Why Do We Eat Meat?
This poem was written out of my need to make sense of a world in which I live as a vegan and others do not. At the time, I had a very complicated relationship with people who ate meat. I couldn't understand them, because I felt like I knew so much about the industry and many of them just didn't want to see or care about the animals who were being murdered and abused every day. People are very defensive about what they consume, and as someone who actively chooses a "different lifestyle," conversations about my eating choices came up frequently. I wrote a series of poems about our impact on animals, and this was the last one I wrote. The more poems I finished, the more that I started to realize that I needed to change the way I talked to people about veganism. I needed to tell them that I understood where they were coming from. I was uncertain of how to do this, so I just started writing. The Dr. Seussian style of this poem was a deliberate choice as it was the only way I knew how to make light of a topic that was a core part of my identity. Although the poem is not explicitly about uncertainty, it reflects a time that I felt I was unsure and uncomfortable talking about my politics and practices.
Emily Marsh
We are obsessed with meat.
Because it's delicious and cheap
In the past,
Eating meat meant
A person was wealthy
Now,
Everyone can afford it,
But it's not healthy
We are told
We need
A LOT
Of protein.
We are told
Meats are good
As long as they're lean
Technological innovation
And stuff we loved to try
Now meat's a huge industry It's
weird not to eat it, but why?
We eat more than we need to
Because it's cheap
It's normalized
And there's no good reason not to
It's shoved in our faces
By ads, friends, and family.
We're freaks if we don't
And "it's good" and "I'm hungry"
But the least we can do
Is start cutting down
To reduce our footprint
And save the whole town
Be aware of your impact
You can make a difference.
As long as you're trying,
As long as you listened.