Eating food produced in harmful ways: wrongful complicity or moral tragedy?

Imagine you come across a leftover turkey sandwich that will expire soon, no one is around to eat it, and you cannot donate it to someone else before it goes bad. In this case, if you don’t eat the sandwich, it will go to landfill. A new omnivore says that you should eat the sandwich, rather than buying some plant-based food. A common rebuttal to new omnivorism says that by eating the turkey sandwich you become complicit in industrialized animal agriculture: consuming the leftover sandwich amounts to a retroactive endorsement of the institution that produced it. This is wrongful, and so we should reject new omnivorism. This is the complicity objection to new omnivorism. In this paper, we argue that the complicity objection fails to ethically distinguish new omnivores and vegans. We argue that, in terms of complicity with wrongdoing, vegans are at least as bad as new omnivores in their dietary choices. We suggest that we accept the moral tragedy of our situation, which is that there is no harmless-to-animals diet available, and so, rather than trying to find the impossible, we should confront this morally tragic reality head on. Confronting our dietary choices may well support new omnivorism over veganism in certain circumstances.