Tag Archives: Eating Animals

Eat your meat and shut up.

13 Jan

Can you look me in the eye and say that?

Whether it’s on big blogs like elephantjournal or sites like YouTube, I keep seeing a ton of things with titles like, “Why I’m eating meat again in 2012!”  Each one features an incredibly defensive former vegan offering a million reasons why they’re sick of vegans and how it’s impossible to satisfy the extremist rules of the vegan police and how for health reasons it’s become crystal clear they need to resume their meat consumption.

Maybe there are some people who have started eating sheep again sheepishly, but what I’ve seen have been big loud boasts. I don’t get it.

I mean, I get it that people might want to start eating meat again. There’s sacrifice involved in being vegan. For some people, it’s the taste of meggairy (meat, eggs and dairy) that they miss. For others it’s the social cost. Or maybe it’s the nuisance factor, or the feeling of being constrained by rules.

I’m not bothered by any of those but the social, which I’ve written about already. But what strikes me about these people who are returning to meggairy is that most of them use the language of people who would never go vegan and who revel in heaping disdain upon us.

Self-righteous assholes is one of the ways we’re described. Hey, I can be a self-righteous asshole, both before I was vegan and now, but where is the anger coming from? They also attack us for our rigidity and go to great lengths to let us know that veganism simply isn’t the right choice for everybody.

My guess is that these are personalities that need to try something new every few years. That need to change. That enjoy the feeling of doing something different. Because how hard is it to really go vegan in the first place? It wasn’t all that hard for me – someone who ate meat for almost half a hundred years, someone who didn’t really like vegetables all that much, someone who will oddly refer to themselves in the third person all of a sudden.

But here’s what I really don’t get: If you were vegan, or even vegetarian, for a long time, as many of these reverts seem to have been, then I can’t imagine you aren’t aware of the horrors of industrial animal production. Yet what’s missing from the rants that I’ve seen is any kind of acknowledgment along the lines of, “But I will only eat animals I feel were raised as cruelty-free as possible,” or “I will never eat fast food or any other meat whose origins I can’t ascertain,” or “I still will only eat animal products occasionally.”

It’s quite the opposite. It’s not only an explanation of why it’s no longer something they want to do, but rather it’s an indictment of anyone who continues to do it. We’re all just a bunch of hypocrites. Being vegan doesn’t work. We should worry about ourselves and stop judging others.

I imagine there’s a number of reasons why people go vegan in the first place, and a number of reasons why they go back, I just thought the reverts would go back to animals with their tails between their legs, not with their claws out and teeth bared.

But while I recognize that people go vegan for a number of reasons, I feel that people stay vegan for one reason: what they’ve learned about the lives of these animals makes them feel they simply can’t go back. And I wonder if the people who go back to meat ever watched any of the movies like “Earthlings” or read any of the books like “Eating Animals” or if instead being vegan was just another fad to them – a way to lose some weight or boost their heart health. Hey, that was me once, but then I read the books. Until I did I didn’t know if I could keep it up but after I did I knew I could never go back.

Eating animal products is far from illegal in this country, in fact it usually feels like it’s the opposite: it’s what our country wants us to do, not what it doesn’t want us to do. What I’m getting at is that these reverts can do what they want. If they learned enough about animal treatment to avoid animals that are victims of the industry’s worst horrors, then in a way they have returned to the carny world as better people.

Maybe it’s a good sign that they feel the need to lash out as they exit. Maybe it means they realize the enormity of what they’ve chosen to once again do. And that’s still a realization that almost everyone you know doesn’t realize.

So go ahead, reverts. Unleash your diatribes about how your body needs meat to function well. How it’s not a matter of eating wisely or supplementation but rather how there’s an optimal level of wellness for your body that simply can’t be achieved without meat. I’m not a doctor; maybe you’re right. Only you know how hard you tried to make it work for you.

Do what you want and eat what you want. But please, for just a minute, try to remember how you felt when you were on the receiving end of these attacks. Think about how disturbed it is for you to now be launching the same vicious criticisms that once made you question what you were doing or made what you were trying to do more difficult.. Try to remember how when you heard these criticisms, they rang like a bell of defensiveness and ignorance and self-righteous cruelty. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing now.

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Jonathan Safran Foer

3 Dec

I mentioned in my very first post that two weeks into a tentative dabble with veganing, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” book and that then there was no going back. (Note to aspiring writers: Do not use the words that, then and there in a row.)

There’s probably not much lamer in a blog than writing about a two-year-old book (and if there is, I’ll find it, you just wait) but after reading what I felt was a catty and vicious attack on Safran Foer by a leading vegan website, I wanted to defend him (like he needs me to come to his defense).

What makes this attack even more pathetic is that the attacker openly — and proudly — admits to never having read the book. But that doesn’t keep this ethicist from posting a photo of Safran Foer with a photoshopped pus mustache (pustache?) under the headline “got pus?”  (Though to the attacker’s credit, a “got milk” reference is pretty original and cool.)  What angers this critic is that Safran Foer is a vegetarian not a vegan, and the critic knows this because he’s read some reviews. In fact, the reviews are apparently enough to tell this critic all he needs to know about the book.

Well, I apologize for talking about a book that I actually did read, I know that’s so 20th century, but it seems pretty clear that this critic is simply jealous of Foer, and of the fact that this vegetarian has done far more to turn people vegan and alleviate animal suffering than this webmaster ever will. Yeah, I thought it was odd too that Safran Foer hasn’t actually come out and declared that based on what he now knows, he’s become vegan, but he does say that if you really want to do something to alleviate animal cruelty it’s better to give up eggs and dairy because those are the worst-treated animals. So it’s not like he’s saying that drinking milk is just swell.

Safran Foer also says he spent over a year researching this book. Keep in mind, he’s one of the country’s young literary stars, and he interrupted his fiction career to do this. That shows some dedication. And he also talks about how he snuck into a factory farm at night and broke into a building housing chickens. Has the critic ever done that? I won’t presume to know, since that would be presumptuous.

Can’t the argument be made that it’s more beneficial to animals to convince people to become vegan or vegetarian, than to spend your time bitching about people who convince people to become vegan or vegetarian? This critic needs to have a couple of stiff ones at his next Vegan Drinks event and then sit in the corner thinking about who’s done more to help animals. Maybe then he’ll take down that catty photo and feel at least a little embarrassed about having put it up in the first place.

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