Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals opens with the sentence “Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.” That sounds like it’s supposed to be a criticism, but then for the next 266 pages, Foer proceeds to badger Americans into restricting their diets even more than that.

No wonder so many vegans like that book! Vegans sometimes portray themselves as rebels subverting the mainstream, upending SAD-ist notions of “tradition, convenience, habit and taste,” and yet what veganism usually comes down to is piling on new taboos.

The early vegan pioneers deserve credit for pointing out the fatal paradox in lacto-ovo vegetarianism – simply avoiding meat doesn’t address the issues that vegetarians actually want to address – but then they just took the vegetarian idea and added even more restrictions to it, defining veganism as:

A way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.

If the first official vegans had been less hasty to spell out the dictates of their philosophy and had clearly defined the sentiment of veganism while leaving the application open to interpretation, maybe veganism wouldn’t be as commonly mired in dogmatism as it is now. Seven decades after “Vegan” exploded into the world, everyone’s first exposure to it is still, “Vegans don’t eat or wear animal products,” which presumes a robust line between animal and vegetable that isn’t actually there and makes it sound like veganism is a set of restrictions in search of a motive. 

If vegans want to convince us that it’s ethical to eat plants and unethical to eat animals, they need a coherent reason for this. So vegans settled on sentience. And yet when people want to eat non-sentient animals and say it’s okay by vegan ethics, the vegan majority gets upset. Christopher Cox outraged a ton of vegans with his “Consider the Oyster” manifesto that held up non-sentient oysters as a veganism-compatible animal food. Well, vegans… if oysters aren’t sentient, what is the problem?

To the more repressed and heterodox vegans, there is something unseemly about experimenting with animal products, even if those animals don’t care whether or not they are eaten. Veganism should be about accepting your lot and eating your veggies, not looking for delicious exceptions! These killjoys are prone to saying that vegans shouldn’t eat non-sentient animals because all animals deserve “the benefit of the doubt” in case they might magically be sentient through some non-central-nervous-system means that science doesn’t yet understand. On top of that, it’s unbecoming of vegans to hungrily scour the lands and seas for animals who don’t have feelings so they can gobble them up. Part of being vegan is representing that “animals are not ours to eat,” say these dreary nags, and slurping oysters supposedly blurs that message. But then, if non-sentient animals are not “ours to eat,” neither are the photosynthesizing bounties of the earth, and we should all starve as punishment for being born in a world we can never own.

I say it’s the exception-seekers who do the most for veganism. If vegans want to spread their lifestyle far and wide, they’d be wise to think, “How can we achieve our goals while making the fewest demands possible?” Not, as now: “Let’s overshoot on restrictions and err on the side of self-punishment, just in case.”

Humans like to achieve the maximum possible gain through the smallest possible effort. How have vegans failed to notice this? Every time you put up an additional hurdle, you shrink the crowd willing to follow you. Why else would there be far more lacto-ovo vegetarians than vegans even though veganism makes marginally more sense?

This doesn’t mean that blindly smashing rules and regulations is guaranteed to draw a cheering crowd. You still need hindrances to create meaning, but going overboard doesn’t help anything. Just maintain the minimum required to satisfy your core point. Imagine if veganism could somehow allow cheese. That would destroy the most clichéd objection to it! Of course, there’s no way to make cheese without animals – unless you count tapioca flour and canola oil shreds – but vegans can eat cheese without violating the vegan idea: any cheese about to be in the garbage will do. And let’s not forget new human mothers with weaning babies and milk to spare.

Either veganism is about sentience and complicity, or it’s a baseless division between plant and animal products. Since a lifestyle grounded on an unexplained “just because” aversion to animals is about as philosophically intriguing as a low-oxalate diet, I have to assume that veganism is concerned with sentience, exploitation and logical consistency rather than just the shape of a food’s cells.

Which means vegans get to eat some animal products! Here are the ones I can think of:

* Any animal products that are in the trash or on their way there.

* Road kill.

* Insects.

* Bivalves (oysters, clams, mussels and scallops).

* Jellyfish and most other aquatic invertebrates, except for cephalopods.

* Human dairy products.

* Human placenta.

* Humans in irreversible comas.

Forget what the Vegan Society tells you. If veganism is to make any sense whatsoever, the above foods are vegan.

Now it’s true that researchers haven’t settled the issue of whether or not insects have feelings or first-person experiences. That doesn’t matter, however, if veganism cares about logical consistency. Vegans simply cannot believe that insects are sentient, because if they do that, they have to abandon sentience as the standard dividing ethical from unethical foods. That’s because, as a practical matter, any philosophy that respects the interests of insects cannot work.

Vegans buy plants that are laced with anti-insect poison and which are often pollinated by bees who are shipped there without their consent and are in many cases gassed after their uncompensated exploitation. Saying that it’s wrong to eat honey but okay to eat the fruits and nuts that exploited bees labored to grow is a bit like saying it’s ethically fine to buy the products of slave labor so long as you don’t steal the sandwiches from the slaves’ lunchboxes. Vegans better hope insects aren’t sentient, because if they are, the number of rights violations contained in a single jar of almond butter blows away the comparatively paltry ethical transgressions in even the most succulent cuts of grass-fed beef. “Benefit of the doubt” indeed!

Whether or not vegans neutralize the insect question by proclaiming their non-sentience, there’s still the issue of mammals who are killed (often intentionally) to protect and harvest the crops vegans eat. But vegans can at least try to wash that from their consciences by telling themselves, “Technically I don’t know for sure that animals are being hunted and poisoned for this veggie burger; maybe I got lucky and this all came from farms that have figured out how to peacefully shoo away pest animals.”

That could never work with insects, though. How could you delude yourself that your leafy greens are insect-friendly when you have to remember to wash the anti-insect death powder off them every time you want to toss a salad? Vegans could re-define veganism to mandate organic, pesticide-free produce, but that wouldn’t necessarily free them from reliance on bee slavery, and raises another problem: unless they are buying from a veganic farm (which they aren’t), their organic produce is fertilized with the excrement and bodies of exploited and possibly tortured animals.

Better to accept that insect lives don’t matter and grow your plants with petroleum.

For the bivalve skeptical, Christopher Cox does a good job of defending oyster veganism here. I’d just add that if logical consistency forces vegans to say that insects don’t have interests, then they are definitely free to eat bivalves, most of which are simpler organisms than bugs. Cox tells vegans to restrict their bivalve consumption to elevation-raised oysters because he says digging clams, mussels and scallops out of the ocean floor may cause environmental damage and kill other fish, but since plenty of land-based vegan foods hurt nature and all the animals who get in the way, I don’t see why vegans should limit themselves to only the most ethically bulletproof bivalves.

Octopodes, cuttlefish and the like appear to be an exception, but for the most part, aquatic invertebrates are not sentient in any sense that vegans need to worry about. That includes jellyfish, who are becoming an overpopulated scourge of the seas, and taste kind of like salted nothing, but have a nice texture. Why don’t vegans eat or at least promote the consumption of jellyfish? Jonathan Safran Foer makes a big stink about bycatch in Eating Animals and might lament all the other fish who could accidentally be killed as we chased after the see-through, flavorless, tentacled ones. The problem with this argument is that it means vegans shouldn’t eat plants, since there are unintentional deaths in agriculture. Mammals are the bycatch of the land and some of them even have to be killed on purpose to protect crops. No sentient animals have to be killed purposely to capture mindless jellyfish.

As for all the human-based products, I don’t think it would be wise from a tactical perspective for vegans to spend much time campaigning for a reversal in the cannibalism taboo whilst cruising hospital wards for human vegetables that nobody wants. But I do think that vegans’ silence on the matter of consuming non-sentient humans, and lack of interest in ethically sourced human breast cheese, does illustrate that vegans are not as iconoclastic and anti-tradition as they like to claim. Their aversion to promoting the consumption of insects, aquatic invertebrates, dumpster food and human milk isn’t due just to doctrinal confusion. A big chunk of it comes down to “convenience, habit, tradition and taste,” the four sins that vegans like to say are the only excuses for meat eating.

Vegans might protest that they are working within the situation they’ve inherited, a sorry state where people aren’t open to entomophagy outside of reality game shows, think jellyfish will sting their tongue and gag at the thought of milk made from a human even though that’s all they ate when they really had it good. But vegans are already asking people to forget tradition and give up lots of delicious foods. If they’re going to demand that we reject everything grandma ever cooked for us, why not tell us to add weird new foods to our diets to make up for it? And I don’t just mean previously overlooked grains and greens, nutritional yeast flakes and soy formulations. The novelty of millet wears off quickly, and as good as quinoa is, using it to break up the monotony of your nightly white rice ration is not as interesting a change as growing mealworms in your backyard. Don’t just add new taboos, vegans. Rip some away!

But vegans are just as beholden to cultural conditioning as the rest of us, the main difference being that they want to make us even more queasy than we already are. If there were a vegan revolution, it would be one of the sorriest revolutions in history, led by an army of out-of-step, meek do-gooders chanting “eww, yuckie!” in unison.

If vegans wanted, they could combine their Spartan self-discipline with a fearless embrace of some of the allegedly grossest foods on the planet. They could be among the most compassionate and most hardcore. Unfortunately, vegans would rather direct our attention to the vital wheat gluten powder (which contains insects parts, by the way, but at least you can’t see them).

This is more than a personal failing on the part of individual vegans. It’s a fault with veganism itself. The Vegan Society defined veganism in terms of self-restriction and aversion to animal molecules, and there veganism remains.

You’d think vegans would care more about sentience and animals than anyone, and yet they’re either too afraid or incurious to investigate where sentience and animals don’t overlap and how that could accelerate the spread of veganism. It’s bizarre when vegans are treated as heretics for admitting that they eat non-sentient or dumpstered animal products, when it’s the outraged “no animal products ever” vegans who don’t seem to understand their own ethics.

And then there are the vegans who hear about vegan-appropriate animal products and shrug them off with an indifferent “fine, but gross, I wouldn’t eat that” and never address the subject again. But that’s just damning oysters with faint acknowledgment and does nothing to reconceptualize veganism as an idea based on an actual principle rather than an arbitrary division between categories of food. If vegans really want to save sentient animals, they should be at the forefront of making insects more palatable. The Loving Hut vegan restaurant chain should have an actual seafood menu. Vegans should raise their next generation on peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches, with human breast milk soft serve ice cream for dessert. They should be petitioning for the green “V” to appear on boxes of frozen New Zealand mussels. And they should be mass-marketing bivalve sausages. Hell, those would actually be good!

But no, they’re still obsessed with soy and dream of the day when scientists will make meat in a lab.

Lab meat is a fine enough idea if it can ever be financially feasible, but why is PETA offering $1,000,000 to the lab geeks who can develop a market-friendly lab-cultured chicken flesh when the oceans are already growing unconscious flesh for free and anybody can raise non-sentient animals in cardboard boxes in their backyards?

Many vegans hate Anthony Bourdain for going around the world, eating the weirdest animals he can find and chastising vegans for rudely turning down the food of other cultures, but what Bourdain is advocating here (amongst selfish hedonism) is adaptability – an admirable trait that vegans tend to utterly lack. Some relatively freewheeling vegans retort, “Okay, so why not just eat animal products that one time a poor Korean farmer offers you a piece of duck in a loving gesture of friendship, and then be vegan for every other meal?” But by the time most vegans find themselves on a farm in Korea without the language skills to adequately explain the tenants of their quasi-religion, they’ve demonized all animal products for so long that the thought of eating any makes them feel ill.

Veganism breeds rigidity – it’s about as maladaptive as it gets. Some vegans like to think that humanity would be forced into animal-free living in the event of a societal or environmental collapse, but how does that make sense? The looming threat of starvation certainly didn’t lead to community soy gardens in Leningrad: first they ate their pets and then they became cannibals. Not that that is a future that most of us want to strive for, but it shows that flexibility can come in handy. And a diet that gets us used to eating insects would satisfy vegan ethics while preparing us for just about anything – unlike a lifestyle that forbids us from eating everything that ever moved.

More aversions may not be what the world needs.

I can see no advantage of veganism outlawing more food than it must. Simplicity and ease of explanation? That could justify an abridged “no animal products ever” speech to confused waiters, but not making it the actual definition of veganism. Some vegans explain their objection to freegan and non-sentient animal products by arguing that inoculating disgust to all animal bits makes you less likely to stray from the truly unvegan ones. But if you really believe in not hurting animals, is it necessary to feel an urge to puke every time you see a pepperoni pizza? And what a waste if that pizza is about to go in the garbage! All these aversions do is make it harder to be vegan. And that makes it harder to recruit.

Despite vegan implications that animal foods are, at best, flavor tabs with no special nutritional benefits, health seems to be the primary reason people quit vegetarianism. Unless you’re including an array of supplements that cover even the animal-based nutrients that are deemed nonessential, it’s inaccurate to say that vegan food provides all the same nutrients as a well-planned omnivorous diet. But it doesn’t have to be. Vegans can’t honestly say that plants give you all the same nutrients as animals, but they could say it’s possible to get all the nutrients you need without buying the products of sentient beings. Why don’t vegans want to be able to say that? Why are supplementation-adverse vegans desperately seeking B12 in seaweed when it actually exists in animal foods that their ethics cannot logically prohibit?

A lot of vegans seem to think that the more they limit their food options, the better people they become. But if their motivating principle is sentience, what’s the ethical benefit of adding rules that have nothing to do with that? Why teach an avoidance of all animal products when allowing some of them would be more consistent, less restrictive, would draw more followers and yet still meet the same ethical goals?

Just because the Vegan Society said so?