It’s not enough to be a vegetarian these days; you have to be a vegan with all the attendant headaches of ‘cruelty free’ accouterments and baggage. Even this is not enough though, as in their moral pique, they often feel the need to convert innocent meat eaters who may cross their paths at dinner time.
This brings to mind a woman, the wife of an old school friend of mine, whose vegan zealotry over the years has been a something of a curiosity; sometimes amusing, sometimes infuriating, always astounding. A friend told a story of being button-holed by her at a restaurant gathering. People were free to order what they liked. This is a fellow who will eat from any cuisine in the world, as long as it is some variation on steak and potatoes. Steak and rice will do. He is a sweet, salt-of-the-earth kind of person, so he was taken by surprise. Staring him down with a basilisk eye, the rabid vegan hissed,
“Meat is murder!”
Since our mutual friend was strong-armed into converting to veganism as terms of his marriage, this friend of beneficent temperament sighed and ruminated that he would
prefer to remain a bachelor forever rather than marry such a food fascist. She later included a PETA flier in his Christmas card. He muttered to me he had been sorely tempted to return the favor with a recipe for beef bourguignon, but restrained himself.
There is a new dimension in eco-terror.
Enter the ‘Vegansexuals’. A recent article in the UK paper The Daily Mail described this new phenomenon where vegans claim an ethos and bio-ecosystem of such unspeakable purity that it would nauseate them to have sex with meat eaters. According to the Daily Mail, "The co-director of the New Zealand Center for Human and Animal Studies at Canterbury University, Annie Potts, said she coined the term after doing research on the lives of ‘cruelty-free consumers’."
“'Cruelty-Free Consumption in New Zealand: A National Report on the Perspectives and Experiences of Vegetarians and other Ethical Consumers’ asked 157 people nationwide about everything from battery chickens to sexual preferences."
Was that ‘buttery chickens’, you said? You’re making my mouth water.
"Many female respondents described being attracted to people who ate meat, but said they did not want to have sex with meat eaters because their bodies were made up of the animal carcasses… One vegan respondent said: 'I believe we are what we consume, so I really struggle with non-vegans when it comes to sexual contact.'"
I applaud your stoicism. That means more men for me, and my feline kind.
The Daily Mail continues, “Another vegan said she found non-vegans attractive, but would not want to be physically close to them.” Yet another opined, “I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up of animals who have died for their sustenance.”
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Che
Wonderful article. I laughed all the way through it. My ex-husband became a vegan while we were still married, which explains a lot about why he's my ex-husband. Most of my friends are now vegan; there are only about three of us carnivores left, standing out in the cold, clutching our hamburgers, our glorious buttocks poured snugly into our jeans. Levis were built for meat-eaters - vegans may as well wear those scratchy hemp pajama bottoms. And thank the gods we never see vegans in leather pants - what a travesty that would be.
Zinc-deficiency. I never knew that, but explains oh so much about my vegan friends (bless'em). I suppose I'll start slipping zinc-mickeys into their carrot-smoothies.
Now if you could just point me in the direction of where these men o'carcasses hang out....
2 - Al Barger
Silly left wing womenfolk sometimes seem to want their men to be "evolved" beyond being masculine, even masculine enough to be effective defenders. Then there are these gals you're writing about here what don't want men to eat like alpha males on the top of the food chain.
Indeed, it's almost as if they wanted to both literally and figuratively have vegetables for lovers. This of course brings us to Frank Zappa.
Call any vegetable, call it by name
Call any vegetable and the chances are good
Ah, that the vegetable will respond to yo-ou!
3 - Kyle
This blog doesn't understand the dynamics of veganism. So there was one person who was terrible to the omnivores around her. Vegans are not all like that. She must have been pretty new at veganism if she was trying to convert. Most vegans these days don't try to convert outright because we all know that it's a waste of breath on ignorant people.
Alicia Silverstone may have been wearing a t-shirt with a carnivorous cheetah on it. But vegans don't have a problem with an animal killing because it has to. The big thing here is that humans don't have to. People almost always get their meat from the supermarket. I know I would still eat meat and dairy if I knew the animals were killed immediately. I don't have a problem with the animals being killed but, instead, the suffering they endure during their dark lives.
It's interesting to think that the only reason people don't go veg/vegan is because their tastebuds are addicted.
4 - Matthew T. Sussman
So, a link to the Daily Mail article would be awesome.
5 - Lisa McKay
Link added, Suss. Go read.
6 - Will
I wonder if I'll ever read a blog/op-ed concerning veganism (other than those written by vegans themselves) that doesn't include the usual tiresome "skinny and sickly", "whiny", and "eco-extremist" stereotrypes. Probably not.
I shouldn't even get started on the whole "eating flesh is manly" ridiculousness. Really? I though sticking to your principles was. Oh well.
Oh, and add to this the highly dubious nutritional advice. Sources, please? Sorry, but I see nothing but weak arguments, cheap shots, and sterotypes.
7 - Walter Sear
You are sorely mistaken in assuming that vegans all are skinny and sickly - I'm have a healthier (and vastly more muscular) physique than any of my lard ass friends. If you think that meat is the only (or even the best) source of protein, you have been seriously misled. (And, BTW, those omega-3s you refer to don't come from fish, but from the algae they live off, so I go directly to the source, and cut out the middleman.)
Is veganism healthier than vegetarianism? Probably not. But it's not appreciably worse either as long as you actually take care of yourself (rather than living on the overboiled lentils and tofu that go with the sandal-wearing-beardie-weirdy stereotype of veganism), and both are a far cry better for you than a carnivorous diet.
Do I only date vegans? I'd like too, but sadly, the misconceptions you outline above have made such a choice impossible. The few vegan women I meet are invariably clueless-but-opinionated new agers, into raw food and homeopathic medicine: in other words, diametrically opposed to the creed of 'no bullshit/no hypocrisy' that made me a vegan in the first place.
That is, except for the girls who stick around a while: long enough for me to slowly seduce them to the green side of the dish, with delicious cooking and the odd quiet word about the existential need for kindness to other creatures. (The aforementioned pecs undoubtedly play a part too :> Would this be a good time to point out that vegans taste much better, and have much fewer problems with erectile dysfunction? Well, there you go.)
8 - Matthew T. Sussman
Ahh. Happy days.
"I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up from the bodies of animals who have died for their sustenance," she said."
Good news, we don't want to fuck you either.
9 - Matthew T. Sussman
""When you are vegan or vegetarian, you are very aware that when people eat a meaty diet, they are kind of a graveyard for animals," she said."
All right, see, there's this great thing the human body has called the excretory system.
10 - Ashtoreth
...Standing out in the cold, clutching our hamburgers, our glorious buttocks poured snugly into our jeans...
LOL Che! Loves eet. ;)
Will, the books I posted are books I own and have read. They are full of scientific information that will satisfy your appetite, which is why I included them.
It is a paradigm shift, esp. if you are a vegan, but believe me, I care about men and so the interest in their health is genuine. I have one at home, and his health and well being is paramount to me.
And sorry if you don't like the reflection on vegan men. It's true and it's the result of their nutritionally impoverished diet. Sadly, penis birth defects in children and poor sperm counts are also linked to phyto-estrogens from plastics, pestisides - and the enormous amounts of soy tucked into the American diet.
This would go especially for vegans, who rely on such foods exclusively. If you read about how they process the soy mulch for 'food' you would realize that you have been brainwashed to put the pain of farm animals ahead of your life and the children you sire or give birth to.
Eating meat is not just about taste, as Kyle suggested. Leopards have the good sense to eat what leopards traditionally eat. Humans have the ability to go off on an intellectual tangent and eat something for 'philosophical reasons' rather than best survival of themselves and their offspring. We are obviously more irrational than leopards, but then I have said, 'We can only aspire to be as cool as cats'. ;)
I suggest reading The Testosterone Advantage and The Mood Cure. Leopards do not worry about the 'pain of their food'. Don't let moral narcissism blind you to the truth about what a body/brain looks like/functions like on the traditional human diet versus on a nouveau vegan diet.
Although, this kind of talk may help you score with a vegansexual girl. ;)
Here's to having muscles and brains. The body needs the building materials it requires. All the vegan philosophical arguments aside, their bodies, or dearth of them, speak for themselves.
You might also want to check out www.westonaprice.org. As I say, it's a paradigm shift, back to what made humans a healthy and successful species. Americans have been being brainwashed by food industry interests for a long time now, since the late 1950's when post WWII tons of soy was being farmed. It was sold to intellectuals, like you. Very well I might say.
I just read an amusing article that talked about how the consumer demand for lean meats and low fat diets has led pig farmers to feed saturated fats to pigs in order to make them lean (often coconut oil, which stimulate thyroid and liver conversion of T4 to the active T3.)
They used to feed them vegetable oils, esp. corn and soy oils to fatten them up! A fat pig full of lard was a valuable market commodity. People traditionally cooked with lard.
Shocking I know. I still can't wrap my brain around that one. Old paradigms and bugaboos die hard. I cook with olive oil, butter, and sometimes coconut oil from Tropical Traditions.
Ironically, unless you are an olive oil fiend, (Extra Virgin, like Britney Spears) ;) most Americans buy vegetable oils for salad, cooking and baking needs. These include soy, corn, safflower oils and canola oils. The polyunsaturates, are very unstable molecularly unless stabilized by hydrogenation, at which point you have...
'I can't believe it's not butter'.
Me neither. Hydrogenated fats are Trans fats. Deadly! They are a type of polymer, as in plastic.
It's pure black humor obviously, but the results are - thin pigs, and fat people. Not to mention high cancer/diabetes/heart disease/depression.
School lunches for US kids can now contain high amounts of soy. This gives high levels of phyto-estrogens to growing kids which reeks havoc on their health and endocrine systems. Notice the obesity epidemic in kids? It's not just the sugar drinks (touted as low-fat) it's the estrogenic and thyroid suppressing effects of soy that is in many foods often listed as 'vegetable protein'.
Lads, next time you think of eating a vege-burger or some other soy-fest; before you congratulate yourself on your moral ascendancy, realize that you are taking the equivalent of an estrogen birth control pill.
11 - Ashtoreth
Mathew Suss... LOL! ;))
12 - Walter Sear
"This would go especially for vegans, who rely on such foods exclusively. If you read about how they process the soy mulch for 'food' you would realize that you have been brainwashed to put the pain of farm animals ahead of your life and the children you sire or give birth to."
Who said anything about soy? You are still making assumptions about what Vegan is and is not.
For myself, I eat tofu about as often as say, chinese food. Putting aside the fact that legumes, grains and other staples of the vegan diet easily allow one to exceed the recommended protein intake There are plenty of other dedicated for acquiring protein. I eat a lot of rice protein. I make my own Seitan in a bread machine.
Oh yes, and you mentioned that other hot button issue - vegan children. Too bad that studies so far have found them more intelligent than their carnivorous peers (most likely, I would assume, due to their enlightened parents than their diet. However, they are obviously not suffering from the lack of meat).
Oh yes, and I do barely cook with anything but olive oil. Why ever not?
13 - Will
Ashtoreth, thanks for the links and info, I'm genuinely interested. I think the verdict is still out on soy, because there's a lot of conflicting info. But in any case I should point out that many vegans don't really consume very much soy at all. I know more than a few that HATE tofu.
At least we agree on one thing- olive oil (which is basically the only oil I cook ANYTHING with)
I should point out that Leopards don't practice fatory farming. Leopards can also catch their prey on "foot" and kill it and eat it with their teth and claws. They also don't get sick from eating it raw or even slightly decomposed. Interesting, huh?
And... so, because a leopard doesn't think about the ethics of eating, a human shouldn't? I thought we were SO much better than other animals...
You might be interested to hear Carl Lewis' dicusion on his veganism at the time of record-setting performances, if we're talking health.
And lastly, I think it's funny that most omnivores couldn't stomach a trip to a cattle butcher or battery hen egg facility. Really, who exactly is the squeamish one?
14 - Walter Sear
"And... so, because a leopard doesn't think about the ethics of eating, a human shouldn't? I thought we were SO much better than other animals..."
There's also the other side of this coin. Why shouldn't we eat other people, if we can catch them and make them breed in a factory for us?
I think I could go with that - as long as I got to pick the people j/k
15 - Dennis
Vegans don't have to be unhealthy. Any vegan who hisses "meat is murder" is probably just a retard, so you can't expect them to eat a balanced diet.
Che if you saw my ass in leather pants (I have lots of pics) you'd change your tune.
16 - Ashtoreth
Walter, your comment reminded me of a work by the writer Jonathan Swift.
In the spirit of pure black humor, I present, A Modest Proposal.
17 - Will
"This blog doesn't understand the dynamics of veganism. So there was one person who was terrible to the omnivores around her. Vegans are not all like that. She must have been pretty new at veganism if she was trying to convert. Most vegans these days don't try to convert outright because we all know that it's a waste of breath on ignorant people."
It's annoying that a few misguided people have to reflect so poorly on the rest of us. :(
The only way I try to "convert" anybody is by having othem over for dinner, which I do a LOT. I get NO complaints (and many requests for seconds) about my dishes, and there are generally no veggie burgers or tofu in sight. I was rather proud when a had a rather health conscious meat-eating friend over for dinner last night and he said "whoa, do you always eat this well?". I'd considered it a pretty basic meal!
I made the transition from vegetarian to vegan a few months ago, and I certainly healther than ever. (I have vegan friends who run marathons) And I certainly feel good about my decision. I sing too, (or try to!) and I can't swear it's related, but I've had a noticeably better voice since axing the dairy. Nice side benefit!
18 - Ashtoreth
Walter, Rice and Seiten (gluey darned stuff made from wheat gluten) does not give you the nutritional profile of a steak (ideally, a grass fed steak) which would have the healthiest fats most complete bio-available amino acids, heme iron (non in veg. sources) and bio available Zinc.
You need zinc to make testosterone, which with so many environmental estrogenic compounds from plastics, to pthalates in grooming products is something to be taken seriously.
Also, for the many people who are gluten intolerant, Seiten is not an option, it is a poison.
There have always been farms. Unless you are talking about the cavemen LOL. This is part of how people survived in a community, bartering or trading. Civilization grew with the rise of farming/herding/cultivation of wine and olive oil.
It takes about 11 years for an olive tree to produce fruit for cultivation, so this is a sign to archeologists/anthropologists of a settled people, esp in the Mediteranean.
Interestingly, European skeletons of more meat eating people were taller. The move to more grain/pulse based diets produced shorter skeletons. Those knights in shining armor were really tiny!
I was recently read (Slate, I think) that Americans have been surpassed as the world's tallest people. Now the Europeans are taller than us. Could our adoption of radically different foods and dietary concepts from European traditional foods and foods that had been mainstays of earlier Americans have something to do with it, I wonder? Interesting to ponder...
Certainly, the physical and resulting psycho-social/psycho-sexual ramifications of earlier puberties is hitting our society. The body is ready but the brain/emotions/social situation is not. This is due to exposure to large amounts of estrogens in the environment and diet, compared to even 100 years ago.
19 - Catey
*singin* "ohhh hereshe comes..." ;)
20 - Ashtoreth
Hi doll! Welcome. :)
21 - gette
Oh God! Another idiot lifestyle article by some mainstream chick with mainstream tastes... literally. Can't all you meateaters just die of heart attacks already???
22 - Ashtoreth
Tch-tch-tch...
What did I say about vegan men reminding me of andropausal men?
*pokes carefully with stick*
Hmmmm..... Nervous and aggressive, like a blue centipede. Cranky and crotchety. Low testosterone, low essential fatty acids.
Could it be your diet?
Me thinks so. ;)
As for saturated fats and heart attacks, may I suggest reading 'The Cholesterol Myths - Exposing The Fallacy That Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease' by Uffe Ravnskov, MD. PhD.
Some notes from the back cover:
"Dr. Ravnkov has done a magnificent service with a scholarly book that gathers a vast body of impressive evidence and will surprise many with the true facts from research studies..."
Ray H. Rosenman MD Former Director of Cardiovascular Research ,SRI
"But What about heart disease?" This is the response of many Americans when advised to consume the foods of their ancestors, foods like butter, whole milk, eggs, and meat. Fear of saturated fat and cholesterol has put a solid brick wall between the consumer and satisfying nutritious food - and filled the coffers of the food processing industry.
Sally Fallon
Author of Nourishing Traditions
It is soy processed and not and polyunsaturated vegetable oils both liquid and hydrogenated, which are the root of America's problems with heart disease, and mood disorders. Instead of mirroring the temperament of a blue centipede, check out some of those books I suggested on the Amazon links.
23 - Ashtoreth
Also cranky one,
What is 'mainstream' is the vegetarian, eco-etho-pathology; low fat; terror of meat, eggs, and butter.
What I am suggesting requires putting on one's thinking cap (Instead of wandering around brainwashed chanting 'IM-HO-TEP IM-HO-TEP')and reading some things other than what the mainstream wants to tell... sell you.
24 - Lux
I am pretty close to a vegetan, a non-political vegan. There are non-militant vegans out there.
Also, about omnivore and vegan nutrition. It's not as simple as how you have described it. Food that is taken in does not automatically become building blocks for the human system. Using your argument would mean vegans do not produce cholesterol.
All I got out of this was another non-vegan attacking vegans' choice in life. Just respect those choices.
25 - Ray Ellis
I was just going to say that Ashtoreth is precariously close to becoming my favorite writer here, but after reading some of these comments, I have to retract that. The fact that she can rankle so many overly sensitive hairs and still maintain her demeanor makes her, hand down, a writer to be read on a regular basis..
Keep up the good work, Ashtoreth!