Tab dump

What makes a vegetarian appear self righteous is not that he is a vegetarian but that he issues demands that non vegetarians owe him an apology. Lord knows I'm no huge carnivore, but modern agriculture is just as pernicious as husbandry. Farmers grow food in the southwestern desert and the Central Valley by draining the Oglala aquifer and totally consuming the entire output of the Colorado river. This injects salt into the topsoil which eventually makes it unfit for any plants at all, and the aquifer will not recharge itself for the next thousand years. Today's new modern vegetarian is loading up on all that yummy asparagus from the environmentally responsible folks down at Whole Foods -- who fly asparagus up from Peru in November. Asparagus on an airplane is, in the long run, scarier than snakes.

Self righteous is when you inform people they owe you an apology. Arrogantly self righteous is when you don't clean up your own act first.

Wow. Defensive much?

Great strawman there, pj_camp. Any other random generalizations you'd like to use to avoid debate on legitimate social and ethical issues?

"As a vegetarian ..."

Yawn, yet another predictable Ezra link. And the ironic thing is, he actually considers himself a 'foodie'.

Where's the "cows=blood=death" photo this time, Erza? Nothing in WaPo's Photo Archive with a little red ooze?

eleander: "Great strawman there, pj_camp. Any other random generalizations you'd like to use to avoid debate on legitimate social and ethical issues?"

Actually, Ezra routinely fails to make the connection between his own predilections and their impact on the environment.

So what pj_camp says is neither random nor a generalization.

So what pj_camp says is neither random nor a generalization.

Setting aside the ad hominem knock on Ezra (as if one fallacy excuses another), pj_camp's post did not refer to "Ezra" but "vegetarians." Now, he could have said "vegetarians like Ezra" or "some vegetarians" to make a point about some *people*, but he did not. Instead, he used a massive generalization about all vegetarians as a means of dismissing the very practice of vegetarianism itself. Sorry that is a textbook straw man. Your emotional urge to agree with it doesn't make it any less intellectually and factually bankrupt.

leoklein: not quite true. Ezra has repeatedly acknowledged that his recipe offerings tend to include meat even as his other posts advocate for a reduced-meat diet.

pj_camp: it's clearly the case that, while a vegetarian diet does (on average) include consumption of grains and vegetables grown with use of fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and subsidized fossil water, that diet relies on far less of these things than the (average) meat diet, orders of magnitude less. The author's suggestion that meat eaters owe an apology is obviously a literary trick following from the common (I know I've had it myself during vegetarian phases) socially induced emotion of guilt among vegetarians who feel as though their "personal choice" is negatively impacting others.

I've frequently commented that _properly raised animals_ can in fact be environmentally beneficial, but won't go down that road again...

In general, the author is obviously right, but the problem is that his point is true about, quite possibly and literally, every choice made by every human being. Should I pick my nose in private? I might spread the flu to my coworkers... Whether or not to buy a t-shirt? Cotton production uses half the world's pesticides and so on, so that t-shirt advertising support for PETA doubles as a harmful ecological footprint. But scale matters. The thing about meat (conventional and much "natural") isn't just that it has effects on others beyond the individual choosing to eat it, it's that the effects are, relatively, quite large.

On the other hand, the fact is that eating is, emotionally speaking, an intensely personal activity, so in that sense the audience member was right. How deep into personal life do we want to venture with social policy? Well, that's a different question--the author is challenging people outside the sphere of policy, rather on a direct level of social communication. That must always be allowed, even if it is sometimes irksome.

No no, JonathanTE, if you anything you do or have done has had a detrimental impact on the environment, it means that all actions are justified. If you throw a plastic bottle in a garbage can instead of a recycling bin, shouldn't I get to pour gallons of mercury into the water supply?

Snark aside, there are really two issues being conflated here. One is an animal welfare issue and the other is an environmentalist issue. On the whole, what I think people inclined towards environmentally friendly policy want is for ALL products to generally reflect their proportional impact on the environment (and by extension, their overall cost to communities). The fact that, for a vegetarian, such policies would generally have positive implications for animal welfare is the cherry on top, but it's not clear to me that, for reasons you alluded to, the environmental issue necessarily demands being a vegetarian.