This is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately, and is the subject for this week’s Foodie Underground column on EcoSalon. An excerpt:

There has been a repetitive question in my brain for the last few months.

“Why am I not vegetarian?”

I consider myself a conscious eater. I am the kind of person that nowadays passes up fruit and vegetables because they are out of season. Certainly, I still drink coffee and eat chocolate, and by no means am a 100% locavore, but I constantly think about what I consume and what I eat.

I am however, not a vegetarian. There, I said it.

Sometimes, ethically, that makes me cringe. In fact being a person that writes about conscious eating, publicly acknowledging that I am not a vegetarian puts me in a vulnerable spot; I get nervous about the response. The internet loves to hate, after all.

But I have watched too many under cover factory farm videos and read too many investigative reports about the state of affairs for mass produced meat to be able to avoid asking myself this question.

And so my personal policy to eating has evolved. I eat very little meat (in the past month I have eaten it twice), and I try very hard to think about it when I do.

What’s so bad about factory farmed meat? A lot of things. From environmental to human health to animal rights, there are a variety of things that are wrong about factory-farmed, cheap meat. Nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the U.S. go to livestock farming. To make one hamburger, it takes more than 50 gallons of water. Around 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the global meat and dairy industry. The list goes on. And despite our awareness of how bad the situation is, we continue to become more carnivorous.

Read the full column here.