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RE: The World is a Vegetable

Here are Jeffrey Steingarten's [excerpted] thoughts on vegetarianism. I'll
post them without comment.

Discuss.

Everybody tells me that vegetarianism is a happening thing. Last year,
VEGETARIAN TIMES magazine commissioned a study by Yankelovich Clancy
Shulman. About 6.7 percent of the adults they telephoned told the pollsters
that they are vegetarians, way up from 3.7 percent in 1985. This works out
to 12.4 million vegetarians nationwide, an apparent jump of 80 percent.
Two-thirds of vegetarians are women. At this rate, I calculate, everybody
will be a vegetarian by the year 2024, or at least everyone will say they're
a vegetarian by 2024. But then how can over half of them possibly be women?
Maybe something is wrong with my calculations.

The problem with the Yankelovich survey is that many people who say they're
vegetarian have an extremely eccentric idea of what a vegetarian is. Forty
percent of them report that they eat fish or poultry or both every week.
Maybe I'm using the wrong dictionary, but it seems to me that somebody that
eats chicken at least once a week and claims to be a vegetarian is the very
definition of an imposter, a charlatan, a pretender, or a mountebank. The
survey also discovered a hitherto-unrecognized category -- the 10 percent of
vegetarians who eat red meat at least once a week. I cannot decide whether
to call them bovo-vegetarians or psycho-vegetarians.

The survey's results are broadly consistent with recent trends in food
consumption. From 1976 to 1990, the average American's consumption of beef
dropped from 94.5 pounds a year to 68, but an increase in the consumption of
poultry and fish more than made up for it. So the real trend is the rise of
chicken, turkey, and cod, and of people who would like to think of
themselves as vegetarians. Because vegetarianism is a happening thing.

Amazingly, only 4 percent of today's vegetarians avoid animal products
entirely, an inconsequential quarter of a percent of the total American
adult population, or a mere five hundred thousand people from coast to
coast.

Most Americans go vegetarian for their health, giving "not sure" as their
runner-up reason, distantly followed by the environment and animal rights.
Vegetarians do have fewer heart attacks, lower blood pressure, and trimmer
figures than meat eaters. But as vegetarians tend to lead healthier lives in
general, and exercise more than average, a vegetarian diet in itself may not
have much advantage over an omnivorous diet low in saturated fat, full of
fruits and vegetables, and moderate though not phobic when it comes to meat.

The food press has recently been full of statements like "Eating low on the
food chain has tended to be pretty disastrous from the gastronomic point of
view -- but not any longer!". The evidence presented is always a photo of an
exquisite and sumptuous vegetable feast created by one of the country's top
young chefs. They may be lovely to look at, artfully cooked, and sometimes
delicious, but you would not survive very long on meals like these, because
they rarely contain any protein. For that, you must consume large platefuls
of unglamorous legumes and grains.

Strict vegetarians need to be careful in making their nutritional ends meet.
Most would suffer deficiencies of vitamin B12, vitamin D, and iron if they
did not take vitamin pills or eat fortified foods like Total and Special K
cereals. These three common deficiencies are the subject of intense
controversy, but pregnant or lactating women, children, and the elderly
should be particularly watchful. Early signs that your body is starved for
B12 can be dangerously masked (even until irreversible nerve damage occurs)
by the plentiful folic acid in vegan diets.

Most vegetarian, whole-food, health-food, and organic restaurants pay much
greater attention to their ideology than to their cooking. Their dishes are
typically artless, often drawing (promiscuously and sloppily) on real or
imagined foreign dishes. American vegetarians eat vegetables because they
hate meat. Europeans eat vegetables because they love vegetables. Nearly all
the voluntary vegetarians in the world (not those vegetarians from poverty
or religious belief) live in America and England. Neither group is known for
their skills in the kitchen.

The first thing you notice about a restaurants's menu is how high up the
food chain the chef has dared to climb and which foods on the lower rungs he
or she has chosen to exclude. All pollo-vegetarian restaurants seem to allow
fish (though some pesco-vegetarians avoid shellfish on the grounds that
these are scavengers and bottom-dwellers), but some oddly eliminate the ovos
from which the pollos came, not to mention the milk that flows like kindness
from the pollos' barnyard neighbors. It is common to find ovos where lactos
are excluded and vice versa.

Not even every plant food is welcome. Many restaurants do not offer alcohol,
whether fermented from barley and hops or grapes. Some do not even let you
bring your own. Others eschew the dark, aromatic liquor of the roasted
coffee bean, and most banish the purest, whitest forms of sugar and flour.
Restaurants following strict Buddhist rules also eliminate onions,
scallions, and garlic, which are thought to inflame the passions, while most
macrobiotic restaurants flee from members of the nightshade family, such as
eggplants and tomatoes. One man's poison is another man's essential amino
acid.

...

And then suddenly I thought, in a flash of blinding insight: Wait a minute!
Is this what I have been reduced to? What in the world am I doing, standing
in my own kitchen, mixing up packets of microwavable, artificial Tex-Mex
convenience food? Is this what being a strict vegetarian boils down to? And
in large part, I'm afraid the answer is yes. Only as a vegan would I have
been able to stomach more than 30 percent of what I have eaten in the past
month.

I have come to the conclusion that Mother Nature never wanted us to become
strict and unyielding vegetarians. There is nothing natural about it at all.
Visit any vegan, and you will find his cabinet of vitamin supplements at
least as well-stocked as his larder. The truth is that humans were designed
to be omnivores, complete with all-purpose dentition and digestive systems.
Vegetarianism is not our national diet. Anthropologists know that for most
of the past million years of our evolution, humans have eaten meat,
especially fish and low-fat wild game. The only source of plant protein that
does not require cooking to become digestible is, I think, nuts. But cooking
was invented only fifty thousand years ago, long after most of our
physiology and genetic structure had evolved. I cannot think of a
traditional, nonindustrial culture (we used to call them primitive cultures)
that practices vegetarianism if it can help it. Vegetarianism is always the
product of scarcity, of religion, or of ideology, including nutritional fads
and fashions.

The environmental arguments against meat are strong, but they apply mainly
to factory farming -- vast numbers of animals kept in close confinement, fed
with grain and water hauled from long distances and producing more waste
than we can possibly use as fertilizer or fuel. But unless you insist that
we must all eat in the most economical manner possible -- though few of us
dress in the cheapest way or live in the smallest possible space -- these
are arguments not for avoiding all meat but for eating less meat and raising
it in a sustainable way. Universal vegetarianism would not be an unmixed
blessing for the environment. Ecological nutritionist Joan Gussow explained
that for millennia livestock has been indispensable for its magical ability
to convert agricultural waste, failed crops, and the vegetation on
unfarmable land into high-quality protein. And without grazing animals, it
would be difficult to practice environmentally sound crop rotation. Cutting
your meat consumption by 50 or 75 percent makes more environmental sense
than becoming a vegan.

-- Jeffrey Steingarten, THE MAN WHO ATE EVERYTHING

--- 
============================================================================
================
Andrew Vogel: Manager of Professional Programs, University of Cincinnati
College of Pharmacy
http://pharmacy.uc.edu
(513)-558-3784
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================


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Temmesfeld [mailto:dtemm at yahoo_com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 9:20 AM
> To: Vogel, Andrew (VOGELAP); 'David Armstrong'; 
> Kendrickjd at aol_com; over-the-rhine at actwin_com
> Subject: The World is a Vegetable
> 
> 
> "Vogel, Andrew (VOGELAP)" wrote:
> > Okay, so we get several vegetarian pizzas, and
> > then we carnivores can eat the vegetarians.
> 
> jackass... i'm an omnivore (i eat everything, garbage
> disposal, ya know)... but i am vegetarian-friendly
> (actually, quite vegetarian-friendly, if you know
> what i mean... *and i think you do*...).
> 
> vegetables rock.  i could easily go a month without
> eating meat, and i don't think i'd miss it.  juice
> and veggies are the only necessities when i go to
> the grocery store.  most of the meat that i happen
> to buy ends up in some sort of soup that i buy...
> 
> jerquee is a far better substitute for beef jerky.
> it's so yummy.  all you nay-sayers... back off.  i
> say "try it" with an open mind.  not-dogs have the
> right consistency... some soy products are f-in'
> brilliantly planned.
> 
> personally, i'm grossed out by sausage (buncha inside
> crap ground up and stuffed into an intestine), but
> fake sausage made from soy is good, and it's damn
> near the real deal.  honestly.
> 
> i make a killer vegetarian jambalaya.  i used three
> different non-meats, and quite frankly, you can't tell
> the difference.  it's awesome.  ok, perhaps i've
> picked the dish that i'll make for the brunch.
> 
> vegetarian jambalaya on the way.
>  
> > Read an interesting essay AGAINST vegetarianism in
> > Jeffrey Steingarten's book, THE MAN WHO ATE
> > EVERYTHING. Very compelling argument...
> 
> post some of the essay.  i bet it's bullocks.
> 
> people should be allowed to eat what they want to eat
> based on their own convictions.  that's all i know.
> 
> the secret we all know,
> Dan
> 
> np: vigilantes of love - blister soul
> 
> 
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