Can Information Change People’s Mind? An Autoethnographic Reflection on my Personal Journey to Veganism

ABSTRACT

This autoethnographic essay portrays how a profound change of thinking and lifestyle can be triggered by mass media coverage and how a lifestyle can be sustainably changed although it goes against deeply rooted values and at first glance seems to be highly inconvenient. Considering different meanings of care, I reflect upon growing up with animal agriculture, how information deficit can be a barrier to behavioral change, and the ways a vegan diet matters to climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal agriculture
• vegan
• food
• climate change
• autoethnography

I have helped to send more chickens to slaughter than you and all your friends together would ever eat in your combined lifetimes. Yes, I am opening with this statement because of its shock value – and to highlight the fact that I have personal experience with working as a farmer, and particularly what it means to use non-human animals for food and profit.

In this autoethnographic essay, I use my personal experience to describe a lifestyle change that some of us have already made, many others will make, and yet others, I believe, will have to make. I say this because research shows that even if we could stop all greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, the emissions remaining from the global food system would still make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target (Clark et al., 2020). Hence, “eating for change” as Singer and Kristiansen (2023) put it, is spot on. We can eat to change – we can eat to help mitigate climate change. When the media portray this action for change they mostly put responsibility on the consumers (Kristiansen et al., 2021). This focus on consumers is also often seen in the communication from international conservation organizations (Freeman & Zimmerman, 2023). We consumers are not the only ones who can make this change, and not everyone are able to make this change, but many are and when we choose which product to put in our shopping basket in the grocery store, we own the power to be part of that change. However, this change would not only be relevant to the climate and the ones suffering from climate change. As this essay will highlight, dietary change also means caring for others than ourselves. One question is, do we care enough to do what we can to lessen our harm to the planet, non-human animals, and ourselves?

The nature and climate crisis requires focus on care, care for the past, the now, and the future and caring to take actions that can increase the probability that we avoid a complete disaster. The winds in the field of communication bring fresh air to considering the research field of environmental communication not only as “a crisis discipline, but also a care discipline” (Pezzullo, 2024, p. 1). When there is an acute crisis, a roaring fire, we often put all our efforts into putting out that fire. But not all crises engulf our attention like roaring fires, and yet they can still be as detrimental. If we turn more of our attention to some of those areas that are only short of one spark to become a crisis, before they do, if we care about them, possibly we can prevent some of them growing into roaring crises.

Doyle puts it “to care involves emotion, thought and action” and continues “to care is to take responsibility for those connections and put them in/to practice” (Doyle, 2024, p. 1). For me personally, a piece of new information triggered me. It triggered my emotions, they lead me to think more about a specific issue, and the information I collected lead me to investigate actions I could take and I did put them into action, making a significant lifestyle change. This essay will paint a picture of experiences I had growing up, and portray some of the values I grew up with, to give some background to who I was when this information later hit me like a bolt from the blue. This essay will not answer the question if information is enough to “save the planet,” but rather use the autoethnographic lens to zoom in on how it changed me. Throughout, I suggest ways “care” has signified different meanings in my life as a child on a farm and as an adult who has decided to stop eating non-human animals. This essay connects to the ongoing research in the journal of Environmental Communication on food and the environment (Opel et al., 2010; Singer & Kristiansen, 2023), and overall, I hope sharing this reflection enables a broader conversation in environmental communication about how we do change, when we do, and why.

“Taking care of them”

When I grew up in the Swedish countryside in the eighties and nineties, my father owned and managed an industrial chicken farm that produced meat. Just to get this out of the way, in no way do I condemn him for that. I love my father. It is a long story how this chicken farm ended up in our family, which I will save for another day. For now, I want to focus on my own story, starting with how we found ourselves there, a very young couple (my lovely parents) with one child (that was me), then two, then three and four children, a family dog, my ponies and horses – and, literally, truckloads of chickens.

While I was growing up, my mum went to school, so I was often with my father at work. By being with him at a very young age helping with the chickens, the farming practices became part of my life and were normalized. My father’s farm housed around 80,000 broiler chickens in four huge windowless barns. That was before one of the barns burned down to the ground, a terrible tragedy for our family and the farm. The new barn built to replace the old one could hold more chickens so that with it, the entire farm could house about 100,000 chickens per batch. Six times a year the 36–42 day-old chickens would be sent to slaughter, and a new batch of one-day-old chickens would be trucked in and installed on the farm.

For me as the oldest child, attending the weekend family breakfast was a risky business. The request for help at the farm was often sent across the table landing on my plate. Accepting this request was rarely something I was excited about. I preferred to hang out at home with my ponies and horses and maybe meet up with friends. At the same time, I understood that it was valuable for my father to be able to come home from work earlier at the weekends since we were all at home and he would otherwise be missing out on family time. In a sense, helping on the farm was a significant way I showed care for my family – my mother, my father, and my family’s ability to make a living, as well as being together. Helping with the farming chores would eventually earn me my first ever salary. Despite this introduction to farming, I never considering farming as a way to make a living for myself.

On the farm I assisted with various tasks that in different ways connect to animal care. One daily chore involved finding and removing deceased or ailing chickens from the barns. One by one, I slowly walked up and down the long barns between the feed and water lines. I carefully swung the black plastic bucket in my hand to hush away the chickens to be able to see those in distress or already deceased. When I found the bodies of the dead chickens, I picked them up and put them in the plastic bucket, and kept count. When the bucket became too heavy to carry another round, I emptied out the dead bodies in a black garbage bag. And then continued another round in the very warm temperature kept in there, while sorting out the dead and dying from the living.

Some chickens were not doing well. To reduce suffering and financial loss, these needed to be found and culled. These too I collected in my bucket. I sat them on top of the dead bodies, until I could put them aside. Except for the very strong ammoniac smell from the manure and the warm and dusty air, I was rarely grossed out by this job. Most of the time the chickens had been dead for less than 24 h and I did not find it disgusting to pick them up. On very rare occasions a body had been overlooked for a few days. Chickens die in all possible locations, including under feeders and other equipment. When older and larger dead chickens were overlooked, in the warm temperatures, their bodies turned into something difficult to identify as a chicken. Often their feathers fell off, and their skin took on a dark red and purple color, and the entire body turned into a loose bag of skin with chicken feet attached. Picking them up, I worried their skin would rip and the contents would pour out when I carefully grabbed their ankle and pulled the body off the floor. I did not like finding these bodies, so I always tried my best to look at every single inch of the floor to not miss out any of them. This job was easy and quite boring. Sometimes I would bring a Walkman and listen to a music cassette with songs I had recorded from the radio. It was quick and easy to walk through the barn when the chickens were young and small and had plenty of room to get out of my way, but the job became increasingly challenging as the chickens grew larger and space became very sparse. Now their dead bodies were also heavy to carry. The 10-liter bucket would fill up with just a few bodies. I lifted them by their feet and put them head down into the bucket, and their nails and cold toes would sometimes be so long they would reach the bucket handle and touch my hand until I could empty the bucket. When the bucket was full, I had to carry additional bodies in my other hand, trying to fit as many ankles in my hand as possible. Now I had two tools to swing and hush the other chickens away with, the bucket and a hand full of dead chickens. Their loose swinging necks and open wings would help clear the path. The dusty, warm and odorous environment, housing 20,000 chickens for weeks, added to the difficulty of the task.

I do not remember us talking much about the reasons they died. I do not think I was that curious about it. It was so normal to me that some died every day. We counted them and put down the number of deaths on a list and when we were done we drove back home and that was that. Some of them probably died because their bodies could not sustain their fast growth. It was not uncommon to find not yet dead chickens who had one or both legs pointing to the side in an unnatural angle and being unable to walk. Of the chickens that did not die in the barns, there were two categories: those we would have to cull and those we would send to the slaughterhouse. Early on, my father taught me to identify those who were too small, too slow growing, injured, sick, or weak and bring them back to him so that he could “take care of them” right then and there in front of me. Their necks would be dislocated and often they would still move when we tossed them into the trash bag with the other dead ones. I never had to cull, my father would always take care of that. I remember trying one time and I just could not do it. Dislocating a chicken neck is not difficult per se, but while holding my thumb on the thin neck against a metal wire all of a sudden the concept of taking someone’s life came very close and became real, and that made it impossible for me to do. While I waited for my father to come and help me with the weak ones I sometimes spent some time with them seeing if they would perk up if I offered them food and water. Especially when they were small, yellow and fluffy I tried to feed them and offer them water to see if they could regain strength. This was almost never successful. But sometimes my father would notice that I had had enough time to connect to certain individuals, and if he thought they might stand a chance to recover without suffering, he would release them back to the others and we would both hope they would make it and not be one of the counted dead the next day.

Another job I could help with was to pack the chickens for slaughter. You need a whole crew for this job. Many late nights, I joined soccer clubs and other groups coming to earn extra money, and we packed many thousands of chickens in plastic crates, and we rehydrated after the physically demanding job as the chickens drove off the slaughterhouse. One by one, often 14 chickens were lifted off the floor and put into a crate together. We would work in the protection of darkness because that is when the chickens lie down and are easy to grab. Despite the late hours and dirty and dusty work, as my school classes collected money for school trips, I would suggest we go and help pack the chickens for slaughter as that was relatively quick and easy money earned.

Chickens were with us at home too – they were served as food. My mother was the one cooking for the family, and with great care she would prepare a chicken breast stew made with dairy cream sauce, tomato concentrate and spices. Eventually I learned to cook during the home economic classes in school, and the similar chicken breast stew became my go to when I cooked for my parents, siblings or friends. I absolutely loved to carefully prepare the dairy cream sauce with different spices and serve it with rice. My father was always excited when I cooked that stew because he loved the sauce I made. We did not serve this with any vegetables, but my mother loved to mix lettuce with tomato and cucumber and that would be served on the side, but when we were young kids we did not touch it.

I ate chickens and other animals and animal products throughout my entire childhood, just like everyone else in my family and everyone I knew. I have only very vague memories of questioning why one day I would be tasked with trying to save as many chicken lives as possible, when the day-old chickens sometimes would arrive weakened at the farm needing help to find food and water to quickly get stronger and survive, and then at night around the kitchen table we would eat the flesh from chickens. As a child, I do not remember that eating chickens was ever a huge question to me – or that anyone I knew ever asked me about it as something out of the ordinary. Raising and sending chickens to slaughter to earn money was just what we did, it felt normal. And eating chickens was taken for granted as that what everyone I knew did.

Careful calculations

Years later, I did begin to question it – all of it. I was about 34 years old. At 19 I had moved from Sweden to Switzerland where I now was studying at the University of Zurich. I was impressed by Swiss society and had huge trust in how many things were well-organized. I still ate an omnivorous diet; since meat is very expensive in Switzerland, I did not eat meat with every meal. But an entire shelf in my fridge was always filled with yoghurt made from cow’s milk. And, yes, I sometimes bought chicken to cook, but not very often. I did not care that much for chicken flesh anymore and after having been introduced to veal, calf flesh, and lamb ribs, these were the animals I would eat when I wanted to treat myself to the expensive meats.

We know that historically, the media has not been known for giving much attention to the issue of environmentally friendlier diets (Kristiansen et al., 2021). There are some indications that this might be changing (Mroz & Painter, 2023). In fact, not even several environmental advocacy organizations, at least used to, according to Freeman’s, 2010 study, put the focus on a vegan diet. Despite this, one day in 2016, I came across one of these few articles that do spotlight food production. This article was not environmentally framed, it employed an ethical framing. I was not aware of it then, but have become aware later, that what this article did was to highlight non-human animals and what they go through. Freeman et al. (2011) and many people with them in the vegan movement talk about giving voice to the voiceless. In some ways this newspaper article did that. I transferred screams from a slaughterhouse only a few kilometers away from my home, and made them echo inside my head.

The newspaper article I came across was published in the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and interviewed slaughterhouse workers.¹ I remember reading that each pig slaughtered in that slaughterhouse gets less than one minute of attention in order for him or her to be killed. I was quite surprised by the fact that not more time was required for a pig’s life to be ended. But, then again, I remembered my father telling me how the chickens were slaughtered and that was a very efficient process too. But it was not the short amount of time the workers spent with each individual pig that gave me pause, it was the fact that the partially computerized system used in that slaughterhouse was described as not always working perfectly, leading to some pigs not to be stunned the way they should and there was no way and – most importantly – no time to re-do the stunning properly. My previously unquestioned trust in so many processes in Swiss society being organized perfectly was weakened. I was very surprised I would pay so much money for animal flesh in the store and now learning I sometimes probably paid for a piece of a pig’s body that had not even been slaughtered according to what were understood to be “humane” standards.

This one newspaper article, this once small piece of information, triggered me to the degree that I sighed loudly and thought to myself: hey, I already have to eat a strictly gluten free diet because of my celiac disease, there is no way I could also be vegetarian. And the very next thought was that while I might be right about that, I could try. I could actually try being vegetarian for say, two weeks, and just see if it actually is as impossible as I thought it was. No one talked to me about this. This decision was all me, at random coming across a newspaper article, reading it, and being quite disappointed in having trusted a system that now did not seem perfect anymore, and wanting to try if I could remove myself from funding that system that now all of a sudden did not reach my moral standards. Now all of a sudden, the girl who had convinced her classmates to come earn money for our school trip to Rome by packing chickens in plastic crates for slaughter, was transformed into a young woman who was not satisfied with the fact that some few pigs sometimes would not be slaughtered by the standards set for what dominant society considered to be “humane.”

At the time, I strongly thought living as a gluten free vegetarian would be impossible; but I was very motivated to try a two-week experiment. And now suddenly it became important for me to know what nutrients my body needed – something I also had never reflected on before. I started a thorough online search of nutrition, including which vegetarian sources I could get those nutrients from.

It did not take very long before I came across information that should by no means have shocked me, having grown up with friends living on farms producing cow’s milk, but prompted me to consider an even stricter dietary experiment: a vegan diet. In the same way I thought it was unnecessary that a pig should die while conscious for the benefit of me having a piece of his or her body in my mouth for a few seconds, I now thought it seemed quite cruel to consider what cows had to go through for me to fill that entire shelf in my fridge with yoghurt made from cow’s mother-milk (Jacobs, 2020, December 20; Peta, n.d.). The wheels were turning inside my head. What previously had seemed so normal, was now distorted and looked so weird and alien. I scrutinized everything I thought I knew. And the deeper I dug for information, the clearer it became to me how absurd this all was: we eat parts of animals’ bodies, their mother’s milk and their eggs?! And we do not need to do any of it for nutrition?²

I did not stop there at what some call vegan “propaganda.” It soon became clear to me that not only did this go against my morals and values, animal agriculture also turned out to be very bad for the environment – it is an industry that emits a lot of greenhouse gasses. This was all news to me, and very bad news. My health was my main concern during this two-week long experiment and my search for healthy dietary alternatives continued. And given what my main online searches were about, it did not take long before I came across information that animal products were not as healthy as I thought they were. Now I had this triad of issues with my diet: it was cruel to animals, bad for the environment and bad for my own health.

Now, I was convinced that I needed to try to be vegan. I sighed again. I did not know anyone who was or had been vegan. But I remembered a friend of a friend from when I was sixteen years old who I heard was a vegan, meaning they also did not eat eggs and butter and such. At that time that was a huge mystery to me how that was even practically possible – I really did not consider it an option for myself. And I still was convinced it was going to be impossible. Nevertheless, now that I knew not all animal agriculture was ethical and felt the processes in general seemed cruel to non-human animals, I was extremely motivated to give it a try. At the time, I figured I would try it for two weeks and then go back to eating like I did before, knowing I had tried. Knowing I had made a real effort and tried would calm my bad conscience, I rationalized.

The experiment began. I was surprised by how easy it was to be a gluten free vegan. Of course, yes, I had to read a lot of labels and ask a lot of questions at restaurants; but, I was already doing that because of my celiac disease. This further restricted the processed (anyway unhealthy) products I could buy, while at the same time I discovered the joy of eating beans, lentils, seeds, and nuts as foods I had almost never considered before. I made careful calculations and investigations into where all the nutrients my body needs came from, and never before had I been so informed about what a human body needs to thrive. Taking care to learn more about animal agriculture and my own body’s nutritional needs, ended up transforming my life.

I have now been vegan for over seven years. Today, I identify as a so-called “ethical vegan,” someone who refuses animal products because of the ethical issue with killing and exploiting animals for nutrients (and skin, fur, feathers etc.) we can easily get elsewhere, and the ethical issues that comes with the human labor in animal agriculture, and the ethical issues with producing food that unnecessary pollutes the environment. Being a communication scholar who deeply cares about the health of the planet Earth we live on, being vegan for environmental reasons is just as big of a reason for me not to eat animal products. Increasingly, a plant-based or vegan diet is recognized as critical for reducing climate change, and necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius even if emissions from fossil fuels were eliminated immediately (Carrington, 2018; Clark et al., 2020; Poore & Nemecek, 2018). I am also vegan because a (whole foods) plant-based diet is healthier, however, I will admit, I am not the perfect whole foods plant-based vegan I aspire to be some days.

Reflections on information and care

In communication studies, the information deficit model of communication has been often questioned (Freise, 2016; Hansen et al., 2003; Holland et al., 2007; Nisbet & Mooney, 2007; Priest, 2001; Sturgis & Allum, 2004). This model assumes that individuals or groups of people would change their behavior if only they were more aware or had more information.

While I do not think information for many people is sufficient alone to change behavior, this reflection aims to consider how, under certain circumstances, information can matter profoundly to what or who we care about.

As noted, it is interesting to me to realize it took a few hundred words in one single newspaper article to trigger my interest in trying to change my diet, lifestyle, my perception, my opinion, and in some ways my life trajectory. One journalistic text triggered me to research information that ultimately led me to move as far away as possible from the way I earned enough money to buy my first cell phone. And yes, I now sometimes do wonder if I as a child ever thought the entire chicken farm thing was weird, and I wonder if I really never asked my parents how this all made sense. What values did I actually host when this information came bursting through the door turning everything upside down? What had seemed so normal growing up and starting my adult life, now was distorted and not normal at all. Some of the information reaching me was “why love one and eat the other,” referring to companion animals (e.g. dogs and cats) versus farmed animals. I grew up loving and caring for horses and the family dog and helping raise chickens for their meat. We would call the vet if one of my horses got sick, and we would break a neck if a chicken got sick. Maybe this information helped make it clear that it did not make sense to “love one and eat the other,” i.e. tapping into values I already had, but did not yet apply to all non-human animals. This information likely triggered strong discomfort stemming from cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) in me, and the information was so powerful that the only strategy I could take to lessen the discomfort from the cognitive dissonance was behavioral change. My dietary change experiments showed me there was no need to try to justify why I could not change.

Of course, most people do not change their ways simply after absorbing new information – many people probably read that same article and did not change their diets. Therefore, I would count myself as one of the outliers here. But, information clearly mattered and did not land in a vacuum. And it was probably a combination of new information, my pre-existing values, and my experience on the chicken farm. There was surely also an element of shock too, when I truly connected the dots between the animal product on my plate with what that animal had to go through to end up there. Later, I think atonement became relevant. I could not save the animals I had already helped send to slaughter or be eaten, but I could make sure I did not create demand for it to happen as a result of my actions in the future. My induvial journey speaks to the vast amount of research in the field of social and personal psychology, which suggests (media) information, values, world view, and emotional engagement can play a role in people’s perception about topics including diet and climate change and possibly in providing fertile prompts for lifestyle changes (Braman et al., 2007; Corner et al., 2014; Happer & Wellesley, 2019; Kahan et al., 2007, 2012; Loy et al., 2020).

This autoethnography also considered how “care” mattered. The care my family had to provide a roof over my head and food on my plate. The care I felt to want to help my father and the rest of my family. The care my father had towards the non-human animals that allowed him to help sustain a family of six. The care a journalist showed to write a story about the pigs killed at the slaughterhouse in Zürich. The care to be curious about the news that day. The care for the pigs I never met. Care for my health. Care about making food choices in my everyday life that mitigate climate change. Care, in this context, suggests values including and beyond information. Those are the conversations I want to have more so we might envision a future for animals, human and non-human, without unnecessary suffering, climate change, and unhealthy lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The original article in Tages Anzeiger was taken down and the new version of the article does not include some of the details that were the most triggering to me.

2 There is lots of great online information on vegan sources for (important) nutrients. Sources that were helpful to me when first starting to learn about a healthy vegan diet was the UK Vegan Society (n.d.), and the very in-depth science based website that M.D. FACLM Michael Greger runs, NutritionFacts.org (n.d.), and also the website and app Cronometer.com (n.d.), where you can enter the food you eat and get a detailed estimation of which amino acids, minerals, vitamins and more you have taken in the daily recommended amount. On this page you can also see from which food sources the different nutrients came and through that learn what to eat more or less of. You can also experiment with putting in food items you have not yet eaten, to see what nutrients they would add. As for celiac disease one resource is the Celiac Disease Foundation (n.d.). You can then combine the knowledge about gluten free foods and eat the gluten free foods that are also vegan.