"Meat is murder. Tasty murder." Yes, we've all seen and laughed at the t-shirts and bumper stickers that say that, and then continued to bite into our burgers and roll our eyes at the hippie vegans with their tofu. But I think deep down, we actually, literally believe that.

See, my thing is, I don't laugh at vegans. I know they're right. I'm horrified by the idea of slaughtering an animal. There is no way to do it "humanely." Every time you eat a burger, or some chicken, or some bacon, you're eating a piece of a living, breathing, feeling creature that felt horrible pain as it died. If I had to watch the animal get murdered, I don't think I'd be able to eat the meat. I wouldn't in my wildest dreams be able to do it.

The world will be a better place once we have the technology to grow salami in a laboratory without murdering any pigs. Nobody but the most sociopathic fuck on the planet would disagree with that.

But the people who can stomach killing an animal? They're not sociopaths. Most of them are good people. They've learned to grin and bear something horrible out of necessity. Much like how, during a zombie apocalypse, the rest of us would learn to grin and bear shooting our infected friends. If the world changed tomorrow, and nobody had to kill an animal ever again, most slaughterhouse workers wouldn't miss their old jobs at all. (Other than the whole losing their job thing, but that's about wanting to have a job, not about wanting to kill animals)

Now, the other big reason to be a vegan is one that often gets ignored: the fact that something like 70 or 80 percent of all the crops grown in the industrialized world go to feed livestock, not humans. Farming animals is tremendously wasteful. So even if you are an animal-murdering sociopath, there's still a legitimate economic reason why you might want to boycott meat.

In fact, boycotting meat is the whole point of people who call themselves "meagans:" they will eat meat if it's free, but they won't buy it themselves. I'm not a meagan. I do, quite often, pay for meals that have meat in them. The reason being that I don't really think my refusal to spend money on meat is going to have any meaningful effect. I'm one person against millions, billions of people who keep buying meat. Until some critical mass of people refusing meat is reached, it's not going to make a difference.

Now, obviously, we're not going to get to that critical mass until people like me shut up and join the movement. On the one hand, I don't think we're going to reach that critical mass by spreading the word of veganism. People at large care more about economics than they do about ethics, and meat isn't prohibitively expensive enough for people to bite the bullet — and "no-kill" lab-grown meat isn't good or cheap enough yet either. On the other hand, I'm just trying to make excuses for the fact that I'm too much of a bitch to kick my meat habit. I'm a massive hypocrite pulling unproven theories of social dynamics out of my ass, in order to avoid admitting that I'm a massive hypocrite.

If I said any of this to a hardcore vegan, they'd spit in my face. I care about the rights and welfare of animals, but I'm not going to take the step and fight to protect them. And they're absolutely right to do so. History will not look kindly on me. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and I eat bacon. In 200 years, my love of bacon will seem backwards, barbaric, and monstrous. So I completely understand why any radical animal rights activist would hate me. They're just already living in the future.

So meat is, in fact, tasty murder. No meat-lover is happy about the dead animals. No meat-lover would be sad to see the animal murder go away, so long as the meat tasted the same. Deep down, we all agree with the vegans, we're just not ready to do something about it. That time will come, either when meat becomes unsustainable, or when lab-grown meat becomes viable. Personally, I hope it's the latter. I really like bacon.