Yellowfoots and Sausage: A Conversation About Veganism

A pine forest east of Tallinn, a Saturday in October. Arvo and Liis have been picking mushrooms since nine. They sit down on a fallen tree to eat.

Arvo: Half a basket of yellowfoots and three ceps. I’m calling it a good day. Want half a sandwich?

Liis: What’s in it?

Arvo: Smoked sausage. And mustard. The mustard is vegan, so you can have that part.

Liis: Very kind. I’ve got soup. Lentils and the last squash from the garden.

Arvo: My doctor wants me to eat less of this, you know. (He holds up the sandwich.) She says the WHO puts processed meat in the same group as tobacco.

Liis: Same group, not same danger. The groups are about how sure they are that something causes cancer, not how much cancer it causesIARC, "Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat" (2015), page 2: "processed meat has been classified in the same category as causes of cancer such as tobacco smoking and asbestos (IARC Group 1, carcinogenic to humans), but this does NOT mean that they are all equally dangerous. The IARC classifications describe the strength of the scientific evidence about an agent being a cause of cancer, rather than assessing the level of risk.". It’s still not great. Fifty grams a day, which is about that sandwich, and your bowel cancer risk goes up by something like eighteen percentIARC, "Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat" (2015), page 3: "An analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%.".

Arvo: Eighteen percent of what, though? I ask my students that every year. Nobody ever asks it back.

Liis: Of a small risk. For one person it stays small. It just grows the more you eatIARC press release no. 240 (26 October 2015), page 1: "For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed"..

Arvo: So you’re defending my sausage.

Liis: I’m not defending it. I’m just not going to lie about it.

Arvo: Good, because I’m tired of veganism being sold as a health diet. Half my students think you can’t get protein from plants, the other half think meat rots in your gut, and the three who went vegan last spring were eating kebabs by summer.

Liis: The dietitians are mostly on my side. The big American association said years ago that a well-planned vegan diet is fine at any age. Kids, pregnancy, athletes"Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets", J Acad Nutr Diet (2016), abstract: "appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.".

Arvo: “Well-planned.” Meaning pills, and reading labels for the rest of your life. My diet takes no planning at all. I eat what my mother cooked, and I’m fine.

Liis: I take B12, yes. Without a supplement or fortified food, a vegan diet isn’t adequate, full stop"Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets" (2016), abstract: "Vegans need reliable sources of vitamin B-12, such as fortified foods or supplements.". And I think about iodine more than a normal person should. It took me about a year before it stopped being work.

Arvo: Then there are bones. That big Oxford study. The vegans broke more hips.

Liis: They did. The vegans had more fractures than meat eaters, and hips were the worst: more than twice the riskTong et al., "Vegetarian and vegan diets and risks of total and site-specific fractures: results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study", BMC Medicine (2020), abstract, Results: "the risks of hip fracture were higher in fish eaters (hazard ratio 1.26 ...), vegetarians (1.25 ...), and vegans (2.31; 1.66–3.22), equivalent to rate differences of 2.9 ..., 2.9 ..., and 14.9 (7.9–24.5) more cases for every 1000 people over 10 years, respectively. The vegans also had higher risks of total (1.43; 1.20–1.70) ... fractures". And it shrank a bit but didn’t go away when they adjusted for body weight, calcium and proteinTong et al., BMC Medicine (2020), abstract, Results: "Overall, the significant associations appeared to be stronger without adjustment for BMI and were slightly attenuated but remained significant with additional adjustment for dietary calcium and/or total protein.", so nobody’s sure why. I eat tofu made with calcium and hope.

Arvo: So I keep my hips.

Liis: And I keep my heart. Same researchers, same group of people. The vegetarians had less heart disease and a few more strokes, and the heart difference was the bigger oneTong et al., "Risks of ischaemic heart disease and stroke in meat eaters, fish eaters, and vegetarians over 18 years of follow-up: results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study", BMJ (2019), abstract, Results: "This difference was equivalent to 10 fewer cases of ischaemic heart disease ... in vegetarians than in meat eaters per 1000 population over 10 years." and "vegetarians had 20% higher rates of total stroke ... equivalent to three more cases of total stroke ... per 1000 population over 10 years, mostly due to a higher rate of haemorrhagic stroke." Note: "vegetarians" here includes vegans, and the heart disease difference partly shrank (HR 0.90, 0.81 to 1.00) after adjusting for cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes and BMI..

Arvo: Hips against strokes. Lovely trade.

Liis: Honestly, I think a careful vegan and a careful meat eater both end up fine. I’m not in this for my health.

Arvo: I know. I just like making you say it.

Liis: Chickens, mostly. Most of the animals we kill for meat are chickens. Something like seventy-four billion a yearOur World in Data, "How many animals get slaughtered every day?" (2023), endnote: "Chicken: 73,790,000,000 per year" (FAO data for 2021)..

Arvo: I grew up with my grandmother’s pigs. They had names, a muddy yard, and one bad day.

Liis: If that were the meat in the shops, my case would be a lot weaker. But it isn’t. In the US, ninety-nine percent of farmed animals are on factory farms. For meat chickens it’s basically all of themSentience Institute, "US Factory Farming Estimates" (updated November 2024), opening paragraph: "We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 74.9% of cows, 98.6% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.3% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms.".

Arvo: That’s America. This is Estonia.

Liis: I looked for Estonian numbers and couldn’t find any. When did you last see chickens outside on a farm here?

Arvo: (He thinks about it.) My grandmother’s.

Liis: There you go.

Arvo: Fine. And I’ll do broilers myself, because I teach them. It’s the best selection experiment anyone ever ran. You pick the fastest growers, generation after generation, and you end up with a bird that goes from hatching to slaughter weight in about six weeksKnowles et al., "Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention", PLoS ONE (2008), Introduction: "the majority of broilers are reared using very similar, modern, intensive systems of production where birds are confined for their lifetime within high density housing and reared from hatch to slaughter weight within approximately 40 days.". The skeleton can’t keep up with the meat. In one big British study, over a quarter of the birds walked badly, and three percent could hardly walk at allKnowles et al., PLoS ONE (2008), abstract: "At a mean age of 40 days, over 27.6% of birds in our study showed poor locomotion and 3.3% were almost unable to walk." The study covered 51,000 birds in 176 UK flocks.. I show my class the photos.

Liis: So you agree with me.

Arvo: About broilers. Not about everything else. With birds the evidence is decent. But you lot slide from chickens to fish to shrimp, and the evidence gets thinner every step.

Liis: It’s thinner, not gone. In 2024 a big group of scientists signed a declaration. Strong support for conscious experience in mammals and birds. A “realistic possibility” in all vertebrates, fish included, and in a lot of invertebrates"The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness" (19 April 2024): "First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds. Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).".

Arvo: “Realistic possibility.” That’s scientists saying they don’t know.

Liis: Yes. And if I don’t know whether something can suffer, and I don’t need to eat it, I’d rather not pay someone to find out.

Arvo: Half the ceps in your basket have maggots in them. You’re cooking those too.

Liis: I cut the bad bits out.

Arvo: Mostly.

They walk on. Near the ditch, Arvo stops by a heap of moss and leaves. A roe deer's leg sticks out of it.

Arvo: Look. Lynx, I’d guess. They hide what they don’t finish. This is what I always want to say to you. You talk as if the alternative to a farm is a meadow. For most animals the alternative is this. Or starving in February. Or being eaten from the inside by wasp larvae. Darwin wrote to a friend that he couldn’t believe a kind God would have made wasps that feed inside living caterpillarsCharles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, 22 May [1860], Darwin Correspondence Project, DCP-LETT-2814: "There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.".

Liis: I like that letter. But it’s an argument against God, not for chicken sheds.

Arvo: It’s an argument that suffering is normal. Every biology teacher knows this, and nobody wants to hear it. A fish lays thousands or millions of eggs, and in a stable population about one per parent grows up. The rest starve or get eatenOscar Horta, "The Problem of Evil in Nature: Evolutionary Bases of the Prevalence of Disvalue", Relations 3.1 (2015), page 23: "the great majority of the animals existing in nature are much more characteristically r-strategists, and reproduce by laying enormous amounts of eggs (often thousands or tens of thousands, and in some cases millions of them). ... for each animal that reproduces, only one of her or his offspring survives ... These animals starve to death, are eaten by other animals, or die for other reasons that usually entail a great deal of suffering.". A short life and a bad death is the default. A farm animal at least gets fed, and dies fast.

Liis: But I didn’t send the lynx. I do pay for the chicken. And that chicken wasn’t saved from the forest. Nobody would have bred it if we didn’t want to eat it. So it’s not shed versus forest. It’s shed versus no chicken.

Arvo: Then the sausage is the only reason that pig ever lived. Grandma’s pigs got a year of mud and apples because someone wanted ham. Take away the ham and you don’t get happier pigs. You get no pigs.

Liis: And a pig that never exists isn’t missing anything.

Arvo: Then it isn’t spared anything either. You can’t have it both ways. If never existing can’t hurt, it can’t help.

Liis: For a bird that spends its last weeks too heavy to walk, I think it helps.

Arvo: You think. You’re guessing what it’s like to be a chicken, same as me.

Liis: Then I’d rather guess on the side where nobody gets hurt.

Arvo: On your side nobody gets anything. That’s my whole point.

Neither of them says anything for a while. Liis finds a patch of yellowfoots and kneels down.

Arvo: And your food kills too, you know. Combine harvesters shred mice. Some American animal scientist did the maths once and argued that fewer animals would die if people ate pasture-raised beef instead of only crops.

Liis: Someone answered that paper pretty fast. He compared totals, not how many animals die per person fed. Fix that and his own numbers point the other wayGaverick Matheny, "Least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis's omnivorous proposal", Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16(5), 2003, abstract: "Davis's argument fails on three counts: first, Davis makes a mathematical error in using total rather than per capita estimates of animals killed; second, he focuses on the number of animals killed in production and ignores the welfare of these animals; and third, he does not count the number of animals who may be prevented from existing. When we correct these errors, Davis's argument makes a strong case for, rather than against, adopting a vegetarian diet.". And livestock already takes up nearly eighty percent of the world’s farmland, for less than a fifth of our caloriesOur World in Data, Hannah Ritchie, "How much of the world's land would we need in order to feed the global population with the average diet of a given country?" (2017), introduction: "Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories"..

Arvo: A lot of which is grazing land you couldn’t plough. Rocks, hills, bog.

Liis: Some of it.

Arvo: A lot of it. And then there’s moose. My uncle shot one last autumn. Hundreds of kilos of meat from one animal that lived its whole life in a forest like this, and died a lot faster than that deer.

Liis: Of all the meat you could eat, that’s the one I mind least. If everyone ate like your uncle, I’d find something else to argue about. But the world eats seventy-four billion chickens, not moose.

Arvo: And the world isn’t going to stop. Vegans are about one percent of Americans. That number has barely moved in yearsGallup, "In U.S., 4% Identify as Vegetarian, 1% as Vegan" (August 2023): "Gallup's latest Consumption Habits poll finds 4% of Americans saying they are vegetarian and 1% vegan, in terms of their eating preferences. These figures are similar to what Gallup has measured previously, including in 2012 and 2018.". And most people who try it quit. Eighty-four percent of vegetarians and vegans give upFaunalytics, "A Summary Of Faunalytics' Study Of Current And Former Vegetarians And Vegans" (2016), key findings: "84% of vegetarians/vegans abandon their diet. About a third (34%) of lapsed vegetarians/vegans maintained the diet for three months or less. Slightly more than half (53%) adhered to the diet for less than one year.".

Liis: A third of the quitters lasted three months or less. Plenty of them were just trying it out.

Arvo: That makes it worse. They tried it and didn’t like it.

Liis: Or they tried it badly. No B12, nobody to tell them what to cook.

Arvo: You mean it wasn’t well-planned.

Liis: All right. Yes.

Arvo: So where does your change come from, if not from people?

Liis: From laws, mostly. The EU banned the old battery cages in 2012The Poultry Site, "It's Official: EU Battery Cage Ban Starts January 2012" (20 January 2011): "These cages will have to be phased out in the EU by 1 January 2012." The article refers to Council Directive 1999/74/EC on the protection of laying hens.. Bigger “enriched” cages are still allowed, but it was a start. Germany banned killing male chicks in 2022German Federal Ministry of Agriculture (BMLEH), "Phasing-out of chick culling": "On 20 May 2021, the German Bundestag adopted the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture's act banning the culling of chicks. It came into effect on 1 January 2022, making Germany a global pioneer in this area.". Nobody needed a vegan majority for that.

Arvo: That’s welfare reform. I’d vote for all of it. But it’s not what you want.

Liis: It’s not all I want. And people drift. In Britain, meat eating fell by about a sixth in ten yearsStewart et al., "Trends in UK meat consumption: analysis of data from years 1–11 (2008–09 to 2018–19) of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey rolling programme", Lancet Planetary Health (2021), abstract, Findings: "From 2008 to 2019, average meat consumption per capita per day decreased from 103·7 g (SE 2·3) to 86·3 g (2·9) per day". That is a drop of about 17%., and nobody banned anything.

Arvo: Let me guess. Chicken went up.

Liis: White meat went up a little, while red and processed meat came downStewart et al., "Trends in UK meat consumption: analysis of data from years 1–11 (2008–09 to 2018–19) of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey rolling programme", Lancet Planetary Health (2021), abstract, Findings: "From 2008 to 2019, average meat consumption per capita per day decreased ... including an absolute reduction in red-meat consumption of 13·7 g (ptrend<0·0001), an absolute reduction in processed meat consumption of 7·0 g (ptrend<0·0001), and a 3·2 g increase (ptrend=0·0027) in white-meat consumption.".

Arvo: There you go. People drop beef because their doctor says so, and they eat chicken instead. That’s not good news for your chickens.

Liis: No. It’s the worst swap there is.

Arvo: I know. I’ve done it. I eat meat maybe four days a week now. My father ate it twice a day. Beef’s mostly gone, because of the price and the doctor. What came instead was chicken. One beef animal gives a few hundred kilos of meat. One chicken gives under twoOur World in Data, "Kilograms of meat produced per animal" (data from Faunalytics, 2023): "The quantity of meat produced per average animal over its lifetime. For example, the average chicken would yield 1.7 kilogram of edible meat." The chart's 2023 values: beef 364 kg, chicken 1.74 kg per animal.. I can do the division. Swap beef for chicken and you need about two hundred times as many animals for the same meat.

Liis: And they’re the ones with the worst lives.

Arvo: A beef cow’s life isn’t a holiday either. And chicken is the cheap one. I’ve got two teenagers to feed.

Liis: A cow can at least walk. If you’re cutting back for the animals’ sake, drop chicken and eggs first. Keep the beef if you must. And your uncle’s moose.

Arvo: A vegan telling me to eat moose. I should record this.

Liis: I’d rather you ate lentils. I just know you won’t.

Arvo: I’ll think about the chicken. Properly, not to make you happy.

Liis: And the sausage?

Arvo: The sausage came from a pig with a name.

Liis: It came from the petrol station.

Arvo: Then it had a name at the petrol station.

Liis: Come on. I saw more yellowfoots on the other side of the ditch, and I’m not sharing.

Written by Claude Opus 5.5 under a defined process, which includes AI fact-checking.