You wouldn't think it but It was at ‘The Wave’ last year in London, a climate protest coinciding with Copenhagan where I encountered a group of individuals about as detrimental to global efforts to halt climate change as Jeremy Clarkson or the big G Bush. They were parading along the streets of London waving a banner which read ‘You can’t be an environmentalist if you’re not a vegan!’
The labels ‘vegetarian’ and 'veganism' imply a false dichotomy that we either continue, as a society, to carry on eating meat at least once a day or we give it up completely, becoming vegetarians. Now, for as long as we’ve existed for hundreds of thousands of years as humans (and hundreds of thousands of years as mammals before that) we have consumed meat as a key part to our diet. True, we have the choice and we can survive without meat but I’m sure 99% of vegetarians would eat a KFC if stuck on a desert island. So then where do we draw the line? Would a veggie eat a steak if they were guests of someone who would be severely offended if their hospitality was refused? Would they eat a sausage roll if it were going to be chucked out anyway? How about if they were drunk and just really fancied a kebab?
The point I’m trying t make is that no one has the right to draw a line. Apart from when used to describe a religious person who would actually die rather than eat meat, vegetarianism is just another one of those useless arbitrary lines we have in western society dividing the ‘holier than thou’ vegetarians and the rest of us climate changing, barbarous, savage carnivores just in the same way that we are divided into different races, sexualities and maybe even genders.
All these cases are simply manifestations of a culturally ingrained Western obsession with labelling everything and then putting them all in little boxes: The modern pipedream of omniscience, the logical conclusion of which was Soviet Marxism and Free Market Capitalism. We can’t know everything, if you don’t believe me just briefly look over Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it all adds up! So this means no one has the right to define absolute good and absolute bad, black or white, gay or straight, vegetarian and meat eater, between all these imaginary poles there are infinite points upon which we all stand at different places. To use just two categories is to deny our infinite complexity, our beauty and diversity: exactly what make us human.
Bringing it back down to earth, obviously we must all eat less meat, it currently accounts for around 20% of all CO2 emissions, but there is no need to stop eating meat completely. Vegetarianism is a choice restricted to a very small, lucky minority who, by declaring themselves vegetarians, put themselves up on a pedestal driving many away from the environmental movement, making it appear smug.
The labels ‘vegetarian’ and 'veganism' imply a false dichotomy that we either continue, as a society, to carry on eating meat at least once a day or we give it up completely, becoming vegetarians. Now, for as long as we’ve existed for hundreds of thousands of years as humans (and hundreds of thousands of years as mammals before that) we have consumed meat as a key part to our diet. True, we have the choice and we can survive without meat but I’m sure 99% of vegetarians would eat a KFC if stuck on a desert island. So then where do we draw the line? Would a veggie eat a steak if they were guests of someone who would be severely offended if their hospitality was refused? Would they eat a sausage roll if it were going to be chucked out anyway? How about if they were drunk and just really fancied a kebab?
The point I’m trying t make is that no one has the right to draw a line. Apart from when used to describe a religious person who would actually die rather than eat meat, vegetarianism is just another one of those useless arbitrary lines we have in western society dividing the ‘holier than thou’ vegetarians and the rest of us climate changing, barbarous, savage carnivores just in the same way that we are divided into different races, sexualities and maybe even genders.
All these cases are simply manifestations of a culturally ingrained Western obsession with labelling everything and then putting them all in little boxes: The modern pipedream of omniscience, the logical conclusion of which was Soviet Marxism and Free Market Capitalism. We can’t know everything, if you don’t believe me just briefly look over Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it all adds up! So this means no one has the right to define absolute good and absolute bad, black or white, gay or straight, vegetarian and meat eater, between all these imaginary poles there are infinite points upon which we all stand at different places. To use just two categories is to deny our infinite complexity, our beauty and diversity: exactly what make us human.
Bringing it back down to earth, obviously we must all eat less meat, it currently accounts for around 20% of all CO2 emissions, but there is no need to stop eating meat completely. Vegetarianism is a choice restricted to a very small, lucky minority who, by declaring themselves vegetarians, put themselves up on a pedestal driving many away from the environmental movement, making it appear smug.
