"A cheeky message of compassion," uh-huh. Which cheek?

Front office is in Norfolk, VA, not an area of the country I'd consider unfamiliar with the whole meat-fur-Bambi connection.

I'd guess PETA has an institutional culture of martyrdom: "Look, they're offended at our virtuous ways! Their outrage validates our existence!" When objectively they exist so that we can see supermodels with a vague sense of social responsibility pose nekkid on billboards.

C.

"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs."

I was surprised to see some anti-fur activists protesting outside the ballet I went to in November. Since they brought it to my attention, I decided to count the number of fur coats I saw at the end of the night when everyone is bunched at the doors and filing out. There were five.

But what about the poor vegetables?

Who speaks for them?

Amen, Seth.

Favorite PETA story: Ingrid Newkirk sends a letter to the mayor of Fishkill, NY, demanding that he change the name of his town, which suggests support for the heartless killing of fish.

The understandably confused mayor sends back a letter telling Ms. Newkirk that "kill" is dutch for stream, and that therefor Fishkill means stream with fish in it.

She sends back to say that she doesn't care what it means, it sounds fish-unfriendly and she wants it changed.

I've always thought the best part of this story was that Fishkill is practically in the shadows of the much more famous Catskill mountains.

Presumably she thought Fishkill would be easier to push around.

It sorta makes you feel bad for that guy Arthur out on Staten Island, though.

So, I guess this means that there's an unsatisfied market for meat porn.. Hmm.

Julia: Perhaps it's because the Catskill Mountains don't have a mayor. Doo-dah, doo-dah. Or because she parses "Catskill" as "cat-skill"

If Fiskill means "stream with fish in it" then Catskill should mean "stream with cats in it" and I've never seen one of those. (Actually, George R. Stewart parses it as the possessive "Cat's stream" which leads to the suspicion that the cat, probably a wildcat, is presumably fishing, and thus deserves no more respect from PETA than the mayor of Fishkill.)

If she isn't the same person who objected to the word "niggardly" it ought to be.

Arthur who?

Might Fishkill be "Fish's stream", since IIRC there were some prominent old New York families named Fish?

I believe the key is not that PETA has poor political judgement at all. It is that PETA has learned that the only way their often crack-potted agenda will get any attention is if they are over the top and outrageous. They are out to offend, they are out to get their commercials banned, they are out to get as much press as possible, regardless of what light it shows them in.

I still think they're often crack-potted, but I don't think it's a misjudgement in any way...I think it's entirely intentional.

"Arthur who?"

Arthur Kill is a road / region / river in Staten Island. Also a bridge. There's also the Kill Van Kull, a waterway connecting New York Bay with Bayonne Bay. Who Arthur or Van Kull themselves were, I've no idea.

The Fishkill story should be destined to become a classic of PETA stupidity. The "Mommy's evil because she wears fur" campaign should as well, though it has more vicious connotations than the other.

Just an aside off PETA: Skwid said It is that PETA has learned that the only way their often crack-potted agenda will get any attention is if they are over the top and outrageous. They are out to offend, they are out to get their commercials banned, they are out to get as much press as possible, regardless of what light it shows them in.

Like Ann Coulter, then. That does make sense. No such thing as bad press, in some circles.

bill b: The Arrogant Worms.

And Teresa: No. Another case is here, seen by a friend of mine.

Related in only the most peripheral way: today's Get Fuzzy.

I always make sure that I only read that strip online at work -- I don't want to give my Siamese any ideas . . .

I think Skwid is right, but there is a point where these tactics lose their effectiveness -- you have persuaded those who you will persuade, and everyone else just says -- "Well, it's just PETA again . . . "

Oh, my sister will love this one; she's planning to raise meat rabbits and has tossed around the idea of tanning the furs as well. "Damn straight, your mommy kills animals! And what's more, she can kill them for fur without getting so much blood everywhere!"

(I don't even want to know PETA's views on raising rabbits to feed to German Shepherds.)

I'm told by someone who interviewed for them that employees of PETA are not permitted to bring non-vegan food to work, and that animals are allowed absolute freedom to wander around the offices. (I wonder if the animals are allowed to eat each other.)

It's sad to see people with what must be assumed to be noble intentions carry them so far into the realm of batshit insane. Respect and kindness for other species are good things, after all, and fur really isn't a nice practice; the world might be a better place if more people treated animals as something other than just another resource. But I guess there's no cause so right you won't find idiots in its service.

I eat meat and wear leather, which, like smoking cigars and being a Star Wars fan, are things I do despite being aware of various good reasons not to. I rationalize this by telling myself that it's the nature of life to feed on life, and I know that this is probably a copout. But I can't imagine that being handed a grotesque, guilt-trip shock pamphlet by PETA would be the thing to make me change my ways.

(A frightening thought intrudes: the Jehova's Witness vision of Paradise, with tigers cuddling up to wee lambies and whatnot instead of eating them, must have a certain appeal to the PETA mindset. I leave you to draw your own conclusions about various kinds of guilt-driven evangelism, and the connections between them.)

that guy Arthur out on Staten Island

When I was in Perth Amboy, I wondered if Arthur was the killer or the killee. Until I remembered the "kill=creek" etymology I'd learned when reading Washington Irving in school, that is.

(Arthur Kill is the waterway crossed by the also oddly-named Outerbridge Crossing, which connects Staten Island to New Jersey.)

My favourite PETA story is one told to me by a friend. It was at the height of the paint-throwing incidents. Being conscience-stricken, she had dutifully gotten rid of a real fur coat (she even gave it a "decent burial") and bought a fake fur coat -- a really nice one that looked almost authentic. You can guess the punchline. Of five or six women wearing what appeared to be fur and walking into the Met, PETA threw paint on her fake fur coat.

No apology, either. The PETA people seemed to think it was as wrong to wear a synthetic coat that looked like fur as a real fur coat.

> But what about the poor vegetables?
>
> Who speaks for them?

Also Tom Paxton:
http://www.geocities.com/willboyne/nosurrender/DontSlay.html

I heard him do this live a number of years ago, and he told the story of having some friends approach him to write a pro-vegetarian protest song -- a serious mistake, he said, as he was and is a dedicated carnivore.

>From Seth Gordon,posted on January 7, 2004 08:35 AM:

> "People are more violently opposed to fur than
> leather because it's easier to harass rich women
> than motorcycle gangs."

Leather sucks in the rain, folks. Especially at 70 mph...http://www.angrek.com/sublime.jpg

I suppose if you want a more inept group, you could look to the Animal Liberation Front, which is sort of the openly militant wing of PETA. When I was in grad school, they trashed equipment and data and spraypainted slogans on the wall, and "liberated" a lot of helpless, inbred lab animals at my university, which they then set free in the wild. Well, actually, just off of I5.

Long story short, some hawks ate well, and there were more greasy red spots on the freeway.

Now I'm dying to see a good old Marvel/DC-style crossover issue of the Evil PETA Mommy in Jack Chick comics.

My town (Spokane, WA) got the honor of receiving PETA's "Santa's not coming this Christmas -- milk causes impotence" billboard, complete with a sad Santa looking down the front of his pants.

Story: http://www.msnbc.com/local/KHQ/M343544.asp?0LA=aap9&cp1=1

Dan: "The lion may lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won't get much sleep."

As for who speaks for vegetables, I have. Well, plants, anyway.

I've been a vegetarian since 1978. This is for many reasons, which shift over the years. Now I just tell everyone it's a geas and let it go at that. I wear leather, and use real skin drums.

I think "ethical" vegetarians are silly.

If they believe that all life is sacred, as many claim, then why isn't plant life just as sacred as animal life? If animal life is somehow more sacred, why is that less arbitrary than holding only human life sacred (or only humans, other primates, dogs, cats, and horses, as many people seem to)?

If intelligence is a criterion, then eating chicken with broccoli (two species of approximately equal intelligence as far as I can tell) should be OK.

Anyway, after a runin with one of the more obnoxious animal-rights dorkazoids - this woman once attached herself to a dinner party after a gathering, and upon getting to the restaurant announced "we want a separate table for the vegetarians so we won't have to watch you people eating dead animals" (if I'd been there I'd have said "sorry, we're not going to have a separate table for the vegetarians, because I'm eating with the polite people") - after an encounter with her, I wrote an article for a newsletter (org. we both belonged to) titled "Silent No More: A Vegetarian Against Animal Rights."

Ethical vegetarians should come to me when they can photosynthesize. Otherwise they have to admit that, like the rest of us, they kill to live.

"Respect and kindness for other species are good things, after all, and fur really isn't a nice practice"

There are places, Dan, and my often-cited Russia is among them, where wearing fur isn't a question of "nice" or "not nice." It's almost at the point of necessity.

But me, I'm certainly in favor of the theoretical PETA mission - the Ethical treatment of animals. Now, it so happens that my ethics dictate that it's perfectly alright for me to eat animals, provided that the animals were ethically treated prior to their demise. I'll have to remember, at some point, to go eat a roast beef sandwhich, purchased from my local kosher butcher, out front of a PETA office. Or not.

The two great arguments for Robert Conquest's remark that "every organization appears to be headed by agents of its opposition" are PETA and Fred Phelps.

I supported PETA about 15 years ago, when their main targets were the fur and cosmetics industries. They were always a little outrageous and shrill, but they managed to back up their shrillness with points that were fairly difficult to argue with. My impression is that since they largely won both those battles (even though fur is making something of a slow comeback) they've gotten more and more off-balance.

I (perhaps optimistically) think their hearts are in the right place, but to say that their concept of PR needs work is something of an understatement. The anti-fur ad from the British group Lynx that aired more than a decade ago was brilliant; PETA's stuff tends to be just as disturbing, but rarely for the intended reasons.

There are places, Dan, and my often-cited Russia is among them, where wearing fur isn't a question of "nice" or "not nice." It's almost at the point of necessity.

And that's true too. Most of us are used to seeing fur as a symbol of affluence and status (real or aspired-to) rather than something that could make the difference between surviving or not.

I'd never wear a fur garment here in the Mid-Atlantic; it's just not necessary, and my conscience wouldn't take it. But in Siberia? You better believe I would.

"But what about the poor vegetables?
Who speaks for them?"

I refer you to the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by the Arrogant Worms

Ingrid's not about the sanctity of life - she's said that she'd rather see a baby die than a lab rat.

I agree that PETA comes across as shrill and distasteful. I don't think any meat-eater would be persuaded by such in-your-face tactics. I strongly disagree with their methods of animal rights.

There is a difference between eating vegetables and animals, though. Vegetables can't feel anything when you harvest them.

I am an animal lover and vegetarian, but I will not pour animal blood on you or spray paint on your fur coat to "prove a point".

The person who sloshed me with paint was wearing little pink leather Nikes.

Rabbits don't have that much blood in them.

It's easy to be glib about what you eat when it comes on styrofoam. That summer I tried to grow food in the rocky soil of the Ozarks, I lived on buckshot and polk salad. The shot had a little squirrel meat wrapped around it...I finally hitched a ride into town with that bunch who were there scouting locations for Ram Dass's new commune, got a book about how to live off the land. In it, I found you could buy the starter kit for your earthworm farm from a guy named Carter in Plains, GA.

"I am not a vegetarian because I love animals: I am a vegetarian because I hate plants."

I used this as a sig for quite a while on my e-mail. Great fun. I am a lifelong vegetarian, and the few times I have accidentally eaten meat, I've found it fairly distasteful. It's all what you're used to: most British non-vegetarians would object to consuming ants, snails, frogs, horses, and dogs, because none of them qualify as "food animals" in British eyes.

When people inform me that I am a vegetarian because I love animals (or some variation of this) I usually respond with something on the lines of "No, other way round: I love being cruel to plants. You carnivores kill your prey before you eat it: I chop it up alive..."

(Obviously, if someone asks me why I'm a vegetarian, I'll give them a truthful answer. But questions that presume the questioner already knows the answer do not deserve the same consideration.)

I have, however, passed for a Buddhist when travelling in China. It made getting vegetarian food so much easier...

Hmmm. I wonder if PETA considers the Schuylkill an attack on education?

Maybe they were thrown off the scent by all those natives who pronounced it something like "skoogle".

Vegetables can't feel anything when you harvest them.

How do you know? Some plants flinch from damaging influences. Also, does that mean it would be OK to eat animals if they were killed painlessly? (Kosher meat would be right out, of course, since kasherut specifically prohibits killing unconscious animals.)

julia: who's Ingrid? I mean besides a psycho-loony who ought to be locked up (if she actually acts on those sentiments).

Yonmei: why are you a vegetarian, actually?

Scifantasy: Curse it! I was going to mention the Arrogant Worms....

Ayse: I was wondering if the PETA folks were planning on winnowing out the synthetic from the authentic furs, but I guess now I know. I'd've guessed as much too.

My boyfriend is veggie--but not militantly so, so he often subsidizes my omnivorous habits. (I often say that he subsidizes my meat habit so I won't pawn the X-box for a steak.)

There's actually a lot of evidence that plants show reactions which are basically biochemically similar to what animals feel when one cuts them (but I know of no evidence about the harvesting of fully-ripened fruits).

No info here on root veggies, though, particularly when harvested after the plant has already set seed....

Ingrid is sort of the straight edge version of the yippies. In her spare time, she's the founder and chief rabble-rouser of PETA. Big fan of the Animal Liberation Front. Thinks research is immoral even if it doesn't harm the animals.

Xopher, I am a vegetarian because a year or so before my mum met my dad, she moved into her own place for the first time in her life, and found that eating a meatless diet was much cheaper. She turned this into a point of principle, and my dad has always been a person of principle himself: he has over the 41 years they've been married gradually turned into a vegetarian, though he says himself there is no definite point at which he decided to stop eating meat: he just did. All three children of the marriage were brought up vegetarians, and myself and my sister (and her 11-year-old son) all still are. I've never seen any reason to eat meat. (My brother, who is the most like our mum of the three of us, became a non-vegetarian for rebellious adolescent reasons and also because when he left home he was sharing a house with three other pre-med students, they took turns cooking, and what the other three could and did cook was mostly sausages and bacon and so forth...)

(I've been asked "What if you were starving to death?" and that's a silly question: I wouldn't rather die than eat meat. I would, however, rather go hungry than eat meat - in fact, I'd rather fast for 24 hours than eat meat.)

I prefer to be a vegetarian: I do have moral qualms about supporting the dairy industry, but I enjoy cheese too much to give it up. My ethical feelings about meat and dairy are that people should regard eating meat as an expensive, rare treat. I don't object to eating animals per se: I do object to the cruelty involved in the mass production of extremely cheap meat and milk.

Plus, one more anecdote. When I was working for Compaq, a few years ago, I was the only Western vegetarian until a new administrator joined the department. I walked her round the buffet at lunchtime her first day to show her where the vegetarian savouries were hiding and how the salad bar was priced - and when we sat down to eat with the rest of the department, everyone looked at her plate and someone asked "So, are you a vegetarian too?" and then conversation moved on to what she'd been doing before she worked for Compaq, and it turned out she'd been working for the government food safety department that inspects abbatoirs. "Oh, is that why you're a vegetarian?" someone asked jokingly.

"Yes," she answered, quite simply... and silenced half the department, happily tucking into their plates of British beef.

One of my friends always says "have you ever heard a broccoli scream? they don't have legs to run away with, you know".

I think PETA might win more people over if they weren't so extreme; but then again, I know a lot of vegetarians who are that way cause some image of the meat processing industry freaked them out.

I remember being in Washington DC a few years ago and being really surprised to see a few women running around in full length furs. Here in Texas, we have TONS of leather wearers, but hardly ever see fur-- partly cause it just doesn't get that cold. So I thought people had just stopped wearing them cause of PETA.

Most folks, I think, object more to the cute fuzzy animals being killed than the ugly ones. I mean, fish aren't all that attractive, and there are a lot of "vegetarians" who eat tuna. But bunnies, they're cute.

I often wonder if PETA folks ever kill a bug. If a cockroach took up residence at PETA, would they give it a twinkie?

If you reduce the PETA argument to its root principle, it seems to be that humans ought not to interfere -- or for that matter, interact -- with the ecosystem(s) in which they live, because that interferes with the Natural Order Of Things.

This being the case, I'd think PETA members should be actively supporting manned space programs, so as to remove themselves from Earth's ecosystem where they obviously don't belong. And I imagine a lot of people would cheerfully support the development of a manned space program so as to send the members of PETA off to Proxima Centauri in their very own generation ship....

Oh, hell. I always feel obligated to defend PETA in arguments like these. And I really don't like them much. I hate their terrorist tactics, especially when it's designed to drag kids into the fray. On the other hand, I will admit that their McDonald's Unhappy Meals were clever and effective. I think that, in reality, most of them were actually received by adults, who presumably had the sense not to pass them on to their children. I suspect that this may be the case with the comic strip and the KFC bucket, also.

The world needs radicals. Radicals push the edges of what is possible. If everyone is in the center, then the possibilities become very narrow. PETA is out at the radical end, and I believe that it is partly because of their radical actions that discussion about the humane treatment of meat animals became possible. Think back to the 70s. The conversation was very, very different, then. Remember cosmetics testing? God bless the radicals, they will never get what they want.

PETA has done one thing that I approve of. It was a commercial (I don't know if it ever made it to the air, but it was available on the now defunct website that had many many tv adverts) that showed what it was that pets did while you were at work: fuck their brains out. It was hysterically funny, and it ended with the plea, If you must have a pet, please have it spayed. This is an amazingly moderate position for PETA, and I thought a very constructive one.

Plants and pain: oh, c'mon. How many people writing in this blog actually believe that plants feel pain in the same way that a cat or a calf feel pain? That plants have aversion responses is hardly a surprise. If they had no interest in survival, evolution would have obliged them, by now. However, the things that we think of as the apparatus for feeling pain, nerves, nerve endings, endorphins, etc., are absent in plants. They don't have a central nervous system, so what is feeling the pain? Just the cells that are experiencing the damage? How are the pain messages being carried? What's processing them? How can you say that a plant is in pain if there isn't anything there to feel the pain? I'm pretty damn doubtful about one-celled critters, too. Sure, they run away from the acid. However, survival doesn't equate with consciousness, and I think that when we talk about pain, we are actually talking about an entity experiencing pain, an action which requires an entity, i.e. an awareness of itself.

Oh, on the topic of leather and vegetarians: Leather is a by-product of the meat industry, not the other way around, so it's unlikely that wearing leather shoes is in any way contributing to the continuation of the slaughter of cattle. I know vegetarians with other views, too. However, that cute line about bikers vs. women in fur coats is just a nasty slur. Fur is not a by-product of anything but the fur industry, itself. While it may be a little better now than it was 20 years ago, the fur industry continues to be the source of some unnecessarily gruesome practices -- and I don't just stuff that looks gruesome. I'm talking about things that do cause pain and suffering.

Finally, there is a good, sound, reasonable argument for being more concerned about cute fuzzy animals than scary scaly critters. Empathy is an important part of being human. Cute furry mammals are much closer to us in emotional and physical terms than a tuna or an alligator. It is not a matter of not being emotionally honest enough to care equally for all living creatures. Only some people believe that all critters are created equal, the cockroach as important as the kitten. Lots of the rest of us think that if you can squash a cockroach, you're normal, but if you don't mind wringing the necks of kittens, you may well be a danger to us all. (I know, I know, if the kittens weren't killed then the farm would be overrun, and wringing their little necks is far less painful than putting them in a sack and drowning them, and who has the money to spay a barn cat? And if it doesn't bother you even a little bit to kill them, then you scare me anyway.)

People Eating Tasty Animals.

As an unreformed carnitarian, my favorite "welcome to California" moment was when a bunch of us were invited to a lunch meet-and-greet with our new CIO, and his admin asked us if we had any special dietary needs. It had never crossed my mind that meat qualified as a special dietary need.

The worst part of it was that we had a guy in the group who would only eat hamburgers, steak, and pepperoni pizza. When the meeting ended, the two of us bolted out of there to find some actual food.

PETA? The only problem with comparing them to Ann Coulter is that Coulter occasionally trips over a fact when she's raving. PETA's spokescritters just show that "you are what you eat" is transitive.

[Fun with Ann Coulter: go to the iTunes Music Store and listen to her reading her books out loud.]

-j

To reduce the amount of vegetable pain needed to support my existence, I would of course be a vegetarian, as meat animals live on more plants than it takes to support me.

Conversely, I wear leather boots in order to reduce my eco-footprint, as I can make them last so much longer than any synth ones I've ever tried that I think it likely the total externalized cost is less. Wild-hair back-of-envelope calculations, though.

I have, however, passed for a Buddhist when travelling in China. It made getting vegetarian food so much easier...

Taiwan is the one place I willingly ate at vegetarian restaurants (I'm a confirmed carnivore). Most such places in the US serve ostentatiously good-for-you food, sprouts and fruitshakes and what have you, that no meat-eater in his right mind would take a second look at. But Chinese Buddhists abstain from meat because of religious prohibition, not because they want to feel good about themselves or superior to meat-eaters, and they create mock-pork and -chicken dishes that are by god indistinguishable from the real thing and usually taste better than what's available at similarly cheap normal restaurants. (And I didn't actually mind the fact that it was better for me.) Moral: concentrate on making a product attractive on its own merits and skip the sermon, and you have a winner on your hands.

Lydy, if plants aren't aggressively hostile, how come they keep trying to non-consensually mate with my sinuses? And if plants don't feel pain, I'm definitely going to have to abandon some of the disciplinary measures I've been using in my garden.

I dislike PETA because they go out of their way to alienate people who don't already agree with them 100%.

Elsewhere: I'm nonplussed by arguments about how we're more virtuous in our own nature if we don't eat milk or meat. There are, on this planet, numerous species that would eat me if they were given the chance. Furthermore, I have incisors as well as molars. And hello, we're mammals? Milk consumption a distinguishing characteristic?

Show me a New Yorker who believes that the sacredness of all life extends to cockroaches.

damn. speaking of foodk, I'm finding out the hard way that local restaurant puts msg in their soup. patrick's in toronto. back later.

Ouch.

Hope it's a small amount of MSG.

I think humane farming practices are a good conservative value, and that there should be a lot of work put into requiring food costs to represent the full closed-loop cost of the raising, rearing, or growing. (No letting factory farms treat manure as an externality, say.)

The problem I have with a lot of the animal rights radicals is that it turns into a humans-are-evil absolutism, one where humans don't have the moral right to eat other animals, and I simply don't agree with that world view.

And I hope Patrick packed some warm socks; we're getting actual blowing snow at the moment.

"Is there another group anywhere on the political spectrum that, year after year, displays such monumentally poor judgement as PETA?"

If there is, I can't think of it at the moment.

I like how it's all the fault of "Mommy." Ever since Eve brought sin (and death) into the world...

But this is typical of their theology. They often focus on the evil glamour of feminine display (eg, fur coats) as both symptom and cause of our corruption.

For the record: I'm vegetarian, and have been for years. But I feed my kid meat because I'm a bad mother.

Arthur Kill: by folk-etymology from Dutch achter kill, 'back stream', because of its situation on the opposite side of Staten Island from New Amsterdam.

In Kill van Kull, it [Kull] is probably a family name, the ordinary formation as Kull's Kill being prevented by phonetics, and van being used as the equivalent of English of.

- George R. Stewart, American Place Names. You need this book.

I have consulted some vegetarian theoreticians for their opinion of killing vegetables.

John Robbins, in Diet for a New America, briefly refers to fruitarians (vegetarians who won't kill plants), dismissing them at nuts without saying himself what their philosophy is, let alone what's wrong with it.

Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, mocks carnivores who ask why vegetarians don't care about killing plants. He says the carnivores don't care about plants, they just want an excuse to continue eating meat. No, Mr. Singer, we want to know why you don't care about plants.

The "plants don't have a central nervous system" line is new to me. Does that mean it'd be OK to kill and eat a paralyzed human? If I thought my eating habits should be dependent on not causing suffering, I'd be pretty crass to assume that plants can't suffer in some way we don't know much about.

As for closeness to ourselves, sure, most people practice that. In modern Western society we don't eat porpoise (I hope nobody here is under the illusion, that comes up once in a while, that mahi-mahi is porpoise - it's actually another name for the dolphin fish, a totally different beastie that's a fish, not a mammal), ape, monkey, cat, or dog. After that, though ... Pigs and even cows, maybe, but it's hard to have the kind of intimate friendship with a chicken that most people have with their dogs.

So where you draw the line is kind of subjective. If you want to draw it at the end of the animal kingdom, fine for you. Others don't draw it there; that's their business. Just like whether they have abortions is their business.

Languagehat: I was under the impression you lived in the NY metro area. I suppose I was mistaken (the only veg restaurants I'll be found in are Indian and Chinese -- as a bonus, a lot of them tend to get kosher certs, almost for the hell of it, so I can take my more observant friends and family).

TNH: MSG sensitive? Ouch. And here I am, futilely seeking out the stuff.

Norfolk, VA is my hometown and we have to put up with their shenannigans constantly. And by shenannigans I mean vandalism, threats and sheer lunatic zeal. Theresa's right, they are more like a cult than a political organization, nt quite as bad as say, the Christian Coalition but getting there.

What stood out for me on the "Your Mommy Kills Animals" webpage was the period on a line all by itself right below the main image. "What the hell?!" I thought, "Don't these people have enough brains to know about the non-breaking space?"

As for plants, it's been shown that pine trees in a forest communicate with each other through scent... When an insect attacks and kills one, the others can tell, and start beefing up their defenses. Clearly, when a plant is cut, it changes its morphology to deal with that, grows a sort of scar-tissue to close off the wound. Do all the necessary chemicals for that come from the cells immediately around the cut? I doubt it. A plant is an organism, and as such, it would be pointless for it to not take advantage of the greater manufacturing power of all of its cells. Plants clearly have internal processes going on.

As for pain... I don't think it would offer any evolutionary advantage to a plant. It's not like the plant can do anything about it; it can't twitch or move away (except, of course, for the plants that do twich and move, like the sensitive plants or Venus Fly Traps). I don't think plants had any reason to develop the electrical systems that are the basis of the nerves of animals... I'd imagine that the point of those was speed, and that those levels of reaction speed are only valuable to the motile. But I'm loathe to claim that there could never be such a thing as a chemical mentality. As such, plants may think, and be aware of themselves as organisms, even if they don't feel pain.

I'm a bit torn on the issue of eating animals. One of the most amusing arguments I had with a vegetarian was,
Him: "Humans weren't meant to eat meat. We don't have anything about our bodies that was built for dealing with it."
Me: "What, like canine teeth?"
(Honestly, he was a nice guy who was just bad at expressing himself.)
Anyway, so our species evolved to take advantage of this excellent energy source. But should we? I mean, we get around other parts of our genetic heritage. (Or do we? Do we act much differently now than if we were stuck back out in the forests of Africa? Hm.)

I suppose I figure if the animal lives well, and is killed in a respectful manner, that's about all most of us can expect out of life anyway. And killing for fur, or bone, or art... I kinda figure that it's none of my business to say "Oh, very well, you can eat-- but I'm going to regulate what you wear!" Lives well, dies well; everything comes to an end, and it might as well be a useful end.

I eat a lot of meat for one simple reason: I can buy it at any time and stash it in the freezer and forget about it, and it will never go bad, and when I defrost it in the microwave, it will taste as good as if I'd never frozen it. I never pull a bag of grey liquid meat from the crisper. Unlike spinach. Damn its green heart!

I eat a lot of meat for one simple reason: I can buy it at any time and stash it in the freezer and forget about it, and it will never go bad, and when I defrost it in the microwave, it will taste as good as if I'd never frozen it.

Really? Do you have some kind of magic freezer? I often buy ground beef and divvy it into quarter-pound patties that I stick into individual Ziploc baggies and freeze, later defrosting them for burgers, but I generally leave out some to make fresh burgers with, and the fresh ones taste better.

Ok, first off, I really, really, really hate this argument because I always end up sounding as if I'm arguing in favor of positions that I abhor. I eat meat. I do sometimes wonder if it's ok for me to be as squeamish as I am and still eat meat, but I don't agonize over it. I also don't agonize over other people's eating habits. Their political activism, yes, I worry about that. PETA crosses the line so often I'm tempted to just assume that whatever they're doing is bad. In answer to various questions, comments, and challenges:

Chuck Nolan: If I never heard that line again, it would be too soon. It was a funny 3 or 4 times, not just a funny once, but it is as predictable as the sun rising in the east that whenever vegetarianism or PETA or ALF or animal rights is being discussed, someone will say it.

J Greely: Meat is not a dietary requirement. People all over the world manage without it, some of them aren't even dirt poor. In places other than the extremely rich Western countries, meat is used more as a flavoring, not as an ingredient. You could live a full and healthy life without ever eating meat again. It would be harder to do it without ever eating another plant. (Owsley claimed that it was the only way to be healthy, but Owsley was insane. He was also brilliant. His insights did not come from the most reliable of planes, however. Extra points to anyone who can identify the person I'm talking about. -- No, P&T, you can't play.)

Language Hat:

"Taiwan is the one place I willingly ate at vegetarian restaurants (I'm a confirmed carnivore). Most such places in the US serve ostentatiously good-for-you food, sprouts and fruitshakes and what have you, that no meat-eater in his right mind would take a second look at."

Why don't any of your vegetarian friends take you to any of the good restaurants? I'll admit to the genre of restaurant that believes that medicine has to taste bad or it won't do you any good, but there are restaurants with spectacular vegetarian food in my own neck of the woods, which is Minneapolis. If you live someplace more cosmopolitan, then I guarantee you that you have many, many choices. Try some.

Teresa:

Lydy, if plants aren't aggressively hostile, how come they keep trying to non-consensually mate with my sinuses?

I always blame the creator for that particular foul-up, myself. That and the fact that plants are really fucking stupid. "I am not a plant, I am a free vegetable." Wait, that's not right.

And if plants don't feel pain, I'm definitely going to have to abandon some of the disciplinary measures I've been using in my garden.

I'm not visualizing this. You inflict pain on your plants? I mean, weeding, training, pruning, I dig all that. What are you talking about? This is an honest, ignorant question. I can't garden to save my life. House plants curl up in my presence and die within hours of my entering the room.

I dislike PETA because they go out of their way to alienate people who don't already agree with them 100%.

It's the Liberal Disease. I hate it, too. It's especially distressing that they're so extremely alienating. Stupid gits. Have you talked to Raphael about PETA, though? Raphael's theory is that the first lab that PETA busted into was one of the real horror-show DOD labs. What was being done there was rather beyond anything any of the activists were capable of imagining -- and they could imagine quite a bit. Raphael's theory is that the experience traumatized them and caused PETA to be a dysfunctional group from their very inception.

Elsewhere: I'm nonplussed by arguments about how we're more virtuous in our own nature if we don't eat milk or meat.

Fair enough. But I am also nonplussed by arguments that we are more virtuous if we do eat meat, and that vegetarians are really just hypocrites. Of the various vegetarians and carnivores that I've known, it is only the carnivores who have ever button-holed me to preach in fervent tones about their righteousness and the evils of the heretics. Vegetarians mostly leave me alone, or answer politely if I ask questions. It doesn't seem to me like it's the vegetarians who have the corner on self-righteousness.

There are, on this planet, numerous species that would eat me if they were given the chance. Furthermore, I have incisors as well as molars. And hello, we're mammals? Milk consumption a distinguishing characteristic?

The arguments grounded in what we are biologically supposed to eat or not eat strike me as missing the point. We have tools and brains and some pretty sophisticated theories on nutrution. I see no reason why anyone should have to be tied down to what ancient ancestors on the plains of Africa may or may not have eaten, and whether or not it was good for them.

Show me a New Yorker who believes that the sacredness of all life extends to cockroaches.

Oh, c'mon, Teresa, we're talking New York City, here. If I want a one-armed unicycle rider with perfect pitch who juggles eggs while singing the star-spangled banner while his terrier Yap harmonizes, I'm going to find him in New York City. I'm sure that I could find a garden variety Buddhist who meets those requirements -- given time.

Simon:

Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, mocks carnivores who ask why vegetarians don't care about killing plants. He says the carnivores don't care about plants, they just want an excuse to continue eating meat. No, Mr. Singer, we want to know why you don't care about plants.

Because they aren't animals. They are not close enough to me to evoke empathy. I do not believe that they feel pain. I do not believe that they can suffer. Because I think that there is a very great difference between plants and animals. Singer's an interesting one, isn't he? I find that I like the questions he asks, but I dont like the answers he gets, and I wonder if I'm being a hypocrite, or if he's wrong. Or both.

The "plants don't have a central nervous system" line is new to me. Does that mean it'd be OK to kill and eat a paralyzed human?

Paralyzed humans have a central nervous system. It may not be working very well, but if they are alive, they have one that is functioning at least somewhat. I won't go all the way down the road with Singer on this one. Euthanizing the old and retarded does not seem to me to be an appropriate choice for society. However, removing life support from people in permanent vegetative state is something I support. I oppose cannibalism primarily because you really shouldn't be eating meat which has an immune system so similar to your own. You can catch really, really nasty diseases, that way.

If I thought my eating habits should be dependent on not causing suffering, I'd be pretty crass to assume that plants can't suffer in some way we don't know much about.

It seems to me that the carnivores who defend their diet by asking about the suffering of plants are really claiming that we don't know what pain and suffering are, and therefore we don't have sufficient information with which to make decisions. I think that's horse hockey. You know pain when you see it. Are there boundaries and edges that aren't clear? Well, sure, we live in the real world. But I've seen entire meadows cut down in their prime, then baled and stored up for winter feed, and the suffering I saw was mostly the little toads that had amputated limbs, the birds with a broken wing, the ground squirrell with a laceration... The grass really didn't seem much to care.

So where you draw the line is kind of subjective. If you want to draw it at the end of the animal kingdom, fine for you. Others don't draw it there; that's their business. Just like whether they have abortions is their business.

Now, there I am so with you.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote:
I'm a free-speech absolutist, and I've always been opposed to unnecessary and irresponsible cruelty to animals, but PETA can go stuff it.

I'm a free-speech absolutist, opposed to animal cruelty where possible, and a vegan, and I wish PETA would go stuff it too.

Julia wrote:
Ingrid's not about the sanctity of life - she's said that she'd rather see a baby die than a lab rat.
-julia

I'm not with her there, but I do find that sort of decision difficult. I go some of the way with Peter Singer: I think it'd be worse to kill a fully-grown gorilla than an unborn human baby; but if I try to make finer decisions than that, the mental triage just gets too painful. Yet another reason why it's a good thing I don't run the planet. I'm a vegan because it suits me to be, and I think that's the only justifiable reason. Sure, ethics are good, but I don't see how it's ethical to do something that doesn't work, and/or exhort other people to do it.

Yonmei wrote:
I do have moral qualms about supporting the dairy industry, but I enjoy cheese too much to give it up.

We're sort-of mirror images. The dairy industry was one of my reasons for going vegan, but my lifelong hatred for cheese was one of the things that made it easiest. I've been avoiding the stuff since I was too young to be able to say clearly that I hated it, and so I was used to asking "What's in that?" before eating.

Language Hat: I live near a supermarket with a huge Buddhist range. It's great. I think they sell whole soy chickens there.

Lydy- Owsley is the guy who cooked up those great batches of acid, right?

PS You can, actually, feel a lot of pain without showing any sign of it. Or at least that was my experience when my grandmother kindly tried to shave my legs with an electric razor while I was in a coma. The funny thing is, after all the fuss of pulling the plug, I didn't die. For those who have not tried this form of dipilatory torture, may I say it ranks right up there with hot candle wax on a sunburn and veterinary needles through mucous membrane?

Lydy Nickerson: Meat is not a dietary requirement.

I don't eat meat because I believe that life is impossible without it, I eat meat because I believe that life is better with it.

And most of the health claims and scares that are tossed around deserve to be taken with a grain of salt. And a pat of butter.

Lydy Nickerson: You could live a full and healthy life without ever eating meat again.

Since I can also live a full and healthy life with meat, I will continue to do so. Life is simply more fun if I don't restrict myself to bunny food.

Note: in the interests of full disclosure, I will confess that potatoes, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers are considered honorary meats in my universe. Grains serve as binding agents to hold the meats together. :-)

-j

I've been a lacto-ovo vegetarian (with recent lapses into cheatin' with fish, since I've discovered that I like tuna and shrimp) since I was 14 (1992). I became such a creature for the reason many 14-year-old boys do... to impress a girl. The girl is long gone, but I ended up liking the vegetarianism. My taste for red meat, which had always been a bit tenuous, simply faded entirely.

Nonetheless, "ethical" vegetarians strike me as mostly well-meaning but undereducated folks; Fluffy Bunny Syndrome sufferers seem to presume that predation is something invented and practiced only by human beings, and that only because they're big meanies.

I wonder what PETA's position on feeding crickets to a pet tarantula is? My old desk buddy Neal (1997-2001, RIP) was on the little guys like senators on Caesar; crickets deeply offended his spider-Zen and were to be dealt with ten or twelve at a time if necessary.

Yet I somehow doubt that soy milk was the key to inner peace for him.

The arguments grounded in what we are biologically supposed to eat or not eat strike me as missing the point. We have tools and brains and some pretty sophisticated theories on nutrution. I see no reason why anyone should have to be tied down to what ancient ancestors on the plains of Africa may or may not have eaten, and whether or not it was good for them.

There's probably as much validity in one person's decision to eat meat based on biological support for the concept as there is for another person's decision to not eat meat because technically it's not necessary to do so. It's when somebody argues with me (a lifelong vegetarian for reasons unrelated to saving the cute fuzzy animals) about what must be right for me based on what they believe to be valid reasons for choosing a diet that I get insulted. I think this would be true of anybody on either side of the meat equation.

I figure there are two types of people where diet is concerned: those who feel a need to defend their food choices, and those who don't. Oddly, I find that whenever I mention to a group of people going out to eat that I'm a vegetarian, the response is usually a mix of apologies for eating meat and a defense of the act, as if I cared what other people eat (I don't). I've never been in a situation where a vegetarian was lecturing the meat-eaters, but I'm sure it must happen somewhere, or why would these people respond with such defensiveness to hearing about another person's diet?

Lydy: You may not have your empathy evoked by plants, but I find them quite as empathy-evoking as the lesser animals. I used to pull up carrots by the roots. I don't do that any more: it makes me slightly queazy. I still eat them, though. I also eat animals. With Milo from Bloom County, I say: It's dead, and I'm gonna eat it.

"I do not believe that they feel pain. I do not believe that they can suffer."

This is faith. We used to believe that animals couldn't feel pain or suffer. (Do you know how they used to tie up captured iguanas in central America? Maybe they still do. I'm not going to tell you: it's really gruesome.)

"It seems to me that the carnivores who defend their diet by asking about the suffering of plants are really claiming that we don't know what pain and suffering are, and therefore we don't have sufficient information with which to make decisions."

Now you sound like Peter Singer. You're changing the subject. This isn't about carnivores justifying pain because we don't know where the limits are. (Carnivores accept pain, because we believe that all living things are capable of suffering.)

No, this is about asking ethical vegetarians: if you [the hypothetical ethical vegt. here, not you personally, though one who's taking the position you outline] are so vehemently against inflicting pain on animals, and so eager to empathize with everything down to insects, as to launch a crusade to persuade others to adopt your stance, why this bizarre indifference to plants? Especially as some vegetarians are known to use terms like "all living things" when they mean only animals. Especially as such an indifference is necessary if it's to leave you with a balanced diet. It sounds awfully convenient. High moral principle and low practical fudging don't mix very well. If they want to persuade me of the morality of their stance, they'd better come up with a morally lucid justification.

Lydy Nickerson wrote: Meat is not a dietary requirement

My mom is on a big "eat right for your type" kick on the advice of her endocrinologist, and the book says that type-Os may be healthier with a moderate amount of meat in their diets. I've experienced that myself, becoming ill the time I tried to go veggie (though a mild soy allergy might account for some of that.) I've found I feel healthier when I eat meat.

I also have to say that I do feel empathy to plants, though usually it is towards those on the higher end of plant evolution, like trees and bushes. (I'd call them the "cute mammals" of the plant world, but I don't feel right about it scientifically) I'll often cry when a tree I care about gets cut down, but still I buy wood furniture.

We all make compromises.

Of course, a lot of the cruelty would be cut down if the government would stop subsidizing the hell out of factory farms and let small farmers back into the equation. I try to buy free range organic whenever possible.

I've never been in a situation where a vegetarian was lecturing the meat-eaters

I never have either. And yet having non-vegetarians do a quick guilt-trip in front of me about how they really do eat hardly any red meat, or they only eat fish, or they hope I don't mind but they like meat, is so common that I have developed social strategies for dealing with it. (I think the other non-vegetarian thing about "how do you know plants don't suffer, too?" is the same thing, backasswards: these people feel the same twinge of guilt, but then feel cross because they see no reason to feel guilty, and take their crossness out on the person they believe caused them to feel this twinge of guilt.)

I think this may derive from a meme that eating vegetarian=depriving yourself of meat=not eating hearty enjoyable meals is somehow a Good Thing. It's the sex-is-bad celibacy-is-good meme translated into food.

Which has taken me some time to work out, since I don't find those huge steaks or burgers they're tucking into at all appealling, and am happily tucking into a big baked potato with lovely crunchy-chewy skin, lots of greenleaf salad, and a big dollop of garlicky hummus. ...mmmmmm... and am therefore not understanding in my gut why they think I am going without something. What, that big hunk of animal muscle/fat? Urk. Only, as it is very rude to criticise other people's choices at the table, I never say this: and they speak of their pity only in such oblique terms that it took me quite a while to realise that they think I must envy them...

Food is good. Good food is good. It's true the thing I am frequently annoyed by is restauranteurs who cater elaborately (and, I presume, imaginatively) to their carnivorous clientele, yet persist in assuming that what vegetarians like to eat is some minor variation on grilled vegetables with goats cheese and/or mushrooms. I like reading restaurant reviews, and I have a fantasy about being hired by some big paper to do a weekend review of classy restaurants as they appear to a vegetarian. (Classy restaurants, in the UK, derive their cuisine from a race memory of French cooking, but lacking the important thing about classy restaurants in France*.) "Limited choice: two starters, one based on mushrooms, one based on cheese. Only one main course, based on mushrooms and cheese. Mushrooms not cooked well. Both ludicrously over-priced. Seven or eight desserts. Don't go there if you want a tasty main meal, but the desserts and the coffee were both excellent."

*The French believe that with so many delicious animals in the world, why not eat them? But they also believe that if you can say what you want to eat, you ought to get it. I have eaten utterly delicious vegetarian meals in French restaurants: when I was working there I had to make a deal with myself that I'd only order an omelette once every second day.

While I sympathize with much of their agenda, I agree that PETA is on the wacko side. But I LOVE that art! Yes, Christina, I would love to see Jack Chick's Bad Bob meet up with the Bunny Slayin' Mom. Actually, I don't worry so much about the effect on kids--Dr. Wertham has been throughly debunked, and this is just the 21st-century p.c. version of a classic Jack Davis illustration for E.C. Comix. Hiphop-listening, Doom-playing kids probably love it.

Oh yes: Teresa, I've read that vegetarian new Yorker Moby doesn't kill the cockroaches in his loft.
Also, as far as plants being hostile: It's not just pollen--many plants are of course much more directly hostile to humans. Besides plants poisonous to eat, many of them deadly, there are poison ivy, nettles, anything with thorns...

For a recent clinical summary of results on animal suffering, detailing both pain- and fear-related suffering, see this paper by Temple Grandin. One neurological perspective has it that an organism requires a limbic system (i.e. the parts of the brain which integrate stimuli into emotional responses including the amygdala, the hippocampus, and some other structures - more detail than you probably want here) in order to have the feelings humans identify as suffering. I assume the argument runs something like: since the human experience of suffering can be located in these structures, animals who do not have a limbic system do not suffer in a way that is a meaningful analogue of what humans experience. Extrapolating this idea to a world view would seem to mean that human empathy is only meaningful when applied to certain groups of mammals. (An extreme version of this view limits meaningful suffering to "humans, higher apes, and possibly dolphins" - see the Grandin paper.) Grandin's view (from a skim through the above paper) seems to be that the limbic system is only one layer in a neural processing hierarchy governing pain, fear, etc., and that the other levels of this hierarchy are structurally similar enough to the limbic system that the various fear reactions and learned aversions exhibited by all vertebrates can be treated meaningfully as forms of suffering (and that this reasoning could possibly be extended to neurologically sophisticated invertebrates such as octopus).

In a more speculative vein, suppose you are a newt that can regenerate a leg or a lizard that can shed its tail. What would be appropriate neurological responses (from an evolutionary point of view) to losing the aforementioned limbs? Our lizard would certainly be justified in fearing the circumstances that lead to the loss of a tail (That hawk is going to EAT me!), but would the lizard have an actual fear of losing its tail? And would the experience of losing a tail be particularly "traumatic"? I suspect that it would be better for the lizard if the actual tail-loss were a relatively neutral event, perhaps entailing a change in foraging strategy to avoid situations requiring tricky balancing, but hardly a matter to bewail at great length to all the lizardy gods, or to get all neurotic about. ("And whatever you do don't mention 'the tail incident'...")

I suppose my point here is just that choosing the grounds for empathy is tricky, especially when applied to entities with different life cycles and physiological tricks than humans (jellyfish? ferns?).

Xopher: I think "ethical" vegetarians are silly.

I don't usually feel compelled to defend my dietary choices, but then I'm not usually insulted for them either. I stopped eating meat because I couldn't fault Peter Singer's argument for ethical vegetarianism.

[long post explaining my position deleted]

You know what, Xopher? I can't be bothered. I am tired of online arguments. I want discussion and conversation, and your dismissive tone does not encourage me. Consider me "silly" all you want.

Meat. I love meat. Big porterhouse, yum. Raw oysters, pickled herring, best breakfast in the world. Meat makes me feel better and livelier: less sleepy, more energetic, more clearheaded. If there's an argument to be made about there being a diet that's "natural" for us, then I'm hard put to see how meat isn't natural for me. Other people I know would be sickened by it, and are happiest and healthiest on a largely meatless diet.

Arguments from nature are minefields. We think of dogs and cats as carnivores, but they'll also eat grass. They can't live on it, but they seem to be the better for eating some. And who hasn't had a pet who was wildly enthusiastic about some food that was supposed to be outside their dietary range? I've known of dogs that loved cornchips, or raw carrots, or watermelon. I've been assured by desert-edge gardeners that coyotes have a thing for canteloupe. And I won't go into the distressing details of certain habits of sweet little herbivores like hamsters and guinea pigs.

I don't think we know nearly as much about this subject as we think we do.

I don't know where the idea comes from that eating little or no meat is a spiritually superior practice. The only "natural" reason I can see is that when you have a human population living in an area that supports a mixed diet, the richer and more powerful classes tend to get more meat in their diet. Voluntarily eating less meat isn't being nice to animals; it's bowing out of certain kinds of conflicts with other human beings.

Lydy, the bit about disciplining plants was humorous. Mostly.

Note: I didn't write about PETA because I have strong opinions about diet. I do have them; most people do. What gets me about PETA is their mad intransigence. What they're doing isn't politics. It's a public enactment of a private morality play.

It's not just PETA that pulls these stunts. This Christmas season, an evening or two after the Union Square craft market opened, one end of the market was much disturbed by the Revolutionary Socialist People's Front of Judaea, or possibly the Socialist Revolutionary Judaean People's Front*. Much shouting, much unpleasantness. I believe what triggered the worst of it was a craftswoman asking the protesters to please not shout so loudly right in front of her booth. She was near the edge of the market, and the protesters had come in and taken up the aisle in front of her, thus blocking customer access, driving people away with their loud sloganeering, and forcing her to listen to them at close range. When she asked them to knock it off, things got really loud.

What I noticed about the shouters was that their message entirely consisted of variations on (1.) you're oppressing us and depriving us of our rights; (2.) we're not afraid of you, you fascists; (3.) we have a right to turn a large chunk of public space where an annual crafts fair is going on into a theatre for our political psychodramas; and (4.) it's our country, not yours. That is, it had about as much content one pack of primates screaming at another. The greater cause they were supposedly there in support of was not being mentioned. In fact, I never found out what it was.

I hope it wasn't something I'd have agreed with, because, along with everyone else who witness that scene, I was left with one indelible impression: those people were complete jerks.

_________________________
*See Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Owsley=Bear?

I met him a few times. He seems like a reasonably sensible man, given the waters he swims in.

And by the way: From my own very limited experience, I'll second Yonmei's remarks about French vegetarian cooking, I stumbled into some confusion while ordering dinner in a French restaurant. I thought I was saying "On second thought, never mind the vegetable salad starter; I'll just have the entree." She thought I was saying "I'll have the vegetable salad as an entree." What she brought out was so good that I've been wanting it again ever since. You know those vegetarian Indian meals that get served in twenty different little dishes on a tray? It was like that. Some vegetables were served separately, others in various combinations; some were cooked, some were raw; most were lightly dressed, and it wasn't all the same dressing; and they were all cut up into different sizes and shapes as appropriate for the vegetable and the dish. It was sumptuous, the furthest thing from deprivation imaginable.

The idea that anyone should have to defend or explain their dietary choices seems just slightly weird and alien to me. It strikes me as a question you shouldn't even ask people you don't know especially well; it's an unnecessarily personal inquiry, like asking someone to explain their sexual preference. "Because that's what I like" probably ought to be the assumed reason in both cases.

Nonetheless, while neither vegetarians nor carnivores have a monopoly on self-righteousness, there's something especially disturbing about folks who feel like if it doesn't have a critter in it, it isn't actually food. It's amazing how much this attitude comes out of the woodwork; when my wife and I decided we were going to have a vegetarian buffet at our wedding reception, you'd've thought we were asking people to eat monkey brains and anaconda. (Between the pasta alfredo, the potatoes au gratin, the stuffed mushrooms, the stir-fry and gods know what else, I wonder know how many people would've actually registered "vegetarian" if they didn't know beforehand. It's like Yonmei says: the word gets equated in people's minds with rabbit food.)

I know I guy who I saw actually get rude and unpleasant seeing a vegetarian put steak sauce on a baked potato - it really offended his sense of what steak sauce was for, dammit, and if you didn't eat meat you didn't deserve to use it, or some such stupid thing. (Me, I'm an autocondimentor, and see most food, meat or otherwise, largely as a vehicle for things like cheese or salsa or tzatziki, which may skew my persective a bit.)

In any case, the bottom line for me is that a preference is not a virtue, whether you're a militant vegan or someone who says dumb things like "I didn't rise to the top of the food chain to graze." My reaction to both is a roll of the eyes.

Aside to Scott L.: The use of the word "spider-Zen" in the context of your story conjured an image of a tarantula taking on and dispatching a circle of crickets in the manner of David Carradine facing a ring of ninjas, if he also ate the ninjas as he went along. It was quite amusing, and made my morning.

Yonmei: You might want to read the section on disgusting substances (particularly things which are disgusting to eat) in the _Hotheads_ chapter of Steven Pinker's _How the Mind Works_.

Roughly: there seems to be a human mental system whereby every animal product is apparently classified as disgusting unless we were allowed to eat it before the age of about two. So your not eating a big chunk of cow skeletal muscle because it's disgusting is as `correct' as the desire of most Westerners not to eat insects because they're disgisting or spread disease or something.

(One thing that does seem to be true is that if large meat-bearing animals like cows are available, they'll be nondisgusting, leaving insects to be classified as disgusting by omission, probably because the larger animals are more efficient to get hold of: there's more meat on a cow than on a cricket, so the crickets don't get eaten, and don't get given to the under-twos, so the next generation classifies them as disgusting.)

People vary.

The real world has error bars.

As I get older and more wishy-washy, I find that the thing that doesn't get wishy-washy is the conviction that people who don't think the world has error bars, that there are Right Answers, are not on my side. (Whatever that is.)

I eat meat in part because I like it and in part because I have to; since my guts got ripped up by an agressive virus, they don't work very well, and the range of things I can eat to nutritional benefit is much reduced.

I don't think it's necessary to offer the under-twos a particular food, but it may be necessary for the parents to express a willingness to eat that food, or at least to try new things. Neither of my children ate fish before age two. The four-year-old isn't interested in fish. The eight-year-old requested flounder stuffed with crab for dinner last night. On the other hand, the eight-year-old abstains from rice and refuses french fries and other potato products about half the time they're offered.

there seems to be a human mental system whereby every animal product is apparently classified as disgusting unless we were allowed to eat it before the age of about two

My sister can't stand butter or marge (spread on bread, that is) and doesn't drink milk except in coffee. She doesn't take cream at all. I register this as having started about age five, but my sister claims she doesn't remember a time when she didn't think these foods were disgusting - so I suspect that it's just that by the time she was five she was capable of saying why she didn't want something.

So while there may be a point about people needing to eat things before they're two to find them normal, I'm fairly sure the human mind is a lot more complicated than that.

I'm curious as to why "ethical vegetarian" seems to mean "PETA wacko-type" because there are a wide variety of reasons to be an ethical vegetarian.

First and foremost, as was mentioned by someone else previously, is the way that food animals, and those who raise and process those animals, are treated. (If you haven't read Eric Schlosser's 'Fast Food Nation' you might want to consider it as a primer for ethical eating [He didn't write it to be that, but it works that way for me.])

The interesting thing about 'Fast Food Nation' is that he looks at the whole picture. Yes, it's pretty horrifying the way that cattle and poultry are treated, but he also points out that it's pretty horrifying the way that the humans who work in the food industry are treated as well.

For me, it is looking at the whole picture that adds up to not eating mammals, and to eating organic poultry and dairy and eggs. And going to local restaurants, or restaurants with a policy of giving their employees benefits.

I can not, personally, support an industry that treats people and animals in the manner they do. But I also realize that this is a personal choice, and if others do not feel the way I do, then that is their personal choice, and it's not my place to interfere.

The phrase `the human mind is more complicated than that' should be chiseled in stone above every psychoanalyst's office door.

This is definitely tentative stuff, hypothesised by looking at changes in infant feeding patterns over time (the switch from `eats anything' to `gets fussy' is very sudden and seen in some other closely-related primates too).

The `non-disgusting filter' is only an initial filtration system; it's not postulated as being the *only* way of deciding food tastes nice, but rather a `don't eat poison that the rest of the tribe doesn't eat' filter. Tastes shift after that, but rarely *radically*, and rarely beyond group boundaries; i.e., your sister was unlikely to decide that grilled slug was tasty and demand it with every meal :) but if in later life she went to visit somewhere where grilled slug was eaten, she could probably force herself to eat it nonetheless, and might come to like it.

(Case in point: snails, er, escargot.)

Eating meat is not a special dietary need. Having to have meat at every meal is, because sometimes people will serve a meatless meal just because that's what they're in the mood to cook.

I have a vegetarian friend who I didn't realize was vegetarian until his partner told me: I just knew that every so often he would feed me a tasty dinner, and I hadn't bothered to analyze that they were all full of nice veggies and cheeses and no meat. So

Plants and pain: oh, c'mon. How many people writing in this blog actually believe that plants feel pain in the same way that a cat or a calf feel pain? That plants have aversion responses is hardly a surprise. If they had no interest in survival, evolution would have obliged them, by now.

There's some evidence that suggests broccoli has a rudementary nervous system, and let's not forget that there have been scientific studies done for more than fifty years now on the emotional resonses of plants and not all of them are just crackpot new agey nonsense.

My point is, we have to eat livign things to survive. That's Nature, folks. And highmindedness isn't going to rewire 3 million years of primate evolution just because some hippy likes to pet kittens a little too much.

So enjoy your steak, have a nice green salad on the side and tell TETa to take a walk off the nearest pier.

I've been eating snails (in garlic butter) since I was a kid, and not finding them disgusting (except when they're really hot and they burst in your face when you poke them with a fork). I suppose because we're descended from the French. (Je suis que9be9coise.) I don't know if that accounts for my openness with regard to seeing insects as foods. The rest of my family clearly aren't interested.

I don't have everyday access to bugs in my diet, so they're not part of it, but I've been to insect tastings at the Montre9al Insectarium, and every time I've been disappointed that we only could have one small bite of each available dish.

I especially remember the spicy scorpion wistfully.

Continuing with the theme of the poor public relations strategies of progressive causes, here's one New Yorkers will recognize, the "Got a minute for Greenpeace?" people. Worst in the summer, they cluster in groups on busy corners, confronting passerby with their clipboards and their naked pleas for money. Considering that for many people this is the only contact they'll ever have with Greenpeace, I question their pesky and often downright hostile approach.
I was actually approached by a representative on my break just now, and having nothing better to do I agreed to talk to him. He asked me if I cared that the earth was in trouble, gave me a breathtakingly vague introduction to their organization, and asked if I had a credit card or checking account. When I said no, he made a sour face and walked away without thanking me for my time (did he think I was lying?). I've heard similar stories from several people. Of course I understand that Greenpeace needs funds and they have trouble getting their message through to the public through more conventional channels, but the mercenary strategy is rotten PR - certainly the amount of frustration and ill will created towards them, and by an unthinking transitivity towards all environmental causes, outweighs the amount of money raised. If anyone can defend this, I'd be happy to hear your argument. I *like* Greenpeace, and I'm sorry that most people associate them with the "M&M's for basketball" kids who harrass you on the subway.

Maybe a Greenpeace story of my own can shed a little light on the situation, joanna.

I get harassed by Greenpeace endlessly every summer (my default summer "look" - long hair, 5 o'clock shadow, faded blue jeans and birkenstocks - may account for some of this) and the one time I stopped I asked the young woman if I could have a brochure or something, so that I could read more about their organization before deciding whether or not I wanted to donate. I wasn't being facetious - I knew little about Greenpeace at the time but had heard some good things about them - but the young lady told me that they found that people took brochures to keep the Greenpeace people from harassing them and then just threw them away when they got home (i.e. Creating more garbage) and could I please just give her a check right then and there.

Now, I don't know that "keep people from harassing them" is a good argument in a city where we learn to walk past people handing out leaflets almost as a matter of course and without even a first glance, much less a second, but the girl did have a point about the waste. I don't know how true it is, but Greenpeace is definitely the sort of organization that would be wary of that one.