, and that was the end of it. A wrinkle in the story about quitting eating meat in the summer of 1998 and never eating it again.
But it was a pretty big wrinkle.
Being vegetarian is something that I have long grappled with despite the decades-long commitment. The moral argument is undeniable: to cause the suffering and murder of non-human animals for human consumption when eating animal flesh and animal products is not necessary for human survival just cannot be justified. And yet, when you say goodbye to meat you do say goodbye to other things. For one thing, you separate yourself from others in your community and culture who do not agree with you about the moral issue. You lose the easy way in which food is shared and discussed because of the constant background question — is it vegetarian — which puts up some barriers, especially if travelling to different countries and trying to experience their culture and hospitality. This might not be a huge thing compared to the murder of living animals, but it is not nothing.
More troubling is the moral inconsistency of vegetarianism. Because I wasn’t a vegan and yet, by the same argument, should have been. After all, animal lives were routinely being lost because of the dairy and egg industries and I was complicit every time, yet found myself too lazy to remove all animal products out of my diet completely. And then there were the insects, who I had no compunction about killing if they invaded my home, or who I shed no tears for destroying the habitats of to produce my plant-based meals. Like the morally inconsistent carnivore who thinks it is ok to eat a cow but not a cat because they have a pet cat at home, my vegetarianism similarly picked and chose which non-human lives I valued and which I didn’t. (When my own cat got fleas a long time ago, I didn’t think twice, for example, about exterminating the whole lot of them with a deadly spray and shampoo prescribed to me by our vet).
I’d already made peace with those inconsistencies with the idea that none of us can be morally perfect and also live a full and engaged life in a world already so systemically corrupt, but it was better to be as morally good as we could be. So if I could kill fewer animals, even if I didn’t save them all, that felt like the right thing to do.
For me, the key in the moral argument was around the word “necessary”. To cause the suffering and murder of non-human animals for human consumption when eating animal flesh and animal products is not necessary for human survival just cannot be justified, but implied within that argument is the idea that if it were necessary, it could be.
At college I had a friend who went vegan for about a year. Then he got very sick. His mother, a nurse, cured him by insisting that he eat a yoghurt. It turned out that was stuff in dairy that his body needed. He’s still a vegetarian today, but stopped being a vegan when he realised that, for him, harming the animals to get dairy was actually necessary.
In my own vegetarianism I had always said that while I didn’t eat animals where I could avoid it, if I were lost in the desert and starving to death and the only thing I could do to survive was kill and eat an animal, I would.
So in April this year, when I was diagnosed with a fatty liver after having some pains and discomfort over the last sixteen months, and I read up on recommended dietary changes, it was hard to ignore how frequently the word “fish” kept coming up. Oily fish. Good for a lot of things, not just fatty liver. A lot of benefits my body had been denied for nearly thirty years of being a vegetarian, even with my ever-present bottles of vitamin pills and supplements.
Fish — the one meat that, to my mind, none of the plant-based alternatives had ever managed to crack. A flavour I had long yearned for in my mouth and the only thing from my meat-eating days I ever really missed. Sometimes, when feeding the cat, I would catch a whiff of some salmon or mackerel I was scooping into his bowl and almost — almost— be tempted to take a bite.
It had always struck me as another one of my great moral inconsistencies that since owning my first cat in 2005, despite being a vegetarian I spent a lot of money each week on meat and fish for my cat.
Recently, for some strange reason, I’d hard sardines on my mind. Those little tinned fillets that you could smush onto toast or some crackers. One of the first self-sufficient snacks I was able to make myself as a kid. I had literal pangs of desire for sardines that made no sense to me. But when I looked at all this stuff about oily fish and their properties I thought of my sister when she had been pregnant with my niece. Her pregnancy cravings. She had always said that the body craves what it needs — salt, sugar, fats — usually the bizarre cravings of a pregnancy were due to a deficiency or something the growing foetus needed. Trust the body. It knows.
These ideas were playing around in my head when, nearly a year to the day my wife had mis-ordered that real bacon sandwich in Brooklyn, I decided to listen to my body. Driving home from work, I stopped off at a supermarket and bought a tin of sardines. I came home, made some toast, and opened the tin, intrigued to see if the smell would disgust me. Instead, my stomach growled, as did my cat who, smelling the fish from upstairs, came running into the kitchen and wanted to make himself known if there was any going spare.
Tentatively, I scooped the sardines from the tin and crushed them onto the toast. I saw bones, something that looked like the fish’s entire spine, and was surprised as I crushed them all in that this very clear evidence of the thing on my plate being an animal didn’t put me off. But somehow it didn’t. It was gross and it was honest.
I didn’t add any pepper or a squeeze of lemon because I didn’t want to mask the taste with any accompaniments. I lifted the toast to my mouth, waiting for my gag reflex to kick in and something stop me from tasting it, but instead my mouth filled with eager saliva and, before I knew it, I was eating the fish.
I ate most of the tin, giving half of the final fillet to the cat. And I felt no guilt, only curiosity. Would it make me sick? Would it make me better?
Well it didn’t make me sick, and more to the point the next day I found that gnawing pain that had been bothering me on and off for so long was gone. I felt energetic.
When I told my wife (sent her pictures of me eating the sardines actually), she was excited. Although I’d dragged her along into vegetarianism when we got together and she developed the same sort of ethical views as I had about killing animals for food, she’d also missed fish now for nearly two decades. The next tin of sardines we shared together as she decided to tentatively dip her own toe back into fishy waters. In our next grocery shop, we bought some mackerel to have with salad and potatoes. The following week, some salmon and tuna fish. My liver has been feeling better. We both have more energy than we’ve had in years. I still don’t feel bad about it.
Of course, eating fish again begs the question why not other animals? Is this the end of my vegetarianism completely?
Maybe.
I would already no longer consider myself a vegetarian anymore as I always got annoyed by people claiming to be vegetarian “but I still eat fish”. These pescatarians, I reasoned, weren’t vegetarians, they were just picky eaters.
But there is a question mark now over my commitment to any of my abstinence from meat. After all, if I’ve made peace with murdering fish for their nutritional benefits, why not other animals?
And I guess the reason I’m not yet going all-in on being a carnivore is the same reason I never went fully vegan yet stayed a vegetarian: if we can’t do no harm, doing less harm still seems like the right thing to do.
I don’t see the same health benefits coming from other meats, and have long been used to plant-based alternatives to things like chicken, beef and pork. When we ate those bacon sandwiches in Brooklyn last year, part of what was so disappointing was discovering that they tasted just the same as the fake stuff. All these years we had thought we were missing out, and we weren’t.
Fish was different. The minute the sardine, the mackerel, the salmon, the tuna, went into my mouth, I tasted flavours that had been missing from my diet for years and the health benefits of fish were not only felt by my body, but are well-documented.
I’m not entirely ruling out a return to other meats in future, but right now it still doesn’t seem necessary in the way that eating fish was.
It has taken me over a month to come out publicly with the fact that I eat fish now mainly because I was trying to find some brilliant philosophical way of justifying it. It turned out there really is no good justification. It isn’t morally good that I eat fish now, but it is just another moral wrong that I find to be necessary to survive in this world, like engaging daily in capitalism, buying products I know have been produced through exploitation, driving a petrol car as the planet dies around us, using other fossil fuels to heat my house and run too many devices. It is a moral wrong I have come to accept and don’t feel judgemental about. And one which, perhaps, allows me also as a bonus to engage a bit more freely in both my own culture (fish and chips is back on the menu!) and others (my biggest regret after travelling to Vietnam and Cambodia was that I didn’t eat fish and wasn’t able to fully embrace the cuisine).
We all make moral compromises in our life, and nearly thirty years without eating fish, and still not eating any other animals except for that one bacon sandwich seems better than nothing.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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