I Stopped Eating Animals. Fish Was the Lie I Kept Telling Myself.

There are people who become vegetarians after reading philosophy. Or watching lectures. Or having long, morally rigorous debates with themselves about suffering, ethics, and the meaning of life.

I saw a vein.

That’s it. That’s the origin story. No TED Talk. No intellectual awakening. Just me, mid-bite, happily eating a chicken drumstick like a normal human being, when I noticed a thin blue vein running between the bone and the meat.

And something in my brain just… short-circuited.

It wasn’t “food” anymore. It was a body.

I put the drumstick down. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t replace it with anything. I just sat there thinking, I can’t do this anymore. And that was that. No announcement. No transition period. One minute I was eating chicken, the next I wasn’t.

That was ten years ago.

Since then, I’ve lived in what I would like to call moral consistency and what is, in reality, a slightly chaotic patchwork of emotional logic. I stopped eating animals. Chickens, cows, lamb — all off the table. I couldn’t reconcile calling myself an animal lover while eating them. It felt… off. Hypocritical in a way I couldn’t argue myself out of.

Except.

Fish.

Because of course there’s an “except.”

People love to ask this with a kind of smug delight, like they’ve just uncovered a flaw in a legal argument: So how can you eat fish?

And the honest answer is not impressive.

I just don’t feel it.

I don’t feel the same connection. Fish don’t look back at me in a way that triggers anything human. No expressions, no faces I can read, no sense of personality. They move, they shimmer, they exist — and my brain, apparently, files them under “neutral.”

It’s not a moral argument. It’s a gap.

Empathy, it turns out, is wildly inconsistent. Give us big eyes, fur, or something that looks like it might love us back, and we’re ready to build a shrine. Remove those cues, and suddenly we’re negotiating.

So I stayed pescatarian. Quietly. Conveniently.

Until, because the universe has a sense of humour and clearly enjoys dismantling my coping mechanisms, I watched My Octopus Teacher.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the short version: a man swims every day in a kelp forest and forms a relationship with a wild octopus. And before you roll your eyes — because I did — the octopus turns out to be intelligent. Curious. Playful. Strategic. A creature with what looks very much like awareness.

Which is… not ideal if your entire seafood situation depends on not thinking too hard about sea creatures.

Because suddenly the category isn’t safe anymore.

It’s not just “fish.” It’s life. Complex, thinking life, just packaged in a way that doesn’t naturally trigger our empathy.

At some point during that documentary, watching this octopus interact with a human in a way that felt eerily intentional, I had the deeply inconvenient thought:

Right. That’s the end of that, then.

Not immediately. I didn’t leap off the couch and renounce fish on the spot like some kind of ethical superhero. But the crack was there.

Because once you realise your empathy has blind spots, you can’t really un-know it. You start asking questions you weren’t asking before. Like: Is “I don’t feel it” actually a good enough reason?

Spoiler: it’s not.

So here I am. Ten years after the blue vein incident. Standing on the edge of removing fish from my diet as well, and feeling slightly ridiculous that it took an octopus to get me here.

Eggs and dairy are still in the picture — for now. I’m not pretending this is a perfectly clean ethical system. It’s not. It’s evolving. Slowly. In fits and starts. In moments of clarity followed by periods of “I’ll deal with that later.”

But something has shifted.

The vein made me see the body.

The octopus made me consider the mind.

And somewhere between those two moments, the neat little categories I’d built to make my life easier started to fall apart.

I don’t have a grand conclusion. I don’t have a polished philosophy I can hand you neatly tied with a ribbon.

I have a growing discomfort with pretending I don’t know what I know.

And for now, that’s enough to change what’s on my plate.

Which, frankly, has made life more complicated, slightly more expensive, and infinitely more annoying in restaurants.

But also, quietly, more honest.