People ask why I’m a vegetarian. I say, “I’m not. I just don’t eat meat.”

The next question is “Why,” or a frequently combative: “What’s WRONG with meat?”

Truth is, when first giving up meat I had no specific rationale. I just found myself not eating meat. Especially young goat meat.

“Lamb” or “veal” doesn’t evoke thought of innocent animal children as effectively as that “ kid” word. Eating baby animals never went down well. Petting zoos will do that. Otherwise, my dietary meat and potatoes was basically anything cooked until bloodless. More preferable still: Very dry white meat with lots of mayonnaise and surrounded by Wonder Bread. A matter of taste, or the lack of it.

Growing up, we got our food from the A&P, except what vegetables and fruit we grew in the backyard, and fish caught for fun. Store-bought “bargain” cuts of meat probably explains a great deal of my aversion to that part of the food pyramid. TV dinner Salisbury steak and Spam Surprise didn’t help. School lunches sealed it. Mac and cheese ruled, along with sugared cereal and PB&Js. Fish sticks with Tater Tots. Pizza was the best thing ever. We ate badly, but certainly well. Their psychological impasse aside, lamb, veal and cabrito dining pleasures were also too worldly for our unadventurous household. My Swedish grandfather ate eel and rabbit, a taste of the old country he’d capture himself, but they never graced our suburban plates. We were complete devotees of eating whatever was prepackaged and as far removed from its origin as possible. “Fresh” was reserved mostly for corn. “Tang” was never thought as a day without sunshine, but as awesome astronaut juice. We ate what we were told was food, thankful that America wasn’t Armenia, and asked for seconds. No complaints. Vegetarianism was as foreign a concept as yoga or yogurt. Locavore wasn’t even a word yet.

“Back in the day,” when going “back to the earth” was a real “statement” and even Hippies weren’t vegans, I did some time as locavore as it gets, like animalhair in-your-milk locavore. Cost wise, goats produce more milk than a cow, and it’s already homogenized. My friends’ alternative lifestyle had three goats. Lyle Bowers, our octogenarian neighbor, had about 50, raised for undeclared income. I would help him dehorn and castrate the “kids.” Talk about brutal. Interestingly, Lyle didn’t raise his own meat or poultry, ate mostly out of a can. When you chew tobacco, an empty can is real handy. My friends ate homegrown everything, but non-organic was fine. The counterculture isn’t all purists. Whole Earth Catalog instructed butchery — such a nice word — was attempted until realizing that that is done better by those more skilled. Less waste, much better presentation. That was fine by me. My day job was assisting surgery, so it wasn’t about being squeamish. Life meeting a purposeful death held no real issues in itself. And, animals do eat animals. Dietary reality simply became more real than it ever had before. Pets get names. Eventual food, for good reason, does not. Compartmentalization. Rationalization. Everything is defined by its opposite, but some opposites don’t attract. When I think back on my late stages of meat eating, beef heart and ox tail, neither a big Swanson’s hit, went down real easy. Eventually, however, chickens do come home to roost. After I left that lifestyle, I stopped eating meat altogether. Go figure.

It wasn’t about personifying animals, or thoughts that I might devour my animal friends. Besides potatoes, I still eat things with eyes, but without feet, wings, ears, beaks or noses, thank you. Claw and Tail meat are fine.

Then, separately, came awareness of how the food I once ate, without any thought, came to be on my plate. Small time farming is an animal sanctuary compared to industry production. Animals aren’t people, but people needn’t be so bestial in ignoring agribusiness livestock treatment from forced births to dinner plate. Maybe a USDA snapshot of their ordeal could accompany each retail sale of their body parts or byproducts, like those disturbing photos of missing children that used to stare at you from the side of a milk carton. Here it would be the abused bovine. Carton of eggs, same deal different victim. “Organic,” in itself, doesn’t rule out mistreatment or bad practices, just as agribusiness doesn’t necessarily preclude sustainable practices. Organic or not, apples and oranges remain apples and oranges. Organic monoculture farming still furthers single-crop issues. Commercial fishery excesses aren’t inherently offset by aquaculture alternatives.

“Big Ag” provides an enhanced bottom line, unless the definition of “bottom line” means a truly final account of the cost of such practices.

It was famously said that, “We are what we eat.” We are also defined by what we choose not to eat. Whatever we choose to eat, let’s eat responsibly. Unsustainable and cruel dining should be distasteful to all.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath.