The Moral Of The Story

by tristero

There’s a coupla new books about vegetarianism out there which Chicago Jack reviews over at La Vida Locavore. One of ’em, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, has gotten a lot of attention; the other, Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability has received virtually none.

Foer says don’t eat meat, it’s morally wrong, every animal is an individual. Keith, a former vegan who claims the diet made her very ill, says vegetarianism is naive; it fails to take into account the importance of topsoil cultivation, the number of microscopic critters slaughtered in growing plants, and the fact that culling the herd is important for keeping the topsoil sustainable. Both authors have nothing positive to say about American industrial food practices.

Got no argument with that last bit; industrial food sucks, it can make you very unhealthy, and we can’t continue making food the way we’re doing without fucking serious consequences. The rest of it, well…

I don’t have any strong sense of a tuna’s individuality: I suppose – sure, why not? – that some tuna are nice and some are jerks, but I think one would have to think a lot harder than I’m prepared to about such issues to make a good case one way or the other. As for Keith, I’m pretty sure that a properly balanced vegan diet won’t harm you, although it could easily bore you to tears. (Cue the flame comments: just kidding, people! Geez…) And her off-the-gridism sounds not terribly convincing, although if it makes her happy, I say go for it.

Me, I’ve been vegetarian since about 1982 or so. For reasons I don’t quite understand, many people find the fact I vastly prefer veggies, grains, fruits, eggs and cheese to meat very interesting (my father was deeply offended) and it’s one of the first questions I get when sitting down to a meal, So, when people ask me why, I’ve got two stock responses:

1. I’d never eat a Republican. How could I consume a higher life form, like a snail or a chicken?

OR…

2. It’s not that I hate meat. It’s that I really hate vegetables.

Full disclosure: The first is original. I truly wish I had come up with the second, but I stole it from something I read somewhere.

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Special note to conservatives and others slow on the uptake: This is NOT a post about food preferences.

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Special note #2: Still don’t get it? Okay, let’s spell it out.

Short version: Not everything we do has a reason. And not everything we do that has a reason has a moral reason. Sometimes a carrot is just a…

Long version: The notion that all human behavior has a moral valence is part and parcel of Puritanism. Cotton Mather:

I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time, there came a Dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; “What mean and vile Things are the Children of Men, in this mortal State! How much do our natural Necessities abase us and place us in some regard, on the Level with the very Dogs!”…Accordingly, I resolved, that it should be my ordinary Practice, whenever I step to answer the one or other Necessity of Nature, to make it an Opportunity of shaping in my Mind some noble, divine Thought.

Granted, this is funny as hell. But it’s also very creepy in its holier-than-thou piousness and blatant self-loathing. This stuff has created an enormous amount of mischief. There is nothing particularly “mean and vile” about urinating. Nor is there anything particularly ennobling about vegetarianism. OTOH, there is a lot that is very, very wrong with condemning humans for having a body; likewise there is a lot that is very, very wrong with assuming moral superiority because you will or won’t eat something.

Much human activity simply has little or no moral content. Knowing when it does, and when it doesn’t – ah, there lies wisdom.

But assuming we are always moral agents: there lieth foul Monsters.