Went grocery shopping today and figured if there were going to be any moral reasons behind meatless eating (which, okay, moral reasons are at the bottom of my list, but they’re there), then I should probably aim for the (relatively-)cruelty-free eggs, so instead of just picking up the cheap brand I usually go for I stopped to look for cage-free eggs.

Fun fact: I already knew chicken feed often contains meat (not suitable for human consumption? Feed it to the chickens who will then be eaten by humans anyway! I think I completely quit eating chicken the day I heard of companies putting diseased beef in chicken feed) but it had completely not occurred to me egg-laying chickens might also be fed meat. Until I was looking at the ‘special’ eggs and noticed a whole pile of them advertising hormone-free vegetarian-fed chickens.

Oh yeah, that’s a thing too, isn’t it? Dammit.
Also most of them were labelled either vegetarian-fed or cage-free. The only one labelled as both came in a cheap flimsy plastic container which bent and started coming open when I picked it up, no thank you, my hippie ass is biking home with a detour by the river and I’d like the egg case to stay closed the whole ride.

So what to do here, buy vegetarian (because it rather defeats the purpose of eating vegetarian if a cow died for my food anyway) or buy cage-free (because it rather defeats the purpose of avoiding animal cruelty if the chickens are being shoved into obscenely tiny cages)?

…Or just stick with ‘buy the cheapest and don’t stress over it’, which in this case was vegetarian. But I’m definitely starting to see why people whose main reasons for being vegetarian are moral ones just go all the way vegan.