The debate over whether to consume animal products, like meat and dairy, or go entirely plant-based is a hot-button issue, often filled with vitriol and name-calling online and in real life. That's because the argument is about more than just food—according to researchers, the decision to eat animals or not involves cultural, moral and political ideals as well as nutrition.

People love to moan that vegans are annoying: research has shown that only drug addicts inspire the same degree of loathing. Now psychologists are starting to understand why – and it’s becoming clear that the reasons aren’t entirely rational.

Being a chicken on a factory farm is pretty awful. Some of the reasons are obvious. Farms pack in chickens tightly to maximize profits, so a chicken in captivity has very little space and is surrounded by a sea of other chickens. There isn’t dirt to peck in or root into; instead, they walk through their own waste, and the entire warehouse smells very strongly of ammonia from all the chicken poop. There’s no sky or fresh air — even farms that claim birds have “access to the outdoors” often pack tens of thousands of birds into a warehouse that has a tiny yard that can fit a dozen of them.

Last month, the United Nations set off a furor in the climate community when it clumsily tried to raise awareness about the global problem of meat consumption. “The meat industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the world’s biggest oil companies,” it wrote on Twitter. “Meat production contributes to the depletion of water resources & drives deforestation.” The U.N. then implored its 12.7 million followers to “eat less meat” because “every climate action counts.”

Rather than downplaying the issue of animal rights until we take power, which seems to be the current de facto strategy, the climate movement should proactively build support for a plant-based future.

A couple years ago, I took a highly elucidative course on the philosophy of feminism. This course tackled issues at the core of social justice, from the epistemology of the oppressed to the social phenomenon of oppression itself. It is this latter area we focus upon in the following short essay, itself a project in proving that more-than-human animals are, indeed, oppressed—and seriously so.

At Project Animal Freedom, we strive to build a fully vegan world by 2056 through a series of innovative outreach initiatives, from our College Outreach Program to our Compassionate Cities Campaign. We exist, first and foremost, for the animals with a relentless focus on their rights, lives, and well-being. Learn more!

As Dr. Melanie Joy argues in her landmark book, "Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows," carnism, alongside all the needless suffering, violence, death, harm, and environmental devastation it entails, thrives in darkness; it is only by overcoming the invisibility of the system, by exposing the truth behind meat, eggs, and dairy, that we can question, destabilize, and ultimately overcome this irrational, violent ideology.

What is distinctive about feminist epistemology, and what makes it worthy of further study? In this essay, we will explore feminist epistemology as distilled by no fewer than five prominent feminists in this growing academic discipline, accruing not only the knowledge necessary to comprehend these works, but, more importantly, the tools necessary to free ourselves and our fellow animal from the epistemic marginalization to which we so often succumb.

Below, you will find an essay I wrote during my first semester at SLU as part of my course in medieval philosophy. Presumed lost for over two years, I just discovered the sole remaining copy I printed as a rough draft for editorial purposes. The history of veganism is, upon careful analysis, far richer, more vibrant, and diverse than we might often assume, stretching over 1,500 years back to the time of Pythagoras, Porphyry, and their followers. This essay explores just one 40-page chunk of Porphyry’s treatise, On Abstinence from Animal Foods.

In his landmark essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits," Milton Friedman develops his case for an extremely conservative view of corporate social responsibility (CSR), wherein the sole social responsibility of business is to increase its profits while “conforming to the basic rules of society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom” (Friedman). Yet this extremely conservative understanding of corporate social responsibility encounters a variety of difficulties that call into question the veracity of Friedman's position. The changing nature of ethical customs, in particular, suggests the falsity of Friedman's central thesis since these changing ethical customs reveal that we value more than just profits; we also value the preservation of other pertinent social goods, over and above the maximization of profit within the “moral bounds” of society.

A genocide of epic proportion rages every moment of every day, on every continent, in every town. So vast and horrific the scale of this genocide, that 3,000 lives every second does it claim. Multiply the human population seven times over and you still fall drastically short of the number each year slain. In the US alone, 8.3 billion beings are smothered from existence each year. But across the world, this number swells to more than 56 billion, rising by more than 100 million heads annually. And even this figure drastically underestimates the totality of death by tens if not hundreds of billions of lives lost each year at sea, whose numbers are so great they are measured only in tons. “What is this genocide?” you may ask. This, and only this, is the genocide of animalkind.

From our earliest myths, meat has always been associated with the masculine and vegetarianism with the feminine. Whereas man the hunter was strong, virile, and dominant, woman the gatherer was passive, peaceful, and submissive. To this day, the myths our culture has woven continue to inculcate within us a sly, but potent belief that meat is necessary for strength, that soldiers need meat, and that only true men eat meat. Simultaneously, vegetarianism has been denounced as the senseless sentimentality supposedly so often typified by women. But what if these associations could connect the oppression of women to the oppression of more-than-human animals?

Winning a full-ride was once the crux of my existence, my raison d'être. Now it is an increasingly distant, yet still painful memory. Below you will find my admission essay, a short essay I once assumed was incredibly shoddy because it failed to win me the full-ride I once thought I deserved. May other animal rights activists succeed precisely where I failed.

Einstein feared that we would lose our humanity and become hollow automatons, the lives of which are dominated by technology. Unfortunately, his fear is all too real. In Star Wars, we realize his fear by immersing ourselves in the futurism of an era we rapidly approach—an era in which humanism and its values wane while nihilism and its antagonisms wax. The Star Wars franchise attempts to abridge the practical implications of the abandonment of humanism with the hope that its values will not perish, but survive and one day thrive. Star Wars thus suffices as a vision of a world in which freedom prevails over bondage, democracy over authoritarianism, creation over destruction.

I trudge up the steep, redwood-lined hills of Berkeley, California, lugging two black canvas suitcases—one small, one large—and an oversized, gaudy scholarship book, awkwardly wedged between my armpit and torso. Reaching the final intersection, a drooping roundabout seemingly melted into the hillside, I sigh with relief; five miles, two hours, and much misdirection later, I had finally reached the Chicken Coop, an unassuming apartment complex nestled among the uptown frat houses. I would spend my first night here among the terrorists, the peculiar smell of stale cheese, celebratory cannabis, and wet dog wafting through my nostrils as I lay on the matted, hair-encrusted carpet.

Whether I feel happy, sad, angry, or stressed, food has always provided my personal answer to the vicissitudes of life. I celebrate my birthday with outrageous displays of gluttony—two heaping plates, half a cake, and a mango smoothie, please!—and I diffuse my stress by eating cookies, one box at a time. Should I feel angry or depressed, the pleasure of eating not only distracts me from my internal challenges, but lulls me into a state of self-fulfilled complacency. Given the major role that food plays in my life, I felt overjoyed to keep a careful catalogue documenting my dietary exploits over the past week. What I discovered has not only renewed my relationship with food, but also provided deep personal insights into my broader life beyond the buffet line.

Five years later you can find the speech that started it all, the small body of work that convinced me to rededicate my life not to music, but to inter-special harmony, that all creatures might know the riches of life, the joys of freedom, and the securities of justice. Below you will find the transcript from my first major public speech at none other than the Ethical Society of St. Louis. This deeply transformative speech remains powerful even to this day; may both its sweeter and more acerbic chords rouse you and carnists alike to action.

Imagine you are attending a family reunion at Olive Garden, when you overhear your niece asking the waiter for vegetarian options. After the waiter leaves, you ask your niece why she has become a vegetarian. But as she begins formulating an honest response to your legitimate question, her father suddenly hushes her—“this is neither the time nor the place,” he mutters. As your niece tries to explain otherwise, a nearby aunt soon vents her frustration, remarking venomously “respect my personal choice, and I’ll respect yours,” while a nearby uncle pronounces his adamant, almost boundless love for bacon. Then your nephew chimes in, adding “We’ve always eaten meat. Why should we stop now?” Unfortunately, these responses to the vegetarian proposition are all too common. But what if these responses reflected classic, textbook fallacies we could easily refute if only we knew the correct counterargument to employ?

Since its release on March 7th, the highly controversial documentary, What the Health, has generated a social media firestorm surrounding the healthfulness of animal products. While thousands of vegetarians and vegans have hailed this documentary as the most complete revelation of a long-awaited truth, countless meatatarians have fought against this plant-based tour de force, arguing that animal products are not only healthy, but crucial for human health. Join us as we strive to answer the ever controversial question—is meat a health food or a death food?