Have you seen Across the Spiderverse yet? It’s a great movie with a lot of life lessons, fantastic animation, and a good score that bangs. The story is literally out of this world, in its simplicity and ingenuity. And I came out of the theatre having resolved a complex moral dilemma that I had been struggling with for years.
Veganism.
I rarely speak about my struggle with veganism, mainly because I fear getting hate. I am not an expert on the topic and this is a personal story of my understanding of the concept and the research I have come across. Those always seem to get the hate from every angle in my opinion and that terrified me. So I didn’t speak about it.
I suffered in silence and maybe voiced my struggles in therapy once or twice. Even my therapist’s solutions didn’t ease much.
If you’re thinking that Spiderverse gave me the courage to voice my struggles and find a community, you’re wrong. That’s not the issue it resolved. Without further ado, let’s look at the nature of the problem.
I want to be vegan. I grew up vegetarian, and while there was a point I didn’t see the point of it, the more I learned about animal agriculture and the cruelty animals face, the stronger my desire to go vegan became.
Except…I’m autistic. And milk is one of the few textures I can tolerate. And there’s also the lack of family support and the inability to cook on my own. Couple all these with the social isolation and going vegan began to seem like a pipe dream.
Only I didn’t give up. I went vegan. And was hospitalized because I couldn’t balance out my nutrition.
And then my partner and therapist helped me realize that while it’s terrible, there are ways to ethically consume dairy and that despite what I feel, my health takes precedence. They made me see that as the world currently stands everyone going vegan isn’t a possibility and some people even “proved”, I still don’t trust the research they showed, that going vegan could do more harm than good.
So I stayed vegetarian, living as vegan a lifestyle as I could. Which I believe is the healthy way to be vegan.
But I digress.
The point was to survive I had to believe that meat consumption is necessary to a point. And for some people, it is because of health and financial reasons and if I don’t like that, it’s not my place to comment.
Yet having that as a solution never sat well with me.
How can we justify the exploitation and literal death of thousands just to save a few lives? Or for the greater good.
Yet by the same logic, I couldn’t say that those who need animal products are wrong. They’re trying to survive and stay healthy. Which is their right.
Yet my heart cried for the animals.
And after years of struggling, I came across Miles “I can do both” Morales.
Spoiler alert. Miles is told that he must let his dad die because that’s “canon.” Defying the canon could mean the death of his entire world, if not the multiverse.
I can see the utilitarian view. Sacrifice one to save many but how does Spiderman justify that? Justify doing nothing because an algorithm says so.
But wasn’t that what I had been doing? Looking the other way because I thought there was no way to do both. Just accepting the status quo?
And then Miles made his choice. He would save his father and while I thought him a fool and selfish for a while- he was choosing to save his father when it could destroy the world, seemed more villainous than heroic- Gwen’s realization made me realize that Miles wasn’t choosing his father over the world. He would sacrifice his father if he had to, he was Spiderman, but he was trying to change the canon. Save the world and save his father. Do his own thing.
And that solved my dilemma.
I didn’t need to accept the research blindly. I could still try, as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, to find a solution. Trying, and perseverance is what make one a hero, not sacrifice.
I didn’t need to be sick to save the animals.
And Miles didn’t need to suffer to prove he was Spiderman.
Am I scared to share this? Petrified.
But I will do it. Because I feel the world needs this solution.
Don’t accept the status quo.
But don’t sacrifice yourself or your loved ones without at least trying to make two cakes so that you can have your cake and eat it too.
It’s like Krishna said in the Gita, do your best without thinking of the rest.
