The documentary was supposed to be about cephalopod intelligence, but watching Heidi cycle through what looked unmistakably like active sleep states, I found myself thinking about a gathering in London seventy-five years ago, where seven people tried to name something that didn't yet have a word.
They thought they were simply naming a diet. They were actually naming a fundamental rupture in human consciousness.
The Ancient Refusal
In 973 CE, a blind Syrian poet named Abu al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri wrote: "I no longer steal from nature." He refused meat, dairy, honey, leather—anything taken from a creature that could suffer. This was medieval Syria, not modern California. Al-Maʿarri wasn't responding to factory farming or climate data but to something more fundamental: the recognition that consciousness might exist in forms we barely acknowledge.
His contemporaries considered him a heretic. In his collection "The Unnecessary Necessities," he argued that causing unnecessary suffering to any sentient being was a moral failing. "Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up," he wrote, "and do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals, or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught for their young." He lived in seclusion, maintaining his ethical stance despite social isolation.
The thread runs through every civilization that documented it. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, believed that killing and eating non-human animals sullied the soul and prevented union with a higher form of reality. He taught that all animals had souls, which were immortal and reincarnated after death. Before the word "vegetarian" was coined, people who abstained from eating meat were called "Pythagoreans."
In India, Mahavira formalized ahimsa into Jainism's central principle—not just non-violence but the absence of even the desire to harm. Jain monks still sweep the ground as they walk, wear masks to avoid inhaling insects, strain water before drinking. Western observers call this extreme, revealing more about Western baselines than Jain philosophy. The Jains understood something we're only beginning to rediscover: that harm creates ripples far beyond the immediate victim.
What's striking isn't the diversity of these traditions but their convergence. Separated by geography, centuries, and cosmologies, they arrived at remarkably similar conclusions: that consciousness is not binary but a spectrum, that suffering is not hierarchy but a web, that what we do to the vulnerable we eventually do to ourselves.
The Naming
Donald Watson had been vegetarian for twenty years when he called the November 1944 meeting. The meeting was held at the Attic Club, 144 High Holborn in London. Those who attended were Donald Watson, Elsie Shrigley, Fay K. Henderson, Alfred Hy Haffenden, Paul Spencer and Bernard Drake. London still showed its bombing scars. Rationing had reduced food to mathematics. The Holocaust's full scope was just becoming known.
Watson later wrote about the beginnings: "Perhaps it seemed to us a fitting antidote to the sickening experience of war, and a reminder that we should be doing more about the other holocaust that goes on all the time." The machinery of mass death, once built, seeks objects. The logic of industrial slaughter, once normalized, expands.
They spent considerable time on the word itself. Watson coined the term vegan to describe a vegetarian diet devoid of all animal-derived ingredients. He derived the term from the word vegetarian by taking its first three letters and its last two letters. Short, memorable, new. What began as naming a dietary practice became an ethical position.
Leslie Cross, Watson's collaborator, saw veganism as something that would emancipate human and other animals. The first Vegan Society newsletter reached twenty-five subscribers. Within two years, it was international.
Here's what those founding members couldn't have known: Over 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for meat globally every year. The question they named has become more urgent, not less.
The Contemporary Paradox
The movement was contradictory from the start. Watson was working-class, but many early vegans were aristocrats playing at simplicity. The American Vegan Society, founded in 1960, explicitly linked veganism to ahimsa, though its founder H. Jay Dinshah was born in New Jersey, not Jaipur.
The appropriation was well-meaning but telling—Western veganism has always borrowed liberally from Eastern philosophy while remaining fundamentally Western in its approach.
These tensions have only intensified dramatically. Contemporary veganism is simultaneously anti-capitalist and thoroughly commodified. Beyond Meat went public at a $3.8 billion valuation. Oatly's IPO reached $10 billion. Venture capitalists poured $3.1 billion into alternative proteins in 2020 alone. The same system that created industrial slaughter now sells its solution. Instead of reimagining our relationship with life, we're refreshing the brand.
The movement oscillates between purity spirals and corporate capture. At a vegan potluck in Oakland, someone argues that eating honey is "stealing reproductive labor from female bees." In the same city, a former vegan tells me her orthorexia hid behind ethics for years, her body depleted, her relationship with food destroyed. The line between conscientiousness and pathology blurs. Meanwhile, McDonald's tests the McPlant burger, KFC launches Beyond Fried Chicken. The revolution will be franchised.
Social media amplifies both extremes. Instagram influencers promote "clean" eating that's barely distinguishable from disordered restriction. TikTok creators film themselves crying at the meat aisle. The algorithm rewards performance, not principle. Lost in the noise is the original ethical inquiry: What do we owe other conscious beings? Both the purity police and the corporate co-opters miss the central paradox: What if awareness exists in forms we can't recognize?
The Octopus Problem
When researchers study octopuses like Heidi, they observe chromatophores—elastic cells of pigment—flickering under the skin during apparent sleep states. These color changes might be the octopus equivalent of REM sleep, though scientists remain divided on whether this indicates dreaming.
The footage is mesmerizing: Heidi shifts from ghostly pale to mottled brown, then flashes deep maroon before settling into a paisley of yellow and black. David Scheel narrates his speculation: she's hunting dream crabs, camouflaging against imagined seafloor, celebrating an illusory catch. But other scientists are skeptical. "Color change is just a neuromuscular behavior," says biologist William Gilly. It might be nothing more than involuntary muscle twitches, no different from a dog's legs paddling during sleep.
Research has found that octopuses experience two alternating sleep states—quiet sleep and active sleep. During active sleep, they display changes in skin color and texture, eye movements, and muscle twitches, similar to REM sleep in mammals. Their consciousness, if it exists, shares no common ancestor with human awareness—it evolved independently 600 million years ago.
The implications are staggering. Octopuses have more neurons in their arms than their brains—they literally think with their entire bodies. When an octopus reaches for prey, is the arm making a decision that the brain ratifies? When Heidi changes color, which part of her distributed neural network is dreaming? We keep looking for intelligence that mirrors ours, but cephalopods suggest awareness might be fundamentally plural, networked in ways we can't imagine.
This is veganism's core challenge: not whether to eat animals but how to acknowledge sentience we can't fully comprehend. Philosopher Peter Carruthers argues that animal suffering might be unconscious, mechanistic—no more meaningful than a smartphone's low-battery warning. If he's right, veganism is an elaborate projection. If he's wrong, our violence is more extensive than we imagine. The octopus, with her alien intelligence, forces us to confront the possibility that sentience pervades nature in forms we're not equipped to recognize.
The Impossible Practice
I stopped eating animals years ago, initially for the wrong reasons—using restriction as control—but eventually found my way to ethics. Imperfect, but genuine. The shift from performance to principle took time.
Last week, preparing dinner in my kitchen: quinoa shipped from South America, vegetables from Malaysia, electricity from imported natural gas. The global food chain makes every meal a web of invisible connections and contradictions. Every choice cascades into untraced consequences.
This is what ahimsa means to me: not the absence of harm but the acknowledgment of it, the attempt to minimize it while knowing perfection is impossible. The Jains who sweep the path know they'll still step on something. The point is the sweeping—the attention, the intention, the expansion of care despite its futility.
The implications are staggering. Octopuses have more neurons in their arms than their brains—they literally think with their entire bodies. When an octopus reaches for prey, is the arm making a decision that the brain ratifies? When Heidi changes color, which part of her distributed neural network is dreaming? We keep looking for intelligence that mirrors ours, but cephalopods suggest awareness might be fundamentally plural, networked in ways we can't imagine.
Beyond Purity
Current estimates suggest that three-quarters of land livestock are factory-farmed. At any given time, around 23 billion animals are on these farms. Animal agriculture produces at least 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions while using 77% of agricultural land to provide only 18% of calories.
But even this risks reducing ethics to carbon math, as if the octopus matters only insofar as her ocean affects our coastlines. Climate change has conscripted veganism into service as a solution to emissions, but this instrumental logic misses something essential. We shouldn't avoid eating animals just because it's inefficient or warming the planet. The deeper issue remains: What does their inner experience feel like?
Indigenous scholar Kim TallBear points out that Western veganism often replicates the same human-nature divide it claims to dissolve. Many Indigenous peoples never separated human and animal worlds to begin with. The Lakota phrase "Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ"—all my relations—acknowledges kinship with all beings. This isn't metaphorical but literal: a recognition of shared ancestry, shared fate. The point isn't creating new separations but recognizing existing connections.
When the Inuit hunt seal or the Mi'kmaq fish salmon, they're participating in relationships millennia old, guided by reciprocity rather than domination. The industrial slaughterhouse and the subsistence hunt exist in different moral universes. Veganism's universalist claims stumble here, revealing their Western assumptions.
Yet Indigenous hunting practices complicate vegan orthodoxy.
Cellular agriculture promises meat without murder. Precision fermentation creates milk proteins without cows. Companies like Perfect Day brew dairy proteins using microflora, while Upside Foods grows chicken from cell cultures. These technologies feel like science fiction, but so would industrial slaughterhouses to Pythagoras, so would factory farms to al-Maʿarri.
The uncertainty isn't whether these technologies will succeed but what kind of awareness they'll foster. We're not just choosing what to eat but who to become. Will lab-grown meat finally separate us from violence, or will it complete our alienation from the living world? The answer depends on whether we're seeking connection or escape.
The Dream State
If octopuses do dream during their active sleep states, their dreams would be fleeting—lasting only seconds to a minute, like brief video clips rather than the elaborate narratives humans experience.
What veganism keeps asking: not what we owe the dead, but what we owe the dreaming. The answer keeps evolving, shaped by new knowledge and old wisdom, by technology and tradition, by the expanding circle of who counts as someone rather than something.
Watson lived to ninety-five, long enough to see his word enter dictionaries. Near the end, he said: "We don't know the spiritual advancements that long-term veganism would have on human life." He was still thinking about awareness, about what emerges when we stop rehearsing domination with every meal.
We're running the experiment now, unevenly, imperfectly, worldwide. We're still naming it, still failing at it, still trying. The footage of Heidi is still online.
You'll find her forever shifting through colors we've named but don't understand, dreaming in a language older than words, stranger than tomorrow.