The Ham in the Sandwich

I was in a cafe this morning. Coffee, breakfast, nothing specific on my mind.

There was a woman at the table in front of me with a ham sandwich. A few sparrows had wandered in through the open door, the way they do in those small neighbourhood places. She tore off a piece of bread and held it out. One sparrow took it. A few more came. She was visibly happy about it. Genuinely, not performatively.

And I noticed the contradiction sitting right there on the table.

The sparrows she was feeding were alive in front of her. The pig in her sandwich had also been alive, just somewhere she never had to see. That distance, I think, does a lot of work in how we decide what deserves our care. I read somewhere that human empathy scales with cuteness, proximity, familiarity. We will go out of our way to rescue a dog. We will not think twice before stepping on a beetle. The pig sits somewhere in the middle, and also out of sight, which makes the whole thing easier to not think about.

I’m not writing this to judge her. I ate meat for most of my life. Since 2019 I’ve moved away from meat. Though, my life is still full of contradictions that I haven’t yet resolved.

What I kept thinking about is the mechanism. If that sandwich had contained sparrow instead of ham, the scene would have felt disturbing to almost anyone watching. Both are animals. The difference is almost entirely emotional and cultural.

Peter Singer talks about moral progress as expanding the circle of concern. Family first, then community, then all humans, and for some people eventually further. I think that’s roughly what’s happened for me since 2019. The abstraction shifted. At some point the ham stopped being a food category and started being something that had been alive. The behaviour followed, slowly.

I don’t have a clean conclusion here. I just noticed the moment and wanted to write it down. Both things were true at the same time: she was genuinely kind, and her kindness had a boundary she wasn’t thinking about. That’s probably true of most of us, in different parts of our lives.

The sparrows kept coming. She kept smiling. I finished my coffee.