Let Them Eat Cake

Why the smallest behavioral shift still feels like a social imposition

To produce milk, female dairy cows are continually and forcibly impregnated, made to give birth, and stripped of their newborn calves so their milk can be sold to humans instead. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals

I was recently at a family member’s small birthday gathering. Someone showed up with a cake that didn’t have eggs or dairy in it, on account of me (and by extension my kid). I appreciated it. This is in Los Angeles, where acquiring such a cake isn’t that big of a deal. Everyone ate it. It was good. No one seemed betrayed by the absence of butter.

At some point I heard the person who brought the cake grumble from the other room, regarding it being a vegan cake, “because it’s always about Evan.” It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t even serious. Said with a laugh, a shared eye-roll.

What still gets to me is how refusing to consume the products of tortured animals somehow turns one into a pain in the neck. That the cake existed to satisfy me, rather than to avoid something most of us would claim to oppose if it were described plainly. By refusing, you’re making it about yourself — needlessly high-maintenance at best, insufferable at worst.

I don’t feel persecuted. I’m not wounded. I’m just so damn tired of how easily this gets framed as “a preference” instead of what it is: a refusal to subsidize animal suffering. There’s a difference between “I only eat corner pieces” and “I don’t want to pay for the confinement, forced impregnation, and slaughter of gentle, helpless animals.” But socially, those two things get flattened into the same category. I’d argue that most people even perceive the latter as being more selfish.

We all know, at some level, how this system works. We know animals aren’t volunteering. We know what has to happen for milk and eggs and body parts to appear cheaply and endlessly. But the charade continues.

And yes, I’m mortified that I even have to sit here and try to articulate this, once again centering myself in what is ultimately about the animals, and sparing them from lives of abject misery. Perhaps someday this will feel less like a favor and more like the only reasonable choice.