I’m a longtime vegan who sometimes eats fake meat.

Abstaining from dead animals doesn’t mean we don’t contemplate the deeper stuff; it means we contemplated it so deeply we got to a place where we felt the imperative to make a major life change.

Meanwhile, we still like savory tastes. So, yeah, we’re still going to eat fat, salt, and umami. We’ll still going to eat it on bread with condiments, because it is delicious that way and feels happily familiar.

You write, “The artificial meat industry wants to redefine ‘meat’ as nothing more than a proprietary mix of proteins, amino acids, flavors, and colorings, without acknowledging that meat should also contain emotion and respect.”

It doesn’t do the dead animals any good for you to write about how much you respect them; that’s something you do for your own peace of mind. I’ve got plenty of emotions about lost lives and what this level of meat addiction is doing to our shared planet. I choose to turn my emotion and respect into advocacy — for veganism and flexitarianism — rather than romanticizing killing animals.

Can’t we agree it’s, on the whole, a good thing if people eat less animals?