One thing I realized while reading Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, a critique of the vegan approach to saving the world, is that veganism is a case of recognizing what is seen and overlooking what is unseen.

This concept of the seen and the unseen originated with the French economic philosopher Frederick Bastiat. His essay, What is Seen and What is Not Seen, began with this:

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

This explains man’s necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others.

Bastiat approaches this from an economic standpoint, but his observation is relevant whenever someone acts like the only thing that matters is what is obvious and in front of them, and doesn’t consider the consequences of their actions that they cannot spot directly. Like vegans.

In The Vegetarian Myth, Lierre Keith makes a case against veganism that surprised me. Not only is veganism unhealthy, which I already knew from personal experience, but a vegan world is not environmentally sustainable, nor would it even be good for the animals. To someone who cares only about what is seen, the possibility that animals might benefit from human meat consumption is self-evidently absurd. Animals want to live, vegans don’t eat animals, therefore veganism is what’s best for animals.

Keith shows that it’s not so simple. There is an unseen.

Meat eating is natural, she argues, and when done properly, is a vital component in the cycle of life. Much more destructive than eating animal flesh per se are the 12,000 years we’ve spent coercing the land (and the animals) through the butchery known as agriculture. Yes, shoot a deer in the heart with an arrow, and you’ve just killed a deer. That death is obvious - you can see the blood dripping in a puddle in front of you. But what about the death of entire ecosystems and animal species to pave the way for wheat fields and soybeans? That death is not as obvious as the death you see in a hunk of grass-fed animal flesh on your plate, but it is much more tragic.

From page 49 of The Vegetarian Myth:

Rice, wheat, corn—the annual grains that vegetarians want the world to eat—are thirsty enough to drink whole rivers. … Irrigation doesn’t ‘just’ destroy wetlands and riparian systems. As the water table drops, any trees left standing behind the plow die of thirst as their roots no longer reach water. All that’s left is dust. And the dust builds into storms… The Yellow River begins in the plateaus of Tibet, in an area called ‘the country of thousands of lakes.’ Over half those lakes are only a memory on a map, having disappeared into wheat and rice below…

Set aside the fossil fuel for the fertilizer and transportation. If you live in Burlington, Vermont or Santa Cruz, California, and you eat rice—ubiquitous, vegan brown rice—this is what you’re eating: dead fish and dead birds from a dying river. It takes anywhere from 250 to 650 gallons of water to grow a pound of rice. Pretend your rice was grown in North America. Picture Texas or California. Now picture rice, tropically lush with green—and up to its neck in water. Where does that water come from? Now substitute ‘home’ for ‘water’: Long-nose gar and roseate spoonbills, American alligators and piping plovers. There’s death on your plate, an entire ecosystem’s worth, but it happened out past the asphalt, far, far out, in a world we will never know.

Most vegans, when pressed, will admit that animals are killed in the process of procuring their veggies and grains (this common discussion between vegans and non-vegans is much simpler than the ecosystem argument - it’s usually about little creatures that get caught in harvesting machines). But vegans have their own seen versus unseen argument here. They say that meat eaters eat these grains too, and besides, compared to raising animals on grain, it’s much more efficient for humans to eat grain directly. Vegans are right about this, except that the answer isn’t to stop eating meat. The answer is to stop feeding animals grains.

Grains undeniably cause death in multiple ways, but as long as vegans don’t see this death, they are okay with it. They may abstractly know that an entire family of mice was killed to put those egg-free pancakes on their plate, but they don’t have a moral problem with this because killing mice wasn’t the direct intent.

Yet if I were to find a mouse in a field and eat it, mouse death suddenly becomes morally objectionable. It is the same amount of death (arguably the vegan pancakes cause more), but vegans can see the death in the blood dribbling down my chin and the tail caught between my teeth. Death is fine. It’s visible death that’s wrong.

By not consuming animal products directly, vegans fool themselves into thinking that they don’t contribute to death in the world. Just like all of us, they do. But their version of death is “ethical,” because the death they cause is unseen.