May 2012
3 posts
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History of the American Dietetic Association’s...
The attitude of dietetic professionals towards vegetarian diets has changed in recent years. Compared to the 1980 position statement of the American Dietetic Association (ADA) which raised doubts about the adequacy and benefit of vegetarian eating, the most recent ADA position paper on vegetarian diets, published in 2009, views vegetarian diets more positively.
— “The Contribution of...
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David Cain on Vegan Alienation and Why the...
David Cain is the author of a blog called Raptitude, “a street-level look at the human experience.” Last month, in an entry called “Giving up the V-Card,” he explained why he’d stopped calling himself vegan, even though he still doesn’t purchase animal products. The main reason was alienation; veganism had erected a psychological barrier between himself and meat...
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History of the American Dietetic Association’s...
Editor’s note: Almost everything in this entry is a quote, because I wanted to let Adventists do all the explaining. The names that initially appear in bold, aside from those in headlines, are Adventists who would later review American Dietetic Association vegetarian position papers. (Though there are other Adventist reviewers and authors of ADA vegetarian position papers who are not mentioned in...
April 2012
5 posts
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Is Veganism Good for Everyone? →
The New York Times had me contribute to yesterday’s “Room for Debate” about whether everyone can thrive on a vegan diet. In my post I mention that six out of seven of the authors of the American Dietetic Association/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics position papers on a vegetarian diet since 1988 have been vegetarian and vegan (for ethical and religious reasons). I started a few...
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James McWilliams Asks Us to Dream of Vegan... →
Time to dissect another James McWilliams piece. Like the rest of McWilliams’ repertoire, this one is about how McWilliams doesn’t like any kind of animal product consumption whatsoever.
In “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” he writes:
“Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows.”
Okay, now that’s a fair start. Some research suggests that the...
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QuasiVegan's Christina Arasmo Beymer Discusses Her...
Christina Arasmo Beymer ate eggs just so she could identify as an ex-vegan for this interview. “I figure if I eat eggs a couple times a year, I’m less pure and therefore I’m a better person, my ego is diminished and I can join the ex-vegan club, where the cool kids hang out,” she explained. But I’m going to give Christina the benefit of the doubt and assume the eggs were from a...
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Dr. John Hadley on His Proposal to Give Animals...
John Hadley is Research Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. He has published on a wide range of topics in animal and environmental ethics, including recent papers on assisting wild animals in need, animal rights extremism, the reporting of animal research in the media and the ethical limits of veterinary expenditure.
Last...
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"Dear Awesome Vegans and Vegetarians and...
I am stealing this grammatically suspect introduction from an email I received a few weeks ago, written by a vegan activist. The purpose of her email was to convince me to choose veganism. I am writing to tell You, All of You Out There, and her, because she is out there somewhere too, that I am a vegan. Yes, I eat meat, I wear leather and I work at a slaughterhouse. But I do actually think I am a...
March 2012
2 posts
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Les U. Knight on the Voluntary Human Extinction...
Les U. Knight is a leader in The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a self-explanatory movement that takes the “Profoundly Deep” ecological view that humans are inescapably a blight on the planet and should therefore stop reproducing altogether. Knight does not, however, agree with David Benatar that we should stop bringing more humans into this world because life contains suffering...
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Alexander Paul Burton on How Vegans Drove Him Out...
Alexander Paul Burton grew up in the countryside in the south of England and moved to London for University. He co-created the vegan bakery Accidentally Vegan and ran it for over a year, and at the peak of its success, was beloved by members of the London vegan community, getting rave reviews like this one on A Vegan Obsession and this one on Fat Gay Vegan. But angry animal activists and the...
February 2012
4 posts
3 tags
For Vegans, Human Health Comes Before Animal Lives
Most vegans and meat eaters agree: the lives of animals are not worth enough for us to willingly sacrifice our health for them. Vegans just don’t think that giving up animal products entails such a sacrifice.
In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan writes:
There is no question that meat is a nutritious food. In particular, it is a source of complete protein, containing all the amino...
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How to Make Animals Go Extinct: The Vegan Way
Veganism prohibits humans from exploiting and murdering animals in order to use their bodies as material goods, but there are still plenty of ways for humans to eliminate animals without a single amendment to the vegan constitution. Though most vegans wouldn’t want to do this, it would even be theoretically possible—problems of practicality aside—for a vegan humanity to get rid of almost...
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A Vegan World Means Less Food For Humans (maybe)
“A vegan world can feed more humans,” is one of those absurd less = more vegan arguments — like that “veganism increases dietary variety” — that only makes sense when you consider a certain kind of omnivorism. There’s a good chance that someone who eats nothing but chicken nuggets and french fries will develop a more varied diet if she becomes vegan, since...
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Vegetables: What Big Agriculture and James... →
James McWilliams has written another anti-meat column for The Atlantic. That’s his beat after all. Let’s see if it contains any fallacies.
Here’s McWilliams:
I’ve repeatedly argued that supporting alternatives to the industrial production of animal products serves the ultimate interest of industrial producers. The decision to eat animal products sourced from small, ...
January 2012
4 posts
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Vegans May Not Be Speciesist, But That Doesn't...
“Following the civil rights movement, veganism is the next step for moral progress in our society. I think the movement will follow the same historical trajectory as all previous rights movements - through denial and anger, but finally acceptance.”
– Ruby Roth, author of That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals
“It is racism when we choose to save one white person over two blacks. It is speciesism when...
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Do Animals Have Inherent Value? (abridged)
Angus Taylor’s Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate delivers on its title’s promise: it summarizes the philosophical debate over animals, often phrasing points more clearly than the philosophers did themselves. One of the key figures in this debate is Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights, and Taylor applauds him for his main contribution to the animal rights...
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The (Mostly Anecdotal) Evidence for a Vegan Diet →
Many ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians quit for health reasons, but animal agriculture abolitionist James McWilliams doubts their credibility in his post “The Evidence for a Vegan Diet,” saying:
Perhaps inspired by Lierre Kieth’s The Vegetarian Myth, a book that chronicles the author’s losing battle with a plant-based diet, bloggers have clogged foodie networks with angst-ridden accounts of...
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Why Veganism Should Move Beyond "No Animal...
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals opens with the sentence “Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.” That sounds like it’s supposed to be a criticism, but then for the next 266 pages, Foer proceeds to badger Americans into restricting their diets even more than that.
No wonder so many vegans like that book! Vegans sometimes portray themselves...
December 2011
2 posts
1 tag
The Non-Vegan Pet Loophole
Vegans wanting to extend their ethics to every domain under their control often rear their dogs and cats as little furry meat abstainers. Some call this cruelty to animals (a charge that is sometimes undermined by the accusers’ support of factory farming), but if imposing a vegan diet on someone is a form of cruelty, it’s at least a cruelty that vegans are willing to foist upon themselves....
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Dr. Joel Marks on his Amoral Veganism
For some professors and authors, making a career out of philosophy means developing a theory or set of principles that they then elaborate on — and never seriously question — for the rest of their productive lives. Not so for Dr. Joel Marks, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New Haven and a Bioethics Center Scholar at Yale University. For instance, you don’t...
October 2011
3 posts
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Interview With a Vegan: Speciesist Vegan
If you think humans are better than other animals, you’re a speciesist, and you might as well be judging humans on the color of their skin.
At least, if you believe anti-speciesist vegans.
Speciesism, they say, is no more acceptable than other forms of discrimination; looking down on organisms because of their biological classification is just as arbitrary and loathsome as doing the same...
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Factory Farming That Even Vegans Could Support
In the entry “How Animals Eating Each Other Royally Screws Veganism” (which I probably should have given a more philosophical sounding title), I pointed out the obvious: vegans are flirting with nihilism when they say there is nothing morally wrong with non-human omnivores eating other animals simply because these flesh-devouring devils don’t have a conscience and thus don’t believe in right and...
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Interview With an Anti-Veganism Vegan: Dave D →
That’s an interview with Vegan Represent founder Dave D that I posted to CarpeVegan.
But don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned Let Them Eat Meat for Carpe Vegan. I promise to post at least two real entries this month. In the meantime, read Forks Over Knives: Is the Science Legit?, which puts my Forks Over Knives review to shame. Writing mine a year earlier doesn’t get me off...
August 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Forget Sentience: Here’s the Real Reason We Grant...
In my entry “Problems With the Argument From Marginal Cases and Using Sentience as a Basis for Rights,” I attempted to debunk the argument from marginal cases, the keystone argument that holds up obligatory veganism and the notion that sentience is the basis for rights.
I’m getting tired of summarizing the argument from marginal cases, so in case you’re unfamiliar with it, here is Jack Norris and...
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Case For a Baby-Free Argument From Marginal Cases
I talk a lot about the argument from marginal cases on this blog, because it’s the moral equation that glues logical veganism together. This argument is the bridge that makes it possible to think of humans and other animals as morally equivalent. It’s what allows vegans to say “what if you did that to humans?” every time you talk about some aspect of animal use that you...
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Why Not Buy Some Snake Oil With Your Animal... →
In the beginning of 2010, I interviewed Jed Gillen, author of Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs & What it Really Means to be Vegan, a book that is ostensibly about why vegans should raise their companion animals—even cats(!!!)—as vegans. As I said in the introduction to that interview, I got that book because I was sure this Jed Gillen had to be a ludicrous dogmatist with no grasp on...
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Why Vegans Should Strike Meat Off the Agenda
Yesterday someone posted this comment on my blog: “It is amazing the lengths people will go to to justify causing unnecessary suffering.”
I have gone to some lengths, admittedly, but is this blog a justification for unnecessary suffering? That’s hard to say without knowing the definition of “necessary.” Is survival necessary? Is thriving necessary? Is pleasure and...
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July 2011
3 posts
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Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human...
“If you don’t want to die, don’t be born!” — Child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog.
In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, lovable curmudgeon David Benatar argues that life always contains suffering and death and so we cause unnecessary harm by having children. Harm is only possible through existence, and though life contains pleasures, the good almost...
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Interview With a Vegan: Adam Weitz......
Adam is a graduate student and instructor of philosophy, maintains the food blog H.E.A.L.T.H., and is a film review editor for the Journal of Critical Animal Studies. He emailed me in March of this year; he’d come to my blog wanting to hate it, but found himself appreciating some of my arguments, and hoped I would discuss veganism with him. I didn’t follow up on the email, but Adam got...
June 2011
11 posts
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Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and...
In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.” As you might have guessed from the title, the paper intended to show that a diet including ruminant animals fed on grass would kill fewer animals than a diet based purely on vegan agriculture. Davis wrote:
[A] vegan diet...
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Interview With a Vegan Paleontologist: "The Humane...
Robert, aka “The Humane Hominid”, is the vegan paleontologist behind PaleoVeganology, a blog that looks at the evolution of humans and animals, as well as the paleo diet movement, from an ethical vegan perspective.
Robert went vegetarian in high school “to impress a pretty girl,” and stayed that way for the animals. He has been vegan for six years. This didn’t stop...
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It's Easier to Tolerate Sinners in Christianity...
Despite the reputation that Christians have for being judgmental, the Christian view of non-believing sinners is potentially more forgiving than veganism’s. Christians want to save sinners from themselves, or from Satan, or, you could also say, from God’s overblown standards. Though Christians wouldn’t exactly put it this way, their conception of saving frames God as the brutal...
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Why Stun One But Shoot the Other? →
After seeing an agricultural scientist shove his arm into a fistulated cow, Marianne Thieme went vegan and founded Party for the Animals, a Dutch political party devoted to advancing animal welfare. They won two seats in Dutch parliament, which is now on the verge of passing Party for the Animals’ law to rescind the legal exemption allowing Jews and Muslims to kill animals for food without...
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Interview With an Animal Activist: Camille Marino
Camille Marino is the founder and Senior Editor of Negotiation is Over and is on the Advisors and Speakers Panel of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. NIO strives to be an instrument of defiance, disruption, disobedience, subversion, creative and aggressive grassroots action, and a catalyst for revolutionary change. NIO’s belief is that “Total liberation — human...
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Interview With a Vegan: Joshua Katcher
Joshua Katcher launched The Discerning Brute in 2008 as a resource for “Fashion, Food & Etiquette for the Ethically Handsome Man”. With a focus on sustainability, social justice and animal rights, Katcher deconstructs the mainstream understanding of masculinity and offers a vision of men that are protectors, defenders, and heroes for animals and the environment. His lecture...
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“Veganism is not hard; ever noticed how picky almost every person placing their...”
– Nil Zacharias, “The Inconvenience of Being Vegan”
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Mark Zuckerberg and the Annoyance of Non-Vegan...
If you saw a goat-shaped cloud in the sky recently, it might have been the soul of one of Mark Zuckerberg’s meals. The CEO of facebook and anti-hero of David Fincher’s The Social Network recently announced that he has already murdered a goat, a chicken, a pig and a lobster as part of a one-year plan to eat only animals he has snuffed out himself, in a quest to get in touch with the...
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Interview With an Ex-Adventist: Ronald L. Numbers
Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and of Religious Studies, and a member of the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught for over three and a half decades. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including, most recently, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and...
May 2011
5 posts
1 tag
“But if an individual felt it was necessary for the [vivisector] to be...”
– Nicoal Sheen, Negotiation Is Over
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James McWilliams Explains Why We Must Not Eat if... →
B.R. Myers is the most articulate anti-meat scold at The Atlantic, but James McWilliams is the most prolific. His recent contribution to the food debate, “Foodies vs. Darwin: How Meat Eaters Ignore Science,” starts off like a less interesting version of Myers’ “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” with finger wags aplenty at food writers who care more about gustatory...
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The Moral Schizophrenia of Farm Sanctuaries
A lot of us say that we like animals… and yet we gleefully eat their tortured, rotting corpses. I, for instance, think ducks are adorable, but this doesn’t stop me from eating duck tongue every chance I get. To animal rights philosopher Gary L. Francione, this makes me and most of the world “moral schizophrenics”. But perhaps meat eaters are not the only ones who need to...
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Why Bugs Annoy Vegans
Bugs are small, they get around, they like our food, we need them for their pollination skills and there are just so damn many of them. And because of all this, we are killing them constantly — especially in agriculture. Yet they meet the vegan qualifications for suffering consideration and rights.
This is a problem.
Recently I’ve seen a couple of vegan blogs criticizing...
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April 2011
8 posts
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The Survival Exemption: Great for Vegans Stranded...
Three major animal rights philosophers agree: it is okay to kill animals when you have no other form of sustenance.
None of this discussion is intended to suggest that people who need to kill animals in order to survive – people living in poverty who are struggling to get enough to feed themselves and their families, or those living a traditional hunting and gathering existence – should not do...