Today’s advertiser is Kajabi. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.68.

“Hey Matt! How many pigs today?”

This was the greeting awaiting me a few weeks ago when I walked into Paisanos, a butcher shop that has been serving my Brooklyn neighborhood since 1965. For 18 of those years, I’ve been a regular, sampling their well-marbled steaks, their whole chickens, their panoply of sausages (from andouille to merguez to four kinds of chorizo), their bags of stock-ready bones, and, of course, their whole pigs, raised on small farms in New Jersey, two of which I buy every September to smoke in my yard for our block party. That party is a major undertaking that’s made infinitely easier thanks to Iván, one of the butchers, who trims, scores, and rubs the pigs in the store so I don’t have to at home. Paisanos is a fantastic business, run by real human beings, and I’m thrilled to be recognized by the guys behind the counter, who deal with dozens of customers a day and have no special reason to remember my name and face. But they do! And that makes me happy.

Amazingly, Paisanos is just one of at least seven full-service butcher shops in this neighborhood alone! Staubitz Market, a couple blocks away, has been open since 1917, Dellapietras since 2013, the Meat Hook since 2022 or 2023. There are still two old Italian butchers (I think), at least two halal butchers, and the meat counter at Whole Foods. That’s more butchers than you’d find in many cities in the United States. Brooklyn loves its meat.

So, yes, my family eats meat. Steaks, duck breast, pork butt, spare ribs, chicken thighs, salami sticks, guanciale slabs, bacon ends. Tagines, carnitas, thịt kho, flies’ heads, nikujaga, ragù bolognese, spatchcocked roasts, sloppy joes. We are not, of course, exclusively carnivorous. Every meal features a leafy green of some kind — a simple salad or stir-fried baby bok choy, usually — or Japanese turnips or broccoli (butter-braising works for both of those) or mushrooms (stir-fried with Sichuan peppercorns) or cucumbers. Oh my god, we eat so many cucumbers! Tofu, too — the soft kind in mapo tofu or kimchi jigae, the dried kind shredded into 香干肉丝. A couple of us even love beans! Still, meat remains at the center of most of our meals, a flavorful, nutritious anchor that we all greatly enjoy.

Except that once in a while, for no particular reason, I cast my eyes to the horizon and ask myself a question that is as dumb as it is meaningful:

If aliens ever visited Earth, how would I justify our eating meat?

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Meat is murder. Duh. But lots of things are murder. So many things are murder these days! That is, the process of life requires — or seems to require — a certain amount of death. The transformation of animals into meat for human consumption is only the most obvious version of this. Farming kills as well: the plants themselves, sure, but also the insects and fungi and mammals and micro-organisms we deem pests. We rid ourselves of them through traps and sprays, and we churn up their habitats both intentionally and inadvertently. We may tell ourselves we just want them to go somewhere else, but we all know that somewhere else means the grave. For us to eat, all manner of things must die.

Can we justify this to the aliens? Or, okay, if aliens aren’t your thing, then, like, God™? Or simply our collective moral conscience? What arguments are we going to make to keep on killing?

Maybe we start all the way at the other end and argue the opposite — that we should kill nothing in order to survive. This is certainly an admirable position! It’s more or less the diet of Jainism, an Indian religion that also preaches tolerance and nonviolence, both of which were, until recently, perceived as good things. Jains are not only vegan, they also avoid root vegetables, alliums such as garlic and onions, and anything where you’d not only have to end the plant’s existence in order to consume it but also disrupt large colonies of micro-organisms that surround the plant or its edible bits.

The even more extreme version of this can be seen on the wonderful Apple TV show Pluribus, where an alien virus has turned all but a baker’s dozen of Earth’s human beings into a unified hive mind that is so utterly opposed to taking a life that they won’t engage in farming or even pluck an apple from a tree — and therefore will likely starve to death en masse within a decade. As sweet and noble as it may sound, it’s also nonsensical: Many of the edible plants we survive on evolved to be eaten. Whether their forebears were conscious or not¹, the plants’ own survival into the future is predicated on giving up some piece of themselves to feed other creatures. To refuse that nutrition in the alleged interest of protecting life is nonsensical. Then again, those who go around declaring themselves “pro-life” have always tended to be out of their minds.

I understand these extreme positions. Who wouldn’t want to be an absolutist about protecting life, of all things? But this absolutism is never absolute, because right away we can start arguing over minuscule distinctions. For example: If digging up a potato disturbs too many microorganisms to justify, does plucking a pumpkin from a vine (which is okay by Jains) really do less damage? There are probably both scientific and religious responses to this, but the mere asking of the question is the problem: It shows there is no bright line between protecting life and ending it.

I wish there were! I keep searching for it along the spectrum of consumption, from Jainism to pure carnivorousness. Do we draw the line at animals — and if so, which ones? Mammals and avians, surely, could be on one side of the line, and if that makes sense to you, you’ll probably want to put octopuses there, too. But other fish? Shellfish and mollusks? Lizards? Insects? What qualifies them for freedom from the dinner plate, intelligence or the capacity for pain? How would we measure each of those? And what do we even mean by “pain” — the pain of death or the pain of life in a pen or a cage? Is the former acceptable if the latter is minimized?

There are no easy answers² to any of this, except, I think, to not choose any answer with too much certainty. This seems to be what Peter Singer — the Australian moral philosopher whose book Animal Liberation has been a major influence on vegetarianism and, I guess, ethical eating since its publication in 1975 — now believes. In this Instagram post (and in his 2020 book, Why Vegan?), he declares himself a “flexible vegan”:

As I understand it, that means he’ll eat, say, clams, because they do not experience pain, at least in the way we mammals think of it. Which sounds fine to me! But maybe not to commenters like this one:

Really, the choice here in eating is — as it is everywhere, in all things — between absolutism and flexibility. One may appear to be easier: clearer, simpler, a set of orders to be followed … unless you begin to think a bit and question them. The other, meanwhile, is messier and less demanding, but it requires you to think from the beginning, to make up your own damn mind about the level of damage and pain you’re comfortable inflicting on the world for your own sustenance and pleasure. I can’t tell you which to choose, but you can probably tell my preference, especially since I’ve given no hint here, or in my IRL life, that I’m about to give up smoking pigs.

And when faced with an inquiry from a higher power, I guess maybe I now know what I’ll say: Yes, we raise intelligent (and less-intelligent) animals in unpleasant, often factory-like conditions in order to kill them brutally and process and eat their flesh — while also farming crops in ways that indiscriminately destroy smaller forms of life, from rodents on down to microbes — all because we want to, because it’s what we know, and because we’re morally and physically lazy. Except that we’re not always! Many of us humans push for more humaneness toward all life on Earth, doing what we can, to whatever degree makes sense at the moment, to minimize the harm we cause, while recognizing that harm is inescapable. We all will eat to live, and we all will die and be consumed, and it’s only because we’re human that we can even apply a moral calculus to that process. We may not have settled on a single, universal answer, but the point is that we’re trying to figure it out. Well, some of us are, anyway. And if that’s not enough to save our species from galactic condemnation, I hope they’ll allow me time for one last meal. I know just what it’ll be: a couple dozen oysters on the half-shell, a pile of french fries, and some very cold beer. Is any of that ethical? I don’t care. All I know is it’s delicious. 🪨🪨🪨

I’ve long been obsessed with maps, particularly with older maps that often represent the world in ways we’ve forgotten. The Tabula Peuteingeriana is the best example of this: the largest surviving map from antiquity, showing all the major roads of the Roman Empire — but not in our modern, bird’s-eye-view conception. Instead, it’s more ground-level POV, an enormous scroll that shows, in a mega-rectangle, the towns and cities one would encounter along those roads. You can explore it in very high resolution here.

But now there’s a new, more traditional approach to visualizing the roads of the Roman Empire. It’s called Itiner-e, and it expands the total network from 120,000 miles to 187,460 miles, including not just highways and major thoroughfares (in the ancient Roman sense) to smaller routes and paths, stretching from Cramond (now Edinburgh, Scotland) to Berenike, on the Red Sea. To click around these maps is to be reminded that the complexity of our civilization is nothing new, and that today’s world of concrete, steel, and silicon may someday be viewed as a mysterious, barely comprehensible relic of the past.