All this seemed very clear-cut to me years back --- in fact I recall giving a decent number of sermons along the lines of some of the highlights of your blog. And I appreciate the heart of it, I do.

It was when I started digging deeper into the harm that any and all kinds of food production cause, and that coupled with an understanding of plant sentience and our sort of sentience not being the navel of the universe, it scattered my marbles pretty good.

We only feel easy about killing plants see more because we have so little in common with them. The question is, do we have the right to make humanity the standard for judging the rest of existence? On a more fundamental level, existence is so much more vast than our human worlds and the diverse standards of moral and ethics we have grown accustomed to over the millennia.

While I appreciate all the values behind the animal rights and vegetarian / vegan movements, I personally like to see all ideologies reach their conclusion, not stay hanging mid-way --- and the levels of absolutism required for some of these ideals to stay true are practicable for a naked Jain holy man who eats only fruit and filters his water to avoid killing small organisms.

When the natural conclusion of an ideology leads to something impracticable, it's hard for me to stay at a mid-way conclusion and remain true to myself. That doesn't feel right either.