Gather Round the Table: Virulent Vegans

From the outset: I have no problem with vegetarians or vegans.  I fully respect their opinions and their gustatory choices.  I encourage everyone to eat healthily, and to do so in a manner that best fits their values and ethical guidelines.

See here’s the thing: I wrote an essay for the online journal Grist.org.  They had asked me to describe what it was like to be a “sustainable chef in big-Ag country.”  In case you’d like to see it, it’s posted here.  It’s much easier for me to write about food than it is to write about myself, but I gave it my best shot, and the editors at Grist.org seemed to like it.  They gave me a heads-up though, that a few of their readers might possibly take umbrage at my suggestion that in order to save certain species of animals, we must consume them – the logic being that many have gone extinct due to lack of a market.  If people won’t buy them, farmers won’t raise them. 

Happens with plants too. Due to the industrial standardization of food, 75% of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900.  93% of American food product diversity has been lost in the same time period.  33% of livestock varieties have disappeared or are near disappearing.  30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and one more is lost every six hours.

But what these responders had concluded was that I, and everyone else who consumes “the flesh of non-human animals” is inherently evil.  I’m a bad person, and deserve to be roundly condemned.  Nevermind knockin’-on-thirty-years as a foodservice professional trying to improve the food system.  Nevermind vocal advocacy for small, local, sustainable farming and food production.  Nevermind being a (reasonably) upstanding citizen of a participatory democracy.  I’m bad.  I need to be silenced.

Here’s a sample of what they had to say about me and what I said, in responses posted under the essay:

There is nothing sustainable about mistaking animals for food, yet this "sustainable" chef freely encourages the use of cattle (including veal), pigs, and birds.

Please stop glorifying these greenwashing hypocrites.

The self-branding of "sustainable" chef really grated me, too.  Let's be fair, you're not the only one to use it.

Well, in fairness, he has more on the ball than that cheerleader for Iowan agriculture, Kurt Michael Friese, who asked in the linked "wonderful piece" thread what he apparently thinks is a trenchant rhetorical question, "If we all go vegan, what would happen to all those animals that we now keep in CAFOs?"  OK, KMF, ask yourself, what sorts of things might happen to them?  Really, we in the East did that fellow a grave injustice by allowing him to return to Iowa with his dense Midwestern livestock mentality intact.

So let’s see here, I am a dense, self-branding, greenwashing hypocrite. 

First of all, I did not ask, “What would happen to all those animals that we now keep in CAFOs?”  Rather I asked one of these respondants, for the reasons outlined in the statistics above, “Would someone please explain what happens to the livestock, to the millions and millions of cows, sheep, goats, pigs, ducks and chickens when we all go vegetarian?”  I have difficulty imagining these creatures living happy, peaceful lives in the wild.  They would (and have) become extinct.  Not a very humane result.  Also, I did not choose the title “sustainable chef,” that was the editor, regardless of how much it may or may not apply.

However my point is not to argue or refute.  My point is that the vehemence of their argument has and will continue to leave them (not all vegetarians, just these virulent preachers) at the fringes of credulity.  The fact that I eat meat does not make me evil or amoral, it is in fact what humans, not to mention many other animals, have done for eons and I do not consider humans to be above or beneath their fellow members of the animal kingdom.  I have eyes in the front of my head, canines and incisors.  My body digests and metabolizes animal protein very well.  I am an omnivore.  To state that I should change that or be condemned makes them come off as holier-than-thou proselytizers. Instead of trying to convert people to their way of thinking, I suggest that we all just live our lives, and be the change we want to see in the world.

		Kurt Michael Friese, Gather Food Correspondent
	Gather ‘Round the Table is a regular feature of Gather Essentials: Food. Chef Kurt Michael Friese is a freelance food and wine writer & photographer. He is also the co-owner - with his wife Kim - of Devotay, a restaurant in Iowa City, serves on the Slow Food USA Board of Governors, and is Editor-in-Chief of the local food magazine Edible Iowa River Valley. He lives in rural Johnson County, Iowa. Keep up with Kurt Michael's food series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.