It's OK for vegans to eat oysters.

What to eat. What not to eat.
April 7 2010 6:55 AM

Consider the Oyster


Oysters on ice.
Are oysters vegan-friendly?




There are dozens of reasons to become a vegan, but just two should suffice: Raising animals for food 1) destroys the planet and 2) causes those animals to suffer.   Factory farms are the worst offenders, but even the best-run animal operations can't get around the fact that livestock are the largest contributors to global warming worldwide and that the same amount of land used to feed one beef-eater can feed 15 to 20 vegans. Animals are terribly inefficient machines for turning plants into food, and an inefficiency of this scale is disastrous. The animal welfare argument is even simpler: While there are limitless ways in which humans are different from nonhuman animals, one thing we share with most is the ability to feel pain. Since I consider it unethical to cause you, dear reader, undue pain, there's no reason—other than simple preference for my own species—to have a separate standard for mammals, fish, and birds.


Moreover, since oysters don't have a central nervous system, they're unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours—unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster. They can't move, so they don't respond to injury like those animals do, either. Even monkish ethicist Peter Singer sanctioned oyster eating in Animal Liberation —the best-argued case for a vegan diet I've read—before reversing his opinion for later editions of the book. To justify the flip-flop, he wrote that "one cannot with any confidence say that these creatures do feel pain, so one can equally have little confidence in saying that they do not feel pain." This is unconvincing: We also can't state with complete confidence that plants do, or do not, feel pain—yet so far Singer hasn't made a stand against alfalfa abuse.

The main argument of Animal Liberation is that discriminating against nonhuman animals is indefensible because it makes irrelevant category distinctions—pain cuts across species barriers. But to loop oysters into a dietary taboo simply because we've labeled them animals is to make just such a faulty distinction. Likewise, we shouldn't be eating more plants because they are in the plant kingdom; we should eat them because it's a sound way to feed ourselves without causing a lot of damage to the world. And oysters, as far as we can tell, belong with plants in almost every ethically relevant way. 

When I became a vegan, I didn't draw an X through everything marked "Animalia" on the tree of life. And when I pick out my dinner, I don't ask myself: What do I have to do to remain a vegan? I ask myself: What is the right choice in this situation? Eating ethically is not a purity pissing contest, and the more vegans or vegetarians pretend that it is, the more their diets start to resemble mere fashion—and thus risk being dismissed as such. Emerson wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." A foolish consistency: If you resolve to give up foods that begin with the letter B, and if you stick to that for the rest of your life, you'll be mighty consistent. You'll even benefit the world by cutting out beef. But there's no good reason to avoid broccoli—unless, like George H.W. Bush, you don't like the taste. There is, on the other hand, great reason to be an inconsistent vegan and make an exception for oysters—for it is surely foolish to deprive yourself of an icy plate of white-shelled Watch Hills.

When I talked about this article with my editor at Slate, she said, "I won't lie—you'll be attacked viciously for being a vegan, and attacked equally viciously for not being a strict enough vegan." Maybe so, but if amid a sea of vitriol a meat-eater makes a great case that some other animal deserves to be treated as I've treated the oyster, or if a vegan comes forth with a good argument for why oysters should rightfully remain off our dinner plates, then I'll have to change my mind and my diet.

Peter Singer, for his part, showed some flexibility when I e-mailed him about this piece. "I've gone back and forth on this over the years," he said. "Perhaps there is a scintilla more doubt about whether oysters can feel pain than there is about plants, but I'd see it as extremely improbable. So while you could give them the benefit of the doubt, you could also say that unless some new evidence of a capacity for pain emerges, the doubt is so slight that there is no good reason for avoiding eating sustainably produced oysters." Here's to the vanquishing of hobgoblins—the first plate is on me.


Christopher Cox is a senior editor of the Paris Review.