Why you should be vegetarian

¶ … Vegetarian

I would like to begin with a thought experiment, which I take from the dieticians and vegetarian activists Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, and their best seller Fit for Life. The Diamonds are faced with the prejudice which considers vegetarianism to be "unnatural" and they offer the following to investigate what, precisely, our notions of a "natural" diet entail:

…We as humans are not even psychologically equipped to eat meat. Have you ever strolled through a lush wooded area, filling your lungs with good air while listening to birds sing? Perhaps it was after a rain, and everything was fresh and clean….Just then perhaps a chipmunk scurried across your path. What was your VERY FIRST INSTINCTIVE inclination upon the sight of the chipmunk, before you even had time to think? To pounce on it, grab it with your teeth, rip it apart, and swallow it, blood, guts, skin, bone, flesh and all?...Kids are the real test. Place a small child in a crib with a rabbit and an apple. If the child eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car. (Diamond and Diamond, 98).

I hope to argue that both biologically and ethically, vegetarianism is the best possible choice in diet. Through an examination of earlier sources, I will show that vegetarianism is a lifestyle with a long history and a coherent rationale, which readers should find persuasive.

The ethical arguments for vegetarianism are well-known. The central ethical principle asks us to regard animals and not consider whether or not they can think, but whether or not they can suffer. A cow may not read Tolstoy, but it can feel pain. To ignore this pain is to coarsen one's own capacity for responding to the suffering of any other being, including humans. Jonathan Safran Foer makes this point nicely, and shows that he indeed can read Tolstoy at the same time:

Tolstoy famously argued that the existence of slaughterhouses and battlefields is linked. Okay, we don't fight wars because we eat meat, and some wars should be fought -- which is not to mention that Hitler was a vegetarian. But compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us. It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you would told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. (Foer 254).

The ethical argument here does not require giving animals the status of people, or getting into the debate about "animal rights." Foer points out that the moral improvement occurs in the person who refuses to eat meat, by "exercising" the "compassion…muscle." We might treat other people better if we treated animals better first.