This I Believe

Hello, good morning. Or evening, depending on when you are listening to this tape. How are you? Did you have breakfast, lunch or maybe dinner? What did you eat?

This is a normal salute, but I would like to go further and ask you little more on that specific matter: what you ate. Let’s say you just had lunch.

How did you choose your menu? Let me guess—probably you measured the time allocated for your meal. The intermediate between your work and studies. Your distance from the restaurant, the food left in your refrigerator and their expiration date. The money in your back pocket. If you did not eat alone, the preference of your roommates or coworkers, too. Maybe you were so busy that you merely grabbed anything from the nearest convenience store. This mind process you go through three times a day, every day, throughout your life. Unless you usually skip breakfast. But even then, you probably pick up a snack to substitute the meals you forgo. The important thing is that we make these decisions all the time. Here, in that mind process, I suggest that you put in one more factor: animals.

I have been a vegetarian for the last four years, and temporarily quit vegetarianism four months ago. Many people ask why I started vegetarianism, and why I quit. Truth is, there was no “moment of shock” or “enlightening epiphany.”

It started with a simple fact: I disapproved animal testing of cosmetic companies. It seemed unreasonable to make so many rabbits and mice go through a torturing process just to develop and legitimize the safety of a new mascara product. More so, there exists more scientifically accurate testing methods such as ones using tissue cultivation. Surely, it would be unnecessary to repeatedly dab chemicals into rabbits’ eyes just because it saves a little more money.

Then, it occurred to me that eating animals was not so different. Type in “modern factory farming” in Google browser, and click images. Now scroll down. What you see there is not true. Or at least, only a very small part of the truth. Read up a few books on the subject, and you will quickly understand that reality is much worse than that. Or easier, type the same words into Youtube. When you click the pictures of the unrecognizable figures, you will come to… nothing. An empty black screen with the words, “You must be 19 or older to view this video. Please confirm your age”

I won’t repeat all the details mentioned in the books I’ve come across, because the list is endless. I won’t elaborate on how male chicks are grinded at the age of 3 days and left to die in their half-torn bodies. I won’t mention that 99.7% of all fish catch, named bycatch, is disposed back in the ocean, dead. I won’t mourn over how enormously oversized hens struggle in their span-wide cage, making chirping noises because they should still be, in fact, babies. I won’t elaborate, because it is not that meat eaters do not care for those animals. It is because there seems to be so little we can do as individual consumers, and thus we live on choosing forget exactly how our cheeseburger came to us.

Now, you may think that I am asking you to consider the uncomfortable option: forgoing the pleasure of meat-eating. Being a vegetarian or vegan is challenging, especially in a boarding school where you don’t get to choose the menu you are served, and for this reason, I gave up vegetarianism for the while. But you don’t have to be on either end of the spectrum. What I propose is that you sometimes choose to eat vegetarian meals over meat, when it is not too difficult, when you feel like it. If you are trying to decide between bibimbap and samgyupsal this lunch, why not factor in animals and go for bibimbap? Try asking the waiter if the restaurant offers any vegetarian meals. Your one visit, accumulated with a few more customers’ requests over time, could impact the restaurant to add a vegetarian dish to their menu.

The impact is still minor, you may say. But it is still much more than nothing. An average person eats 7,000 animals in a lifetime. If more people make their voice known, let restaurants and factory farms know that they care, it can make an impact. It is the rule of easy rescue. By putting in a little effort, you can change the world—much more so than you think. This I believe.