This is the best advice you can give someone imo. Im like 75% vegan, still have eggs and bacon on the weekends, some chicken with dinner, some other stuff here and there. But mostly its beans/tofu and rice with veggies.

Some people think they have to give up everything all at once right now and of course that seems overwhelming.... because it is.

One change I made early on was to look for ways to shorten the distance from my food, become familiar with how it gets to my plate and just keep higher standards overall for things like meat.

The experience of buying meat in particular can be heavily abstracted and sanitized. Every big chain supermarket has an area with rows and rows of perfectly packaged cuts. There is not very much information at all about most of it.

Pick up a Styrofoam tray of boneless skinless chicken breasts from the one or two giant conglomerates. Each package is wrapped in plastic. They all have very consistent appearance, evenly colored and equally plump. They are completely odorless. It is chicken but it's very very far away from being a chicken. It's been through a lot of hands and miles. You've already hit a wall, though, because you're not getting much more information about that meat besides maybe some marketing terms and a picture of a taco or some shit like that. You're being sold the idea of it. All of the horrible stuff is obscured. Even the neutral stuff like what it ate, if it was ever sick or given any medications. All that stuff gets pushed into the memory hole and is supposed to never reach the consumer. If you become too curious, and start digging into it on your own, you naturally end up consuming less. They know this.

Contrast that with what's produced more locally. Try to figure out who in your area is producing with the goal of building up an actual local foodway sustainably. How close can you get to identifiable people actually producing your food? Can you access a co-op, farmers market, CSA?

Folks who do things like regenerative farming and try to build up their soil tend to be very passionate and like to share about it. Visit a nearby farm or ranch. Many have small retail operations. They may deal in larger quantities than you're used to. Find out the process. If an animal is involved, how is it cared for and what does it do all day? Is the animal improving its surroundings or degrading them? Are you willing to meet your food face to face?

IMO if you're going to continue eating meat, you owe it to your food to unpack this stuff, examine how it makes you feel to literally "know how the sausage is made", form deeper connections with your food and community, and find opportunities to make positive changes to your buying habits.

ETA:

not everyone will be able to stomach peeking behind the curtain. But that's actually good. It means you're a compassionate human being, and that feeling can be harnessed and channeled into better personal choices.

I'm just tired of seeing all meat-eating equated, too. The Styrofoam chicken is in a completely different category from a fresh whole chicken acquired locally from, say, a nearby farm that prioritizes regenerative practices.

Compare the true costs and impacts of each. You might forget they're the same species. It turns out that, if you simply let a chicken just... do its chicken things and provide it with what it already knows it needs to satisfy its drives, its natural behaviors and outputs can be directed to benefit the rest of the system. It's not easy. This is a complex system, and there's a lot to learn. But if you can get it right, the chicken is healthy and satisfied, it improves other parts of the system during its life, has at least net-zero if not positive net impact environmentally, and you still get to sell it at the end if that's what you want your operation to be.

The best arguments for not eating meat disagree specifically with what happens at the end of, e.g., a meat chicken's life. I know not to argue against that. It's a principled moral stance.

There will probably always be people who want to eat meat. It is very deeply ingrained human impulse. I think it desperately needs to be scaled way way back. The big players in the conventional national industry need to be seized and taken apart, yesterday. Everything good and useful there needs to be pried out of their hands, brought local, and distributed among the people.

If the tables were turned, and local, sustainable models were the norm, we'd eat way less of it, feel way better, and have the community profit instead of extracted from. "Big chicken" would not exist like it does now. We'd be having completely different conversations.

While I agree with the sentiment, I still struggle a bit with this rhetoric. When it comes to misogyny or rasicsm you wouldn't tell someone to just try and do less of it. The meat & dairy industry is still a whole lot of abuse and exploitation, and I think everyone is probably on board with having nothing to do with it. The friction is just too high I guess.

to a vegan it kinda sounds equivalent to “just don’t be racist most days of the week, thats a good start”

That's the thing. If we could use less meat, use less cars, use less fossil fuels, we would all be happier. But me choosing to do these things sounds to people as just bending over for somebody else to use what I don't use. I just want a happier lifestyle? I'm not doing it for politics or self sacrifice, I'm just taking a step backwarda and realizing that mcdonalds sucks, car commuting sucks.

But I will use the car when I need to go to the countryside and there is no BETTER alternative!

Nah