It started probably six years ago with “happy meat” and “grass-fed beef” and Food Inc. and a vague sense that what I eat matters. It was an inconsistent start, full of fits and stops and an unhappy burger here and there. I’ve never much liked chicken but bacon and prosciutto snuck its way in every few months (and still does to a less often degree).

The health phase came next. The China Study, a book about the nutritional benefits of an animal-free diet, introduced to me the idea that animal protein might even be carcinogenic. While the book is based largely on animal and population-level observational studies, a 2013 landmark article on the Mediterranean diet in the New England Journal of Medicine moved me away from red meat entirely. These conclusions were more rigorous and hit closer to home. My response? Eat fish.

For the past three or so years I’ve been a (fairly) strict fish-only omnivore (these days commonly referred to as pescatarian). I probably eat meat—a burger or slice of salami—less than twice per year. During this period you might have heard me explain my eating choices by saying “It isn’t a moral issue for me. It’s more of a health thing.”

Of late, the environmental impacts of factory farmed meat has become widely known, perhaps to everyone but me. It finally dawned on me when I learned people collect methane from cow farts to save the planet (yep they’re called fartpacks). Far from being able to cite statistics, it proved yet another chink in the armor of a meat-eating lifestyle.

And today it is informed by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. He takes direct, decisive, and disastrous aim at the ethical implications of factory farmed meat. Simply put, one cannot read his book and continue to eat factory farmed animal meat unless they ignore reality. Ignorance is no longer a comfortable eating space. Most damning is the realization that even ethically raised meat is a majority of the time slaughtered in highly unethical ways.

I write about my journey because it pulls from so many others’. It continues to be incremental. (I haven’t decided how to approach these considerations when traveling (especially in the developing world) or how to exactly implement them during eventual life back in Portland.)

And it will always be hard. It isn’t fun to talk about with skeptics and it isn’t easy to be consistent. There are foods I’ve missed for years and now new foods will be added to that list. But there has come a time when what I’ve learned, what I now know, demands my vegetarian response. If I choose differently, I’m choosing dishonestly. And as important as meat is to our souls and homes and history, there is another way.

I’ll leave you with a couple quotes from Foer’s book:

“However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless—it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement is.”

“We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?”