Confessions of an Outlier

"For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore,  and do not return to a life of slavery."  - Galatians 5:1

Greetings from an outlier. I’ve been a Jesuit for 38 years and change and an outlier as to diet and the ethics of food systems for 36. I’ll explain: In the second year of my novitiate I decided to refrain from eating the flesh of animals. Obedient novice that I was, I shared my thinking with our master of novices, who was also my spiritual director. He supported my decision and told me to proceed. Being a Kansas boy through and through he didn’t share my concerns, but he could see that the move and the thinking behind it were important to my moral and spiritual development. Best of all, he cared for me. You look for that in a master of novices.

And so I became the sole vegetarian among nine novices and three senior Jesuits. Many years later I’m still decidedly in the minority among Jesuits, even though plant-based diets are no longer the curiosities they once were in the US. And I’m happy to report that there’s now a group for Jesuit vegetarians and vegans in the US and Canada. At last count there were nine of us. Nice, though we’re hardly setting a trend among Jesuits. So even though I belong to a group of outliers, I’m an outlier still. 

Which matters for several reasons. It’s lonely, even when fellow Jesuits are thoughtful enough – as they often are – to include “something Dirk can eat” in the meal they’re preparing. It’s not as if I’m without friends among my brother Jesuits, although as is common in Jesuit life when you’re no longer in a house of formation, they’re mostly long-distance friends. Near or far, some of my friends even appear to think well and even highly of me. I am not openly mocked. Regardless, and to date, none of my Jesuit friends has joined me in this. And in four decades none of the Jesuits I’m close to has even raised the topic with me, even though we’ve talked about a lot of things over the years, at length and in depth. A lot of things; not this thing.

Which is curious, perhaps, because we Jesuits are educated, prayerful and generally reflective men. Most of us have at least an intellectual commitment to social and environmental justice; many of us understand justice to be integral to the Gospel message: not a hobby; not an option on a long list of things a Catholic Christian might be interested in investigating further, time permitting. Seems clear, now, that choosing to abstain from meat has proved a good deal more countercultural than this Jesuit would have imagined. Or is it that the Jesuits I run with imagine that I think less of them for not making the same choices I’ve made? I hope not because I don’t. Right living neither begins nor ends with diet. And I myself have been the target of weaponized questioning – from non-Jesuits – as to whether non-human animals (often referred to simply as “animals”) have souls or thoughts or emotions and whether we humans have any moral obligations to them. It’s unpleasant. Nothing is gained; feelings are hurt. And I’m aware that beliefs about food and eating are deeply held and even fraught – tied up with identity, belonging, family, ethnicity and tradition. Which brings to mind the line from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, delivered when the aunt of the bride-to-be finds out that her niece’s intended is of all things a vegetarian: “What do you mean he don’t eat no meat? … Oh, that’s OK. I make lamb!” 

Am I confirmed in my beliefs? You bet. Is there evidence to suggest that we human beings would be better off if we were to refrain from thinking of animals as food? Sure. Tons of it, including mountains of evidence that so-called animal agriculture is a major driver of climate change. And these are matters of ethics and morality. Anyone who’s lived with animals knows they feel pain and suffer. The suffering of non-human creatures on factory farms, in slaughterhouses and in degraded natural environments matters. The planet matters. It all matters, and it mattered in the Catholic world even before Pope Francis released his prophetic 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. But confirmed in my beliefs or not, finger-pointing isn’t going to move things in the right direction. Moralizing, whether from the pulpit or on the printed page, is tiresome and counterproductive.

I know, of course, that I’m not the only outlier out there in the great wide world. More than a few committed Christians have chosen the narrow path in this regard. And yet we remain a small and oddly persecuted minority: Misunderstood; dismissed as inconsequential, soft and sentimental; overlooked at dinners, cookouts and holiday celebrations (“Can’t you just eat the side dishes?” or “You know, you could just pick the bacon out….” or the below-the-belt “Jesus ate meat; it’s in the Bible!”); even mocked by those – rarer than they used to be – who feel a disturbing need to advertise a weirdly-inflamed desire for animal flesh. to wit, years ago a friend – a friend – stabbed a piece of steak with his fork; holding it to my face he said, grinning, “You know you want this!”

There’s a whole lot of energy around the abstraction we think of as meat and most people think of as delicious. I’ve seen meat described as humankind’s favorite food. It’s the point of the counter that occupies all that prime real estate along the back wall of the typical American supermarket. It’s protein in its most desirable and versatile form and the centre and most praiseworthy component of at least two of America’s daily meals. Or all three of them, for those lucky enough to be greeted of a morning with this siren call: “Do you want bacon or sausage with that?” 

As for myself, something with regard to this delicious abstraction has shifted over the years. At some point I realized that the thing I’d given up for a lifetime of Lents had coalesced into something decidedly more haunting than an abstraction. In fact it had become the fleshly remains of a creature that had been alive and was alive no longer – remains, as in going down to the morgue to view a deceased person’s remains. So, the stuff of death … and suffering; the stuff of death and suffering. Which is why I now look away while passing the meat counter, and why I now get just the slightest bit queasy when I encounter an “iconic” (not my term, and I’m not even sure what makes an advert iconic) Beef-It’s-What’s-for-Dinner commercial (courtesy the National Livestock and Meat Board; about which you’re glad they included “National Livestock” in the name. Otherwise you’d be greeted with, “Hello. I’m with the Meat Board”). 

Yes, turning away from the meat counter is quirky and nonsensical, the stuff of drama queens and the faint of heart. Except that it’s not performative and I’m not afraid of the stuff. I’ve walked by countless meat counters over the years; I grew up consuming and preparing it. There are even some fond memories associated with meat: My sainted mother, who taught me to cook, talking me through – back when telephones were black with rotary dials – deboning a chicken breast; Sitting next to my flannel-shirted father early on a chill morning at the counter of a diner in Winslow, Arizona, tucking into breakfast sausages rolled in buttermilk pancakes and drowned in butter and syrup – called, enchantingly, “pigs in a blanket” – for the first time in my young life. Or my first corn dog, slathered in mustard and eaten at a county fair; wondering how the people I loved had hidden something so magical from me for so long. On a fleshly level, meat is just skeletal muscle and therefore just anatomy. I have degrees in nursing and have worked as a licensed family nurse practitioner: I’ve dealt with far worse than anything you’d see at the meat counter. I’m not afraid to look at meat; not afraid to handle it. It’s just that I don’t want to; not any longer. Meat has become, dare I say it, distasteful and disturbing, fitting for something that is – in the world of industrialized agribusiness – the end product of sustained start-to-finish violence. 

So no longer an abstraction but what’s left of a creature that was loved by God and to which (Could you handle “to whom”?) God was always present. 

And there’s more, which is to say it gets worse. It may not be enough to quietly abstain from meat. My discomfort cannot end or even temper the misery of the billions of creatures whose lives become meat every year. Our problems are connected, and the misery associated with meat is intimately connected to markets and the economic systems that deify them. This is a problem because, grasshopper, markets are indifferent to suffering of all kinds: Yours, mine, our fellow creatures’, the planet’s. Indifferent: Not indifference as in the Ignatian idea of equanimity as a component of spiritual freedom, the goal of which is to discern the will of God, but rather indifference as inconsequential or meaningless or not worth troubling your pretty little head about. 

Markets are about business. In the words of the American president (from 1923-1929) Calvin Coolidge, “the business of America is business”. Silent Cal and his fellow travelers then and now believe the decisions America needs to make are business decisions – you know, Business Decisions, as in “Your employment is ending. It’s not you: It’s a business decision.” Which is the workaday version of “I think we should see other people. It’s not you; it’s me.” 

Some years ago I learned that the primary driver behind most business decisions isn’t ethics but the prospect of profit or loss. In fact, and thanks to a mysterious process that  eludes my understanding, calling something a business decision has the incantatory effect of removing it from the realm of ethics altogether. Business decisions are about profit and loss and profit and loss are defined in terms of the bottom line; the short term; what can easily be quantified here and now. Suffering – especially suffering that doesn’t belong to you – is a soft factor, meaning that it’s hard to quantify, in this case because it has to do with feelings and  human feelings are slippery enough and hard enough to quantify. And some of us aren’t even sure – steadfastly and perhaps stubbornly unsure, as a matter of policy – that non-human creatures even have feelings. Yessir, the jury’s still out on that one and when they do return we’re certainly not going to poll them. 

All of which is to say, exhaustingly, that quiet abstinence may no longer be enough. Things matter – even things that the scientific paradigm refuses to admit or consider. Creatures matter. The lives of creatures matter. Suffering matters, even when those who suffer cannot put their suffering into words. Even when their suffering is hidden behind slick advertising campaigns; even when they are disguised as production units; even when countless suffering production units – which, being units, by definition cannot suffer – are packed away behind the windowless walls of the pre-engineered metal buildings that disfigure the North American agricultural landscape from coast to coast.

So there it is. I am not better than you. Not in this; not in anything. But somehow in this I have encountered grace, which is the presence and reality of God, at work in the world. I have learned – the long way, through a long conversion – that all the world’s creatures matter in themselves, because they are loved and so are deserving of love. 

• Dirk Dunfee, SJ + April, 2026