Pamela is pursuing a PhD in philosophy and education, mostly studying moral education and school reform. I would have loved to talk to her about educational philosopher John Holt’s unschooling movement (she’s a fan), but Pamela was an ex-vegan and first I needed to find out — how could someone who once knew it was evil to eat even trace amounts of animal products ever go back to eating meat? She writes a blog called This Field is Required, and in the entries “Why Being Vegan Can Be Bad For You” and “More Thoughts On Veganism and Well-Being”, she answered this question. So really I just wanted her to say it over here. 

What got you into vegetarianism and then veganism?

When I moved across the country and began graduate school, I was broke, living alone and clueless about cooking. So I started eating even less meat than usual (I’d never been much of a carnivore). It was eventually down to one or two servings per week, almost exclusively at restaurants. Because I was eating less meat already and realized I didn’t miss it much, I was slowly becoming more receptive to arguments for veg*nism.

Then I adopted my first dog, Chip, as an adult from a rescue group. He had apparently been abandoned and spent some time as a stray, which left him with severe separation anxiety. He would literally have a panic attack every time I even looked like I was leaving the house. I was amazed at the obvious complexity of his range of emotions, and the depth to which he experienced them. It made no sense to spend hundreds of dollars on his medical care — and a doggie behaviorist, even — and then to turn around and eat other animals who were just as emotionally sensitive as Chip.

So, I started feeling rather guilty about eating meat and became vegetarian soon thereafter. But on account of the vegans’ arguments for the inconsistency of vegetarianism, that dairy and egg production methods are at least as cruel as that of meat production, I ended up going vegan another month or two after that.

Behaving like a vegetarian apparently helped you decide to become one. Something similar happened to me. One night at a buffet restaurant (I’m not ashamed to say it was Golden Corral) I unintentionally got only vegetarian foods. The friend who was with me asked if I was vegetarian. I looked at all the vegetarian food on my tray and said “Yes.” I didn’t eat meat again until ten years later. I had already been considering vegetarianism, so it wasn’t totally random, but it also seemed to relate to what you wrote on your blog: “Your value judgments and deliberative processes can themselves be altered by ways in which you already act.” Are we not really as moral and rational as we like to think?

Moral psychology is a fascinating but possibly disillusioning field, because it exposes so many shortcomings in human reasoning as to invite a general skepticism toward people’s choices and justifications.

I think these cases have a lot to do with cognitive dissonance. There is a psychic cost associated with the mismatch between beliefs and behaviors, so we naturally try to get one in line with the other. This can be accomplished by either changing the belief or the behavior, and maybe that happens somewhat haphazardly. Holding values deeply, reflectively, and consistently remains possible, but not without an awareness of the biases and barriers that threaten critical thinking.

You were vegan for nine months. How did you quit?

I didn’t just wake up one day, decide to quit being vegan, and start force feeding myself foie gras. Rather, I had spent a while struggling with some very strong cravings for animal foods, particularly eggs. Some people interpret cravings as our bodies telling us what they need. That sounds plausible, but I don’t know that there’s any evidence for it. The cravings could also have just been related to the fact that animal foods had become forbidden fruits, so to speak.

I merely gave myself permission to eat animal foods when and if I felt that doing so was right for me, all things considered.

Why did you feel the need to leave veganism?

There were a few aspects to it. One was the cravings I just mentioned. Another important factor was my growing disillusionment with sources of vegan nutritional information. It often seems that everyone giving out nutritional advice has an agenda –- the vegetarians and vegans, the Paleolithic eaters, the government –- and that everyone’s data just happens to justify their pre-existing beliefs about what we should eat.

In general, I have a lot of respect for evolutionary biology, and so I became concerned that there was some truth to the suggestion that people aren’t fully evolved to eat a whole lot of grains, or processed foods in general.

Much of my vegan diet consisted of these items, and it began to feel like wishful thinking to suppose that the diet is the best from a nutritional point of view.

Some vegans are going to think, “Aha! She ate too many grains and processed foods. No wonder she didn’t feel healthy as a vegan. If only she had followed nutritionist Jack Norris’s advice, she could have stayed vegan.” Do you think that you “did veganism wrong” and could have figured out a way to make it work if you tried harder?

No, and I think that vegans who say those things to ex-vegans who made good faith attempts at veganism are putting a mean-spirited face on the animal rights movement. I have quite unstable blood sugar, and this was exacerbated by veganism because of the low amounts of protein that plant foods provide. Surely it was enough protein to stay alive, but maybe not optimally. I had serious reservations about eating large amounts of soy foods, and the only unequivocal defenders of them were people committed to the veg agenda.

I could have eaten fewer grains and processed foods but, from what I understand, people on more like a raw diet fare even more poorly health-wise in the long term than ordinary vegetarians or vegans. Evolutionarily indicated diets that reject grains and processed foods make up for them with meat, raw milk and eggs, not with pounds and pounds of fruits and vegetables. So that was more of a gamble than I was willing to take with my own health. And people are at least as morally obligated to take care of themselves as they are obligated to take care of any animal.

Did anything other than nutritional fears cause you to reconsider veganism? 

Most of all I was disturbed by some of the attitudes that being vegan caused me to develop. I have what you might call an obsessive personality. This probably partially explains why people like me who become interested in animal issues jump so quickly into veganism, finding its logical consistency and purity attractive.

Over the nine months I spent vegan, I experienced emotional ups and downs, between feeling proud and good about my lifestyle to feeling despair at the plight of animals and disgust toward everyone around me for their failure to see the light.

Ultimately, I think the way in which being vegan often compromises social relationships is the biggest indictment against it. How are you supposed to fully appreciate your spouse, parents, friends, etc. and enjoy spending time with them when your moral ideology has you focusing on how totally nonchalant they are about torture and death?

Veganism provided the perfect opportunity for me to obsess about something while pretending that it was totally justified. I am surely not the only vegan for whom the diet serves that purpose. Quitting veganism turned out to be essential on my own journey in fighting obsessive tendencies.

Can you think of specific instances when your vegan ethics came between you and another person?

For sure. My husband, then fiancé, moved in with me while I was vegan. He was a really good sport about it, and ate vegan dinners that I prepared, but had non-vegetarian breakfasts and lunches. I was pretty disgusted by having animal foods around, and I tried hard not to think about how little he apparently cared about the animals.

I also had some trouble with my mom. I became vegan after a period in which I had started exercising and eating a healthier omnivorous diet, and had lost around 30 pounds. My body mass index had fallen to squarely in the normal range, but I think my mom thought I was developing an eating disorder. She would give me a bit of a hard time about not wanting to eat certain meals with the family, and asked how I could lead a normal social life as a vegan. To some extent, her concerns were legitimate, but I resented them.

I’m jealous of people who left veganism sooner than I did. How did you realize in nine months what it took me nine years to realize?

I’m sure that the main reason I realized some of these things so quickly is because I am a philosopher in training. My undergraduate degree is in philosophy, and I have almost three years of graduate work in philosophy under my belt. Thinking about things (mostly ethics, broadly construed) is just what I do, both professionally and for fun. My philosophical nature is what helped to get me into veganism in the first place, but ultimately it is also what got me out.

I began studying Aristotle, who takes a very different approach to ethics than most contemporary moral philosophers. While newer work in ethics tends to be fairly technical, and focused on the rightness or wrongness of particular hypothetical actions, Aristotelian virtue ethics focuses on the qualities of character that help a human to excel and flourish. From this perspective, I began to see that a genuine sensitivity towards the suffering of non-human animals is compatible with eating in ways that do not harm me, mentally or physically.

You got into veganism because you believed that it was wrong to cause animals suffering and death. But you quit veganism because it wasn’t good for you. Do you still agree with the arguments for veganism, then?

I don’t think there is anything wrong with causing animals’ deaths, per se, because I don’t believe animals have rights. However, I do continue to believe that animals have a morally significant interest in not suffering. The arguments for veganism – the good ones, anyway – make legitimate trouble for the omnivorous habits in which most people uncritically engage.

The identification and explanation of speciesism represents a great step forward in expanding our moral spheres to include not only humans of other races and genders but non-human animals as well. And the problem of marginal cases helps to clarify our thinking about animals, while also shedding light on related moral issues, such as what qualities are necessary and sufficient for moral personhood. So yes, I still believe in the arguments to a large extent.

But since you now eat meat, is it that you think applying these arguments does not require veganism? Or do you think that it’s permissible not to fully live up to all of your own beliefs?

Of course, I’d rather not see myself as akratic, or weak-willed, in that I can’t bring myself to follow my own best moral judgments regarding whether I should be vegan. I suppose that’s possible – humans are excellent rationalizers, and our motives are often opaque to us. But, officially, I would say that vegan arguments do not show that veganism is morally obligatory. Rather, they suggest that veganism is supererogatory – an instance of going morally above and beyond.

Vegan arguments are hard to criticize because they are indeed logical, and many people who attempt to refute them do so ineptly. But the broader, more holistic moral perspective that I described before – that of Aristotelian virtue ethics – provides reasonable explanations for why veganism is not required.

Because humans are social creatures, the social costs of veganism may be too high, depending on the circumstances. Because humans are also animals, lifestyles that are natural to us (like omnivorous eating) are good and fitting, when pursued wisely. When we take nutritional concerns into account as well, there is enough reason to reject veganism as obligatory – in my opinion, anyway.

This does not absolve people of the need to be compassionate towards animals, which is an individually and socially valuable trait.

A way to summarize the main vegan argument might be to say that animals being sentient proves that animals have rights. Yet you believe animals are sentient and don’t have rights. What’s wrong with the argument that sentience = rights?

Sentience is only one of a variety of properties that can ground a being’s having rights. People who reject the sentience explanation or justification of rights tend to adopt an alternative standard, which appeals to capacities that it seems only humans have. These are usually taken to include things like the capacity for reasoning (especially including moral reasoning) and the having of a life plan.

Of course, this argument runs into the problem of marginal cases, but you can always bite the bullet and say that higher animals do have rights and that humans lacking these capacities do not. You can also adopt some view according to which rights aren’t natural, but are constructed through hypothetical or actual negotiations in which animals cannot take part.

Do you think the origin of vegan reasoning often comes from an emotional feeling of disgust toward animal killing, and then finding the logical arguments to support those emotions?

I have no doubt that much of vegan thinking originates in this way. Why else would PETA find more success in showing graphic videos than in presenting logical arguments?

However, this is no indictment against veganism. Experimental philosophers studying moral psychology are finding that many or most of our moral judgments are based on disgust reactions or the lack thereof.

Paradigmatic examples might include homophobia and racism. People with these positions are just trying to justify a primitive disgust reaction. People with more liberal beliefs experience less disgust toward homosexuals and people of other races, so the theory goes.

Vegans say that speciesism is just as bad as racism, sexism and the lot. Do you agree? Or is there a significant difference between speciesism and discrimination between human groups?

There may be a sense in which speciesism is equally bad, from some kind of ideal moral perspective. But I think people are less blameworthy for being speciesist than for being racist or sexist. In combating racism and sexism, we usually use techniques to get people to see just how alike women or non-natives are to themselves. This technique is not as effective in the animal case, for probably evolutionary reasons that are quite difficult to counter.

People who have close relationships with higher animals do sometimes begin to see their similarities with humans (as I did with my dog), but the similarities are indeed more limited than in the racism and sexism cases. I think this similarity gap explains animals’ not having rights, but not the more commonly drawn conclusion that we do not have obligations of any kind towards animals.

Many vegans believe that the only way to avoid speciesism is to be vegan. Are they right?

They are wrong. Speciesism consists not in treating different groups of beings differently, but in failing to give different groups of beings equal moral consideration for no good reason. Thus you cannot necessarily infer that a practice is speciesist just because it results in different species being treated differently.

I happen to believe that the outcome of giving animals genuinely equal moral consideration can be some diet other than veganism. Although it matters that animals suffer, and we should do a lot to alleviate that, they cannot experience the social and personal distress that being vegan tends to incite.

This justifies our causing animals some amount of suffering – although certainly not an unlimited amount. And this conclusion is not speciesist, because it did not come from denying animals equal moral consideration.

To many vegans it makes no sense to care about animals enough to improve how you treat them or to reduce consumption of them, but not to quit eating them completely. If it’s wrong to intentionally kill a million animals, then it’s wrong to intentionally kill one.

Veganism, besides being about consistency, is also about maximization. As you say, vegans would have us not merely reduce animal suffering but literally try to eliminate it. This idea is related to the moral theory of hedonistic act utilitarianism, which holds that an action is morally permissible if and only if there is no other action that would produce more utility, impartially considered and over time.

But hedonistic act utilitarianism is the laughingstock of moral philosophy, and almost no one accepts it because it has possibly terrible implications: punishing the innocent, forcing organ donation, spending all our resources on satisfying a utility monster, denying that anyone has rights, ignoring the past and only considering the future, etc.

Once we reject a maximizing conception of utility, there is nothing baffling about reducing animal consumption but not eliminating it completely. Flexitarianism becomes morally akin to giving to charity sometimes but not always, which almost everyone agrees is morally permissible.

So there is an ethical component to your own flexitarianism? 

Yes, definitely. It’s not as if I have tried to reassume willful ignorance regarding animal issues. My flexitarianism is not merely for taste or nutrition, but itself constitutes a morally responsive way of life.

I eat very many vegetarian meals and some vegan meals. I eat meat, on average, maybe once or twice per week, which is really very little as compared to the standard American diet. I try to choose animal foods from reputable sources and am very happy to shop at Whole Foods, whose moral and political stances I respect.

And anytime I attend an event where guests are asked to choose entrees or specify dietary requirements in advance, I go vegetarian. That sends a signal to others about me and my beliefs that would go unknown if I were to eat the meat dish.

That’s the opposite of one of my friends who only eats vegan at home and then will eat anything when out. His reasoning is that he avoids the social alienation and inconvenience of veganism this way, while still being vegan most of the time. On the other hand, your way would make sense from the Jonathan Safran Foer perspective of setting an example. Do you think that you can offset some of the moral cost of your own meat eating by convincing others to eat less meat?

I definitely understand the eating habits of your friend. Because I don’t like having a lot of meat around and am not always comfortable touching or preparing it, I also eat meat at restaurants sometimes – but typically when my doing so is anonymous. In those cases, my eating vegan will not really convince anyone of anything, unlike when I am dining with friends or other associates.

I had an awkward experience in this regard last year. I was teaching an introduction to philosophy course while I was vegan, and I discussed it with the class. One of the students in the class works at one of my favorite restaurants. Now, when I go there and she’s working, I become concerned that she will think I was lying about being vegan or that I’m a hypocrite (in the case that I’m eating something non-vegan). The ridiculous part is that she probably doesn’t even think of the vegan stuff when she sees me.

I’m not particularly forceful about my moral flexitarianism, in that I don’t really try to change others’ beliefs or diets. But I am happy to discuss my position, if it comes up, and I like it when people express curiosity about it.

I don’t see convincing others to eat less meat as a way of offsetting the moral cost of my own meat eating, though. Rather, if I succeeding in doing so, I would see it as helping the person to lead a better life, morally and nutritionally, for that person’s own sake.

Because we have higher capacities and therefore are morally responsible agents, it’s bad for people to live their lives indifferent to gross amounts of animal suffering. I’m glad that animals’ suffering may be reduced as a side effect of the diet, but a veg*n-inspired lifestyle is ultimately justified by the goodness of the accompanying compassion and awareness for humans.

In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safron Foer calls compassion a muscle that we exercise by making an ethical choice such as vegetarianism every single day. But for me there was very little compassion exercising involved. Rather, veganism became a rigid habit. Was your veganism a constant compassion workout?

I agree that compassion is a muscle we *should* exercise every day. But I don’t think that simply being vegetarian is evidence that you are in fact continually exercising compassion. The diet can definitely become rigid and rule-bound, rather than remaining an expression of the goodness of our characters.

While I was vegan, I did think about the animals with some frequency, but it was emotionally draining and socially isolating. Eating vegan didn’t feel compassionate so much as it felt like my only hope for escaping constant and crushing guilt. 

Is there anything you miss about veganism?

Labels give a shape to our identities, and I liked being able to convey my beliefs simply to others by applying the “vegan” label to myself. Now, I practically have to write a book to even begin to explain it all. Being vegan made me feel clean and self-righteous, which was gratifying (although probably damaging in the long run).

I drove by a filthy cow farm on a recent road trip, and I would have liked to be able to say “I don’t give my money to those reprehensible businesses.” While I still don’t approve of the intensive farms, being vegan is like putting your money where your mouth is.

Also, being vegan caused me to choose and plan meals carefully. As a non-vegan, I am struggling to retain that kind of awareness of, and connection to, the food I eat.

Fortunately, vegans don’t have a monopoly on compassionate and mindful eating – it’s just that, for the rest of us, the path is not so clear.