The Dinner Table at Sunset
I was staying at a diving resort in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, shooting a project together with Behind the Mask. The resort sits right on the edge of some of the most pristine reefs you can still find. A man I’d met at breakfast came back from a dive that afternoon, still dripping, still vibrating with the energy of what he’d seen underwater. He couldn’t stop talking about a cuttlefish he’d spent hours with. How it had shifted colors right in front of his mask. How intelligent its eyes seemed. How he’d watched it hunt and move through the corals with grace. A creature that has been perfecting camouflage for over 150 million years, and he had just witnessed all of that ancient intelligence and knowledge.
That same man ordered squid rings for dinner.
I watched him lift the fork. I watched him chew. And I felt something eerily familiar inside me. It was the same feeling I had floating in front of coral graveyards in Bali. The same one I had when I saw them selling shark meat at the supermarket. The same one I had when I saw boats driving at full speed across a manta ray cleaning station. The same one that drowns me when I read the statistics about our oceans. But this time, it was different. This wasn’t about distant politics or shadowy corporate interests. This was happening in real time, at a table where everyone claimed to love the ocean.
He had spent hours under water adoring a creature with three hearts, distributed neurons that let it think with its arms, and a language of color and texture. And then he ordered its cousins for dinner.
The cognitive dissonance was so loud it was deafening.
You Can’t Claim to Love What You Kill
Let me say this plainly, because I’ve learned that subtlety gets lost in the roar of our collective denial: You cannot love marine life while you consume it. Not honestly. Not in any way that makes logical sense. And I say this not to shame you, but because I believe you’re smarter than the lie you’re telling yourself.
This isn’t about judgment. It’s about mathematics. It’s about basic honesty.
When you look a dolphin in the eye underwater and feel moved by its intelligence, you’re not feeling sentimental. You’re witnessing a being with a brain structure similar to yours. A creature that uses echolocation with such precision that it can detect the size and shape of objects. A mammal that grieves its dead, that plays for joy, that recognizes itself in mirrors. When you watch it with that sense of wonder, you’re acknowledging something real. You’re feeling its consciousness.
But then you go to a seafood restaurant and order tuna. Recent statistics indicate that approximately 80,000 to over 90,000 dolphins are killed annually as bycatch in global tuna fisheries.
Tuna. An animal that migrates thousands of kilometers, that has been navigating the same routes for millennia, that possesses a sense of place and family lineages. Tuna are so intelligent that they teach their young where to find food and when. And yet we catch and kill over 2.6 million tons of tuna every single year. We’ve depleted populations so catastrophically that some species are functionally extinct.
You felt that dolphin was special, so you took a photo. You post it online with heart emojis. You tell the story about how magical it was. “I’ll never forget those eyes,” you say. And then you eat its neighbor.
The only way this makes sense is if love, for you, is conditional on invisibility. If something is far enough away, abstract enough, or on someone else’s plate instead of your own, then maybe love doesn’t apply. Maybe love is just tourism. Maybe love is just content.
Billie Eilish, a 24-year-old pop star who has been vegan since age 12, recently said something that sparked a firestorm of defensive comments online. “You can eat meat. You can love animals. But you can’t do both.” She walked into that statement knowing exactly that what she was saying would result in a shitstorm. She knew people would call her privileged. She knew they would defend their choices. She said it anyway.
And you know what? She’s right. Completely, unflinchingly right.
The backlash against her was immediate and predictable. People accused her of lacking empathy for those with fewer choices, of being out of touch. Some claimed that eating meat is necessary for human health. But what I noticed most was the desperation in the arguments. The “but actually” energy. Because deep down, everyone knows she’s pointing out something we’ve collectively decided to ignore: the logical impossibility of the position most of us are standing in.
You cannot look into the eyes of a being and recognize its consciousness, feel moved by its existence, want to protect it… and then consume its flesh. These two things are not compatible. They don’t coexist in honest people. They coexist in people who have decided that some aspects of their love are decorative and some are convenient, and never the two shall meet on the same plate.
The Moment You Choose to Forget
Something happens when you go underwater. Your brain changes. You become hyperaware. Present. Connected to every movement, every color, every creature around you. You descend into a world where everything matters because every moment is borrowed time.
You watch an octopus change its color and texture. You see a sea turtle grazing on seagrass. You make eye contact with something alive and aware of your presence. You feel the weight of being allowed into their world, even for just an hour.
And then you surface.
You climb back onto the boat. You peel off your wetsuit. And somewhere between the water and the air, between the ocean and the land, you leave that version of yourself behind.
The creature you were just moved by becomes abstract again. A memory. A story you’ll tell. A photo you’ll post. By the time you’re sitting at the dinner table that evening, you’ve already begun the work of forgetting. Of compartmentalizing. Of making it possible to eat that very creature you observed underwater.
This isn’t accidental. You choose to unsee what you just saw. To unfeel what you just felt. To pretend that the connection was real underwater but irrelevant on land.
The Creatures with Languages You Don’t Speak
There’s a reason the backlash against Eilish’s statement was so fierce. It wasn’t because she was wrong. It was because she was right, and rightness, when it’s pointed at us, stings.
In her response to the criticism, Eilish posted slaughterhouse footage and wrote, “Go watch a documentary or two and some footage of what is done to the animals u claim to love and what it does to the planet u pretend to love as well. If that footage was hard for u to watch, I encourage u to pls take a look at urself. Like I am so tired of standing up for/having empathy for living beings being controversial. pls continue to live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance and denial and try to convince urself that ur not living a lie.“
It stung because it named the thing we’re all doing. Living in cognitive dissonance. Loving creatures in the abstract while consuming them in the concrete. We tell ourselves it’s cultural, it’s necessary, and it’s an exception. But these are just excuses to avoid looking at what we’re actually doing.
I’ve been on countless dive trips with people who come alive underwater. I’ve seen them cry when they see a healthy reef for the first time. I’ve watched them spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours to spend time with dolphins or sharks. I’ve seen the transformation that happens when a human being recognizes the consciousness of another creature and feels the weight of that connection.
And then they order ceviche at dinner.
Do you understand how violent that disconnect is? Not as judgment, but as fact: you’re contradicting yourself.
The creatures you’re encountering underwater have brains, feelings, memories, and pain receptors.
Dr. Phillip Munday, a fish cognition researcher, describes it simply: “We’ve spent so long assuming fish are simple creatures without real consciousness. The evidence now is overwhelming. Fish have preferences; they can count; they recognize faces; they feel pain and fear. When we catch and kill them, we’re not removing food from the ocean. We’re killing sentient beings that we’re only beginning to understand.”
And we’re deafening them with boat noise. We’re capturing them for tourism. We’re suffocating them in nets. And we’re stealing their food.
The Philosophers Knew
It’s worth noting that this isn’t some new discovery that Eilish invented. The contradiction I’m describing has been obvious to thoughtful people for thousands of years.
Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher, was a vegetarian. He believed that harming animals was ethically indefensible, that intelligence and consciousness were not uniquely human traits, and that we should live in harmony with all sentient beings.
Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest mind of the Renaissance, wrote extensively about his vegetarianism. He believed that “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat.” He wasn’t doing it for health. He was doing it because he understood something that we seem determined to forget: that taking a life, any life, comes with a responsibility that can’t be compartmentalized.
In ancient Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the concept of ahimsa, or non-violence, extends to all sentient beings. The recognition that causing suffering is fundamentally wrong, regardless of who or what is suffering. These aren’t modern inventions. These are ancient, repeated realizations that humans have arrived at when they genuinely consider what it means to love something.
And yet, we’ve constructed an entire system designed to make you forget that the food on your plate was once a being with a consciousness, with preferences, with a drive to stay alive.
The Choice That Feels Impossible But Isn’t
I know what you’re thinking. Or at least, I know what I was thinking when I started questioning this contradiction. It feels impossible. It feels like I’m being asked to give up everything. Like if I don’t eat meat, I’m limiting myself, missing out, becoming some preachy person at dinner that nobody wants to sit next to.
You’re a diver, a snorkeler, a watcher of ocean documentaries. You’re a person who has experienced the wonder of the underwater world. You know what’s at stake. You’re not ignorant about the state of the ocean. You’ve read my other articles, probably. Hopefully. You know that the oceans are dying. You know about overfishing. You know about bycatch. You know about acidification and warming waters and coral bleaching.
You’re not ignorant. You’re choosing.
But let’s be clear about who I’m talking to. I’m not talking to sea nomads who have lived off the ocean for centuries using traditional, non-destructive fishing methods. I’m not talking to indigenous communities whose ancestral practices are woven into their survival. I’m not talking to people without choices, for whom fish is not a luxury but a lifeline. Those people are not living a contradiction. They’re living their reality.
This is about you. The person with options. The person in a developed country standing in front of restaurants full of choices. The person who can see the fish on the plate and know exactly where it came from and what it cost but chooses not to look. The difference is necessity versus choice. For them, it’s life. For you, it’s preference.
I’m not here to shame you for that choice. I’m here to ask you to make it consciously. To acknowledge what you’re actually doing when you order seafood after you’ve spent the day adoring marine life.
Because there’s a difference between unconscious participation and conscious participation, and that difference matters.
The beautiful part, is that the choice to stop eating marine life is not actually that difficult. It’s not a sacrifice of the magnitude you might think. Millions of people do this. Plant-based diets are cheaper, on average, than meat-based diets. They’re healthier. They’re more sustainable. And they don’t require you to perform intellectual gymnastics to justify them.
The hardest part isn’t the food. It’s the admission. It’s saying, “I was wrong. I participated in something that contradicted my values. I loved animals on Sundays and ate them on Tuesdays.”
But once you make that admission, something shifts. You stop living in that constant state of cognitive dissonance that Eilish described. You stop needing to explain away the contradiction. You just stop participating in it.
What Love Actually Looks Like
The ocean has enough problems without our love being conditional and decorative. It needs our love to be real. To be expressed in choices, not just in photos that you bring home from your holiday and post on your feed. To be something that follows us out of the water and influences how we move through the world.
Real love for marine life looks like refusing to eat them. It looks like understanding that the dolphins you’re fascinated by and the squid on your plate are not separate things. They’re part of the same story. They’re part of the same system that we’re destroying.
Real love looks like what Eilish is doing. Standing there, knowing you’ll be criticized, knowing people will call you privileged and preachy and self-righteous, and saying it anyway. Saying, “I will not participate in this contradiction. I will not eat the things I claim to love.”
One Step Back to Solid Ground
So here’s where I’m at and where I’m inviting you to be.
I’m not asking you to become vegan overnight. I’m not asking you to achieve complete moral purity or to judge others who are still making the choice I used to make. People arrive at these realizations at different times, with different information and different circumstances.
What I’m asking is for honesty. The same honesty that you bring to your diving. The same honesty that allows you to look at the data about coral bleaching and bycatch and overfishing and say, “This is real. This is happening. I need to change something.”
I’m asking you to extend that honesty to your plate.
And I’ll be honest back. Some people are getting this right. There are marine protected areas that are working, reefs that are recovering, and coastal communities that have brought back fish populations through sustainable management. There are restaurants refusing to serve endangered species. There are divers choosing dive operators based on environmental practices. Progress exists. It’s fragile and slow, but it exists.
You can be part of that. Not in some distant, abstract way, but right now:
- Stop eating anything on the Seafood Watch “Avoid” list. Replace one seafood meal per week with a plant-based meal. This matters mathematically.
- When you travel for diving, research the operator. Ask them about moorings, waste management, and their relationship with local communities. The best operators will be thrilled to tell you.
- Share this contradiction with other divers. Seriously. Post the question, “Can you love them and eat them?” on your dive group chat. Start the conversation.
- Make one ocean-related donation this year. To a marine protection organization, to a community-based fishery, to ocean cleanup projects. $50 to Oceana funds 200 pounds of bycatch prevention.
- Stop pretending the choice is impossible. It’s not. Millions of people make it every day. The discomfort you feel isn’t about the food. It’s about the admission.
Because every time you order seafood, you’re saying something with your money, with your choices. You’re saying, “I want to continue this contradiction where I love marine life and consume it simultaneously. I want to keep living this way even though I know it’s not consistent with my values.”
You’re smart enough to know that that’s not true.
You have a choice. You can continue as you are, loving underwater and eating at dinner, performing the contradiction without naming it. Or you can do what people like Billie Eilish are doing. You can say, “No. My love is real. Real enough that I’m willing to change. Real enough that I’m willing to be unpopular for it. Real enough that I will not eat the things I claim to love.”
The ocean doesn’t need your guilt. It needs your honesty.
That honesty starts with admitting that love and consumption cannot occupy the same space. Not for creatures with consciousness. Not for beings with language and memory and families and futures.
One or the other. You choose which.
But choose consciously. Choose honestly. And then live with what you choose.
Because the ocean is watching. And unlike us, it has no capacity for denial.
Sources:
- Billie Eilish’s recent statements on veganism and animal consumption, May 2024.
- Fish cognition research: Dr. Philip Munday, James Cook University – Studies on fish behavior, learning, and environmental response.
- Wrasse intelligence and behavior: “The Cognitive World of Wrasse” – Research on tool use, problem-solving, and individual recognition in wrasse species. Published in Fish and Fisheries, 2018.
- Fish cognition review: Sneddon, L.U., Braithwaite, V.A., & Gentle, M.J. “Do fishes have nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2003.
- Fish face recognition and counting: “Fish Recognition and Numerical Ability” – Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, various studies 2015-2022.
- Fish pain perception: International Society for Applied Ethology – Statement on fish welfare and sentience, 2020.
- Global seafood catch and bycatch figures: FAO State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) Report, 2022.
- Global fish catch statistics: 100+ million tons annually – FAO & UN Food Security Database, 2023.
- Pythagoras and da Vinci vegetarianism: Historical records and personal writings archives.
- Plant-based diet cost analysis: “A Systematic Review of the Costs and Effectiveness of Plant-Based Diets” – Nutrients Journal, 2021.
