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I keep a running list. Seven years of being vegan. Hundreds of conversations. Every time someone finds out and launches into their defense, I mentally tick a box. And here's what I've learned: there are roughly a dozen excuses, and they rotate. It's like everyone downloaded the same app.
The wild part? I used every single one of these before I went vegan. I know the logic from the inside. I know the emotional shortcuts. I know exactly how it feels to want the excuse to be true.
Here's the list. And here's why every entry is wrong.
"We've Always Eaten Meat"
We've also always had slavery, child labor, and public executions. "We've always done it" is not a moral argument. It's a confession that you can't come up with a better one.
And if you want to get technical: our evolutionary diet was far more plant-heavy than the carnivore crowd wants to admit. Isotopic analysis of ancient Roman gladiators found their diet was overwhelmingly barley, beans, and dried fruit — not the red-meat-fueled warrior mythology that protein supplement ads would have you believe. Hunter-gatherers in most environments got the bulk of their calories from gathered plants, not hunted animals. Meat was occasional, seasonal, earned at real personal risk.
What you're doing when you pull a shrink-wrapped pack of chicken thighs off a supermarket shelf has nothing to do with what your ancestors did. The global industrial meat system now kills approximately 70 billion land animals per year. Your great-grandparents might have had meat twice a week. The scale alone makes the comparison absurd.
"I Need My Protein"
I've heard this from sedentary office workers who couldn't tell you their own daily protein target if you asked them.
Here's the actual science: the WHO recommends approximately 0.8g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. A 75kg person needs roughly 60g. That's two cups of cooked lentils. A cup of tempeh plus some peanut butter. A bowl of edamame with dinner. Plant protein builds muscle, repairs tissue, and covers every biological function that animal protein does — and the research backs this up without ambiguity.
In January 2025, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics — the largest organization of nutrition professionals on the planet — published their updated position paper affirming that appropriately planned vegan diets are nutritionally adequate for adults and offer long-term benefits for cardiometabolic health. Not "survivable." Adequate. Beneficial. Those are the words they used.
And then there are the animals. Elephants, gorillas, rhinos, bison, hippos — the most powerful land animals on earth are herbivores. But sure, the guy who eats a grilled chicken breast four times a week is going to explain protein to me.
"Meat Tastes Too Good"
Pleasure isn't a moral justification. If it were, we'd have to excuse every addiction, every act of cruelty, every selfish impulse that ever felt good in the moment. "I enjoy it" has never made something right.
That said — and I say this as someone who ate meat for most of my adult life — the taste argument usually comes from people who haven't actually tried the alternatives. Not a proper attempt. Not a night at a restaurant that knows what it's doing. Not an hour spent learning to marinate tempeh with smoked paprika and tamari. Not a real falafel from someone who grew up making it. The flavor ceiling for plant food is not lower. It's just different. And most people who go vegan report that within a few months, the craving for meat fades almost entirely — not because their taste buds broke, but because they found better things.
"It's Too Hard"
Compared to what? Going to a drive-through is easier than cooking anything at all — but you're not making that argument.
"Hard" isn't the real objection. Inconvenient is closer. Different is probably the actual one. Because I fed myself for a full week on $25 and didn't eat badly. Rice and beans. Dal. Pasta with olive oil and roasted garlic. Peanut butter on bread. These are some of the most eaten meals in human history, and every one of them is plant-based.
The idea that vegan eating requires special knowledge, exotic ingredients, or extra money is a story told mostly by people who haven't tried. What's actually hard is sitting with the knowledge of what happens in a modern slaughterhouse and continuing to fund it anyway. That's the cognitively difficult task. Making dinner isn't.
"It's My Personal Choice"
A choice stops being personal when it has victims.
According to a 2024 analysis by the Environmental Working Group, the US Department of Agriculture spent over $72 billion subsidizing the livestock and seafood industries between 1995 and 2023. In the European Union, livestock farmers receive approximately 1,200 times more public funding than producers of plant-based alternatives. The OECD estimates over $700 billion in annual transfers flow to agricultural sectors globally — with a vast proportion going to meat and dairy.
Your "personal choice" uses 83% of the world's agricultural land to produce just 18% of global calories, according to Poore & Nemecek's landmark 2018 study in Science. It produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all global transportation combined. It kills approximately 70 billion land animals per year. It's publicly subsidized. It's environmentally catastrophic. This isn't a lifestyle preference. It's a political economy — and everyone who pays taxes in a country that subsidizes animal agriculture is funding it whether they eat meat or not.
That's not a personal choice. That's a system you're choosing to participate in.
"I Only Eat Humane Meat"
There's no humane way to kill something that doesn't want to die.
The word "humane" in this context is doing enormous rhetorical work for very little ethical output. The animal still dies — before its natural lifespan, without consent, for reasons that have nothing to do with necessity. The label exists to manage your feelings, not to change the animal's experience.
"Free range" for US chickens? The USDA definition requires only "access to the outdoors" — which can mean a small door at the end of a 40,000-bird warehouse that most birds physically never reach. "Grass-fed" beef still means a sentient animal killed years before its natural lifespan. If someone put a "humane" label on killing dogs, you'd be enraged. The species shouldn't change the principle — and it only does because you decided one species matters and another doesn't.
"Plants Feel Pain Too"
No. They don't.
Plants don't have central nervous systems. They don't have nociceptors — the specialized receptors that detect and transmit pain signals. They don't have brains or the neural architecture required for conscious experience. They respond to physical damage the way a thermostat responds to temperature: mechanically, chemically, without any experience of suffering. This is not a contested scientific question. No credible neuroscientist argues otherwise.
But let's play this out anyway. If plants somehow do suffer — even by your own bad logic, you should go vegan. Producing 1kg of beef in a feedlot requires up to 7kg of grain. Most of the plants grown on this planet go to feed livestock, not people. If minimizing plant suffering is your concern, the plant-based diet is still the answer. You've argued yourself into the wrong position.
"Animals Eat Animals"
Yes. And animals also commit infanticide, kill their young if resources are scarce, and operate entirely outside any moral framework whatsoever. We don't take ethical cues from lions.
The difference between us and a lion is exactly the thing that generates moral responsibility: we can reason. We can choose. We understand the consequences of our actions. We have access to alternatives. The capacity for moral reasoning — which you're clearly exercising right now, even if reluctantly — is precisely what makes you responsible for what you do with it.
Lions can't walk into a supermarket. You can. That's the whole argument.
"I Can't Give Up Cheese"
That's not a moral argument. That's an honest description of a craving — and I respect the honesty more than most of these excuses.
Cheese contains casomorphins, opioid peptides derived from casein protein that bind to the same brain receptors as morphine. This isn't metaphor. It's pharmacology. The dairy industry didn't engineer this intentionally, but they've built an entire marketing ecosystem around a mild opioid dependency. "I can't stop" is a description of a habit loop, not a justification for one.
"I'm addicted" has never been a good reason to keep doing something harmful. It's a description of the problem, not a solution to it. The good news: for most people who go fully plant-based, cheese cravings fade significantly within a month. Not because your taste buds broke — because the habit loop stopped being fed.
"I'm Just One Person. It Doesn't Matter."
This is the most seductive excuse on the list and the most philosophically shaky.
First, the math. If individual dietary choices genuinely didn't matter, the industry wouldn't spend tens of millions of dollars a year on marketing to individuals. They spend that money because they know demand aggregates. Every supply chain exists because individual decisions accumulate into market signals. One person's choice matters as one unit of a collective choice that adds up.
Second: moral responsibility doesn't evaporate because other people are also doing something harmful. "Everyone else is doing it" has never been a valid ethical defense — and if you apply that logic to any other context, you'd immediately see how hollow it is.
Third, and most practically: the decision to change is one of the most personally powerful you can make. Not because it'll single-handedly stop climate change next Tuesday. But because it's the moment you stop outsourcing your ethics to convenience. That matters in a way that's hard to quantify and easy to underestimate.
"What About Indigenous Diets?"
I've heard this from a lot of people over the years. Very few of them were Indigenous.
Traditional subsistence hunting — practiced by Indigenous communities in ways developed over generations, at scales and with ecological relationships that industrial factory farming obliterates entirely — has nothing in common with the global industrial meat supply chain. Using Indigenous hunting practices to justify a McDonald's order is intellectual dishonesty and cultural appropriation happening simultaneously in a single sentence.
If you genuinely care about Indigenous food sovereignty: support movements to return land, protect traditional fishing rights, and fight the industrial agricultural corporations that have displaced Indigenous food systems for decades. That's a real conversation. It's also a completely separate one from whether you need chicken in your salad.
The Real Reason
None of these excuses are the actual reason. The real one is simpler: habit. Social comfort. Not wanting to be the difficult one at the table. Not wanting to sit with the discomfort of knowing where the food came from and what it cost.
I lived in that place for years. I made every excuse on this list. Every single one. Not because I was stupid, but because changing a habit you've had your whole life takes more than just knowing it's wrong — it takes deciding that the discomfort of change is less than the discomfort of staying.
You already know most of these arguments are weak. If someone used them to justify something you found genuinely disturbing, you'd take them apart immediately. The only reason they feel convincing is that the alternative is inconvenient.
That's a solvable problem.
Try seven days. No animal products. Not forever — just a week. See what actually happens to your body, your budget, and your relationship with food. Then decide. And if you want to send this to someone who keeps throwing these excuses at you — that's exactly what it's here for.
References
- Environmental Working Group (2024) — USDA livestock subsidies top $72 billion
- Poore & Nemecek (2018) — Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science
- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (2025) — Vegetarian Dietary Patterns for Adults: Position Paper, Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
- OECD (2021) — Agricultural support estimates
- WHO (2015) — Carcinogenicity of red and processed meat
- PMC — The Ethics of Veganism, Frontiers in Animal Science