Thinkpiece
Who’s the vegetarian?
Robin Downie
I hope that some readers of SR are vegetarians – if so I am sure you will recognise some of the experiences I have had – and as for you carnivores, I hope you will think about the arguments.
A common experience is what I shall call the ‘pariah’ experience. When I was in post as professor of moral philosophy I was sometimes invited to attend grand dinners, or sometimes after giving a lecture, I was a guest of honour at a dinner – ‘guest of honour’, that is, until it emerged that I was a vegetarian. The waiter would shout along the table: ‘Who’s the vegetarian?’, and I would guiltily raise my hand. All eyes would then turn on me, some with pity (like I had a nasty disease), some with aggression (like I was probably a communist, or perhaps a fascist, since Hitler was a vegetarian).
The aggressive ones (and this is another common experience) would want to catch me out on the grounds of inconsistency:
‘Do you wear leather shoes?’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘Do you drink cows milk?’
‘Yes.’
Then, said in triumph, ‘There you are!’
The accusation here is that a vegetarian is a phoney if he or she is inconsistent. I’ll come to that argument later.
A third experience takes place at the restaurant dinner. I choose ‘the vegetarian option’ and my lady companion chooses the red meat because she likes blood running down her chin. The waiter eventually arrives and dumps the red meat in front of me and the vegetarian option in front of the lady. A male friend of mine said it was easier to come out as gay than as a vegetarian. My final experience is that of the terrible dinner. I have been a dinner guest where what I was given was the same as everyone else, but minus the meat – ie I dined off carrots, broccoli and potatoes. In my experience the posher the restaurant or hotel the less likely it is to get a decent vegetarian option.
Turning from the experiences to the arguments I’ll start with the inconsistency charge. To be inconsistent is to profess a principle or policy and not stick to it. But most people have more than one principle in life. Mine is to try not to eat meat or fowl or fish, if possible. I’ll come shortly to the arguments for this principle. But suppose I am asked out to dinner and I have forgotten to tell my hostess that I am vegetarian, and she places a meat course in front of me. I shall certainly eat it.
Vegetarianism is only one of my principles; courtesy is another, and I would not want to embarrass my hostess and perhaps spoil the harmony of the dinner. (The poor animal is dead meat anyway, and cannot be resurrected by a principled stand.) There are certainly vegetarians who are much stricter than I am, but absolutism runs into problems here, as in other areas of life.
But why should one adopt a vegetarian principle at all? There are (at least) three good arguments. The first is a moral argument based on world food shortages. It is simply the case that more of the world’s population can be fed by using land to grow pulses than by using land to graze cattle. (And I’ll say nothing about the carbon emissions from millions of cows farting into the atmosphere.) The second is the humanitarian argument. Just visit a slaughter-house, or witness the factory farming of chickens, or the force-feeding of calves or turkeys. The third is the health argument. People eat more meat than is good for them.
Now these are three good arguments as far as they go (and of course they require to be considerably expanded) but they do not establish vegetarianism as an absolute principle. This doesn’t bother me because, as I indicated above, I don’t think the absolutist position on principles is defensible (pace the Pope). My position – on this at least – is similar to that of the late Alan Clark (he of the diaries). I recall Andrew Marr saying that as a young journalist he was given the job of interviewing Alan Clark and, making assumptions of a certain kind about him, he took him to Simpson’s, a famous steak house in London. To his horror Alan Clark said he was a vegetarian. Presumably the assumed red-blooded masculinity of Alan Clark came from eating nut roast. Anyway, Alan Clark said he would not object to eating a grouse or pheasant just shot out of the air. Not all vegetarians would agree with this, and of course we can’t all afford a bird just shot out of the air. But there is a valid point here about humane killing, if no more than that.
I hope I may have convinced some of you at least to cut down on meat-eating and to give up entirely on chicken, veal and turkey (which in any case tastes like cardboard flavoured with antibiotics).
Having written this piece I suddenly realise that I may be put on a police database as a dangerous animal activist.
Robin Downie is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University