...can vegans eat shit? So long as the animals don't want it anymore?

I'm a great fan of Austen's writing and have read all of her work. This statement from the article strikes me as more than a bit self-righteous:

"Stuart has a pretty feeble grasp of literary matters: Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" was not a satire of the 18th-century obsession with hypersensitive "nerves,"

Since when must we adher to any one set interpretation of a novel? I don't see why Sense and Sensibility can't be refered to as a satire of nerves. Much of the novel is concerned with Marianne's lack of common sense--sensibility--and her subsequent illness based on her attachment to Willoughby.

Another of Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey, pokes fun at gothic novels. Sense and Sensibility does something similar, contrasting the two sisters' behavior when romantically disappointed.

Oh well. I suppose overly broad statements are a time-tried method of attracting readership.

Thants for those six paragraphs on how you don't want to debate your choice.

I want a big, fat juicy-ass steak with carrots and aspargus and some kind of potato preparation on the side. Mmmmm.... asparagus... screws with my pee, but whatever. Too bad I'm too broke to get that in a restaurant and too stupid/lazy/useless-in-the-kitchen-except-at-the-sink to be able to do it myself without making it a horrible inedible waste I wouldn't even feed to a homeless guy. Seriously, I can't even fry an egg properly so someone would want to consume it in even the most extreme circumstances.

Man, I'd kill for a really good steak right about now. Just point me at the cow.

I loves the meat, but still, I wouldn't touch a hot dog if you paid me. I have no idea what the hell is actually in those things.

Racoons and boots, probably.

I would put bologna in that camp, too.

Sorry that this post is completely nonsensical, but then so are most of the other posts in this discussion. It's funny how we're all so proud about what we choose to shove down our gullets so we won't die.

Aside from the moral/ethical implications of meat-eating vs. vegetarianism, there is hard evidence that eating a widely varied, whole-foods based diet low in animal protein PREVENTS MOST CANCERS.

Read THE CHINA STUDY to find out all the details for yourself, but for a quick preview of the findings, read on...

The China Study is the largest study of the correlation between nutrition and disease ever performed. It was carried out by Cornell, Oxford and a Chinese University. It followed 6500 Chinese villagers for 20 years to see what, if any, correlation there is between nutrition and disease. The results were overwhelming. In a nutshell, those people who consumed the most animal protein were the ones who came down with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, allergies, and that's all I can remember off the top of my head. The main culprit in causing cancer, it turns out, is casein. Casein is a (cow) milk protein. They did studies with lab rats where they infected the animals with cancer-causing agents. The rats who were fed a diet with a "normal" amount of dairy products developed cancer. The rats fed a low protein vegetarian diet did not. Then they experimented with feeding dairy/no dairy diets to the infected rats. When they were being fed the diet that included dairy products, the cancer grew. When they were being fed the vegetarian diet, the cancer stopped growing. Like flipping a switch, is how they described it.

As a result of these findings, the author, T. Colin Campbell, PhD, who started his life on a dairy farm, and grew up eating sausages, eggs and bacon for breakfast, has become a vegetarian, and he and his family are now moving in the direction of becoming vegan.

Lest you think that this is a book written by an "activist doctor", let me assure you that he was an establishment scientist for most of his career, working for 50 years in high level government positions. All of the health assertions in this book are backed up by laboratory evidence.

It's not wacky, out there, or unproven: eating your fruits and vegetables and limiting your animal protein consumption lowers your risk of cancer and heart disease MORE SUBSTANTIALLY THAN ANYTHING ELSE YOU CAN DO and increases the quality and length of your life. And those studies that say otherwise? Well, there is a very enlightening chapter in The China Study that covers just that subject. Let's just say that the governing interests behind the funders, designers, and publishers of studies determines what will be found by those studies.

that wasn't six paragraphs on how I don't want to debate my choice.

those were separate but related points regarding vegetarianism.

one point was that every vegetarian you encounter doesn't necessarily want to have a debate with you and listen to your (most likely) crappy reasons.

some of the other points had to do with why some of those often thrown around reasons are, in fact, crappy (e.g. that meat eating is 'natural').

I'm just saying, if you want to have an intelligent discussion about vegetarianism, don't build straw men out of arguments for vegetarianism, or think that simplistic arguments for meat-eating are going to convince anyone.

It seems strange that the majority of these letters -- ostensibly, responses to a book review, after all -- are as defensive and angry as they seem. Has anyone actually read the book? Thought about the actual history involved?

Okay, let me help out.

1. Tristan Stuart (and Laura Miller) are right: vegetarians historically have been associated with crankery and faddism, and have been at the very fringes of society for most of human history. But this changed for a while around the turn of the 20th century, when a remarkably well-conceived and more ethical strain of vegetarianism took root (at least in the big cities of the US and Europe, and no pun intended). The arguments of the people who advocated for this form of diet were logical, ethical, and intellectually sophisticated, and represented a significant change from the typically religious- or health-based rationales that Stuart documents.

2. The basic premise of these "ethical vegetarians" was the simple presumption that any worthwhile system of ethics must be applied consistently in order to have any moral weight. In other words, if it was wrong for humans to engage in the unnecessary enslavement, subjection to imperial domination, or killing of other humans -- who are, after all, just another form of animal life -- it was similarly wrong to subject any animals to these things. It was neither a full-fledged natural rights argument nor a purely utilitarian one, but rather a keen, self-conscious awareness that it was very difficult, from an ethical standpoint, to say with any authority that it was morally wrong for one group of humans to enslave and/or kill another group of humans, but perfectly defensible for a group of human animals to enslave and/or kill a group of non-human animals. It wasn't as much about advocating for the rights of animals, you could say, as demanding an end to what they saw as an especially pernicious form of human hypocrisy.

3. True to their desire to practice their ethics on the most consistent basis, most of these ethical vegetarians between roughly 1890 and 1920 or so were anti-imperialist, anti-war, and anti-capital punishment; they were also supporters of women's rights, prison reform, and workplace reform. Many were socialists, or at least leaned in that direction, while others were apolitical (and at least a few were self-described anarchists). But what most shared was a decidedly un-cranky and un-faddish devotion to progressive social policy and the betterment of life for both human *and* non-human animals. To them, a vegetarian diet was inseparable from their larger views on policy and reform and an extension of their ethical beliefs. The Humanitarian League, based in Britain, was probably the most eloquent platform for many of these people and their ideas during this time, and published essays by writers as diverse as Peter Kropotkin, J. Howard Moore, Clarence Darrow, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Salt, Edward Carpenter, and many others.

4. While this brand of ethical vegetarianism faded out after the period immediately following World War I, it was revived (rediscovered?) in the 1960s and 1970s, and many of its tenets were embraced and elaborated upon by a new generation of intellectuals and activists. Elements of both Peter Singer's utilitarian argument for animal rights and Tom Regan's natural rights argument have historical underpinnings in the earlier ethical vegetarian ethos.

5. Many of the reviews of Stuart's book -- and there have, indeed, been many -- seize on the oddball antics and clearly out-of-the-mainstream beliefs held by vegetarians prior to the end of the 19th century. It does make for interesting reading, I suppose, while simultaneously serving to assuage the consciences of meat-eaters through the process of marginalizing legitimate moral arguments in favor of vegetarianism by associating them with the more extreme examples of dietary faddism and oddball behavior prior to that time (or even after, like Stuart's inexplicable use of Adolph Hitler to illustrate 20th century vegetarianism). It should be pointed out, however, that a sound moral argument doesn't lose its impact simply because it has been misappropriated, misunderstood, or distorted by others. More than a few abolitionists in this country prior to 1860 were teetotalers or staunch advocates of the water cure or holders of other odd or even repellent ideas which have since been relegated to history's dustbin. But does that make the moral argument against slavery any less viable?

The point is, there are exceedingly solid arguments in favor of vegetarianism from an ethical perspective (which I think is somewhat apparent in both the angry defensiveness of carnivores and the holier-than-thou smugness of vegetarians themselves). Just because a demonstrable number of vegetarians have historically also been wackos, though, detracts neither from the import of these arguments nor the significance of their history.