Is eating meat a personal choice?

The objection

“What I eat is my own business. I’m not telling anyone else how to live, so why should anyone tell me what to put on my plate?”

The answer

Eating meat is a choice, so the objection rests on the word “personal” and its claim that nobody else is affected. John Stuart Mill drew the classic line in On Liberty (1859): the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against their will, “is to prevent harm to others”, and over their own body and mind “the individual is sovereign” [1]. By that test your plate is your own affair unless what goes on it harms someone else.

When does a choice stop being personal?

A choice stops being personal once someone else bears its cost. How you cut your hair affects you alone. Hitting someone is also a choice you are free to make, in the bare sense, yet nobody would call it your own business. We already draw this line around animals: few people would call cruelty to a dog a personal choice, and in England and Wales the Animal Welfare Act 2006 makes it a crime to cause a domestic or captive animal unnecessary suffering, including one you own [2]. The same section exempts killing an animal “in an appropriate and humane manner” [2], so the law doesn’t settle the question of meat, but it already treats harm to an animal as more than its owner’s business.

Who else does eating meat affect?

Eating meat affects the animals killed for food first, and then other people, through livestock farming’s greenhouse gas emissions. In a rough 2021 estimate from 2017 and 2018 data, Animal Charity Evaluators, an animal charity research group, put the toll on animals at an average of about 105 vertebrates a year for each person in the world who isn’t plant-based, and it says the figure should be taken as an underestimate [3]. Of those, 93 are fish and 12 are farmed land animals, nearly all of them birds [3]. Mill wrote On Liberty about people, but in his Principles of Political Economy he called it “the grossest misunderstanding of the principles of liberty” to treat the punishment of cruelty to animals as “an interference with domestic life” [4]. He was writing there about cruelty rather than diet, but his test turns on harm, so if the animals killed for food can be harmed, the same reasoning reaches them. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (2024), which has more than 600 signatories, says there is “strong scientific support” for conscious experience in other mammals and in birds, and at least a realistic possibility of it in all vertebrates, fish included [5], and the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 treats every vertebrate as a sentient being [6].

Other people are affected through the climate: livestock farming and its supply chains emitted about 6.2 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2015, around 12% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and two-thirds of that came from meat, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2023) [7].

Why should anyone else have a say in what I eat?

Other people have a say because the choice harms others, the animals killed for food and the people living with its emissions, and harm to others is where Mill drew the line between choices that are your own affair and choices that are not [1]. Eating meat is legal, so the say other people have is an argument, and Mill thought people could reason with you even about a choice that affects only yourself [1]. That argument asks you to weigh the choice with everyone it affects counted. On one side is an animal’s life, and on the other things like taste, habit, culture and convenience. Most people don’t need meat to be healthy, so health needn’t be on that side: the UK’s British Dietetic Association says carefully planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life stage [8], and the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ 2025 position is that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults [9].