A critique of Vegetarianism/Veganism

I am not a fan of anti-meat movement but I respect it. I understand if you don't want to directly harm animals. It is just not a choice I make since from my personal experience having eggs/meat in my diet is a much healthier choice & I am willing to make that trade, I put myself and my health above animal suffering. Obviously that would make me a monster in some people's eyes because "animal cruelty", but that is fine. The proposition that veganism is a clean, cruelty-free solution is a comforting illusion. In reality, it is all trade offs. I am not going to debate what is better as a nutrition choice, a balanced diet of meat & vegetables is the clear winner. I am going to evaluate the morality:

1. Crop farming kills animals too. We clear fields for agriculture, use pesticides to kill insects and creatures who will eat our crops. It kills millions of lives and disrupts entire ecosystems. Just because it is not "direct" killing, does not mean it is "clean" food.

2. I am writing this on a laptop, someone is reading this on a laptop or a phone. If you study the modern supply chains, you would know how dirty mining is. Child labor, destruction of nature, there's entire books and documentaries about the suffering of people. We start talking about suffering of animals and go down that road we enter an area where nothing we use is clean and should throw it away. The components for these devices require mining. Mining destroys vast habitats, pollutes waterways, and has documented links to horrific human rights abuses, including child labor in cobalt mines. We accept this harm as a necessary trade-off for the benefits of modern communication and society.

3. Same goes for roads & housing & shipping to be honest. Entire ecosystems & habitats are destroyed to build cities and infrastructure. We all know climate change is a real issue. Yet, we live in these houses. We use rat poison to kill rats in our home, drive away insects. If we should care about life, we should probably care about all life. Just look at the conditions from which the raw materials for these things come from. Open youtube, take a trip. The conditions people live in. The exploitation that they are subjected to. There's probably more I am missing here.

All of this does not mean I am not advocating for all of this to continue. Nothing can be perfect and we will always do these trade-offs. Climate change is a real problem but geopolitics, social trends make it an impossible fight. I will dive into it someday. That is a good argument against what I said above. We can try to make choices within our control and live with necessary evils. We can choose to not eat meat and minimize the suffering we can. It is a very valid argument. But it is not black and white. It is completely fair to choose to have better health by eating meat and addressing shortcomings in a non-meat diet (they are plenty). Getting better nutrition is absolutely necessary as a choice for many and I think vegans should respect that, they cannot define "necessary", the individual can. You can make the argument a vegan diet damages less than the meat based one, which is fair. But ultimately we can choose our health. Selfish beings & all that. It is not a bad thing, probably a good thing to want to be stronger and better. There's much bigger battles for the world to fight right now, probably forever, that you can choose to not fight this one. I have gone into the bigger problems we face in other posts.