What do you not want to know?

Sometimes omnivores and I get into discussions about my reasons for being a vegan and sometimes these discussions get cut short because they say ‘Stop right there – I don’t want to know what goes into my meat/how cows get slaughtered etc. because if I’ll know then I will feel guilty so it’s better to not know’. My husband, for example, was told that if he reads “Eating Animals” by Foer and he has a half a brain and a half a heart, he will turn vegetarian so he prepared himself for the information and surely enough, this all came to pass and now we’re vegans as we learn more.

That’s just an example, there are a lot of nightmarish industries out there affecting what we eat, wash ourselves with, put on our faces, how we dress and what we buy. Sometimes, we have the information about what’s really going on and we change our practices, buy different products, become more aware and conscious but we can’t ever learn enough. Sometimes, we have vague ideas about something being wrong but we just don’t want to research into it because then we’ll have to hold ourselves accountable or find other options. In my family of activists, we try to live our lives in a way that brings forth as little harm as possible to ourselves, others but we consume plenty of products that lead to poverty and hunger and ills of others on the other side of the world (or in our own cities). We use products without knowing what’s in them because we say ‘we are already trying too much, too hard, things have changed so quickly and so drastically…if we learn yet another thing we’re doing wrong, our heads will exploded’...yet, of course, we realize that’s quite the privileged response to have and we should shut our faces up.

Lately, we’ve been looking into buying eco-friendly/vegan sources of clothing and shoes in order to further ourselves from corporatist interests and animal cruelty but we don’t know everything and information on environmentally (let alone practices that provide for workers who make the products) sound products is scarce. And as we start to look into this, sometimes I just say ‘I just don’t want to know…’ (this phase doesn’t usually last, but it’s still there)...so what don’t you want to know about, something you think would change you or your life if you learned about it enough? What do you have suspicions about but don’t want to confirm your feelings?