Another Vegetarian Leaves the Dark Side, Almost

George Dvorsky has started to eat meat. He pretty much had to, it seems, because his vegetarian diet was failing him. Dvorsky was an ethical vegetarian, the judgmental kind, who declared that carnivores were bad people. Now along with eating meat, Dvorsky has to eat his words.

I was a vegetarian for 20 years, myself. But I did it for reasons that I connected with health – the fear of hormones and insecticides and whatever mystery additives that were put into cattle and meat. For awhile I read a magazine called Vegetarian Times, which turned out to be an animal rights advocacy rag rather than much of a help with putting together a healthy diet. I slowly realized that the knowledge of human nutrition is far from complete, and that humans are far from regular, production-line units with the same nutritional requirements.

The psychology of vegetarianism is similar, it appeared to me finally, to that of Atheo-Leftist elitism. It sets a person (human person) apart from those indiscriminant eaters who ingest who-knows-what. And the apartness easily becomes an aboveness, a moral position of presumed superior ethical intuitions. So it is difficult to be a vegetarian merely for health reasons; self-righteousness is a common side effect.

The diet itself is not without hazards. In order to ingest a complete protein, for example, both a grain and a legume must be combined: neither has the sufficient complement of amino acids to form a complete protein. Also there is a tendency to become enamored of “organic” foods, which are biohazards themselves. And if one travels, it is frequently not possible to get a vegetarian meal that is not just lettuce and a tomato. And if one has a tendency to buy into the unsubstantiated claims surrounding the mysterious additives in meat, then one is also vulnerable to the unsubstantiated claims of homeopaths and outright frauds.

The concern about additives in meat is without empirical evidence in its support. All additivies, including insectides, come with a withdrawal period, which is a period during which the animal is not to be harvested. After the period is over, the substance is known to be dissipated from the animal’s tissue.

Not to use the insecticides or, when necessary, the antibiotics to treat illness is, in my estimation, animal cruelty. Pastured animals cannot help but attract blood sucking insects, usually by the thousands unless controlled. And they ingest larval-stage internal parasites which are resident on the plants they eat.

When I had time to look into it, I found no reasonable empirical findings to support the concerns about the safety of meat. So I finally became a rarity: an ex-long time vegetarian who now raises beef cattle.

Dvorsky still has elitist ethical standards. After all, he is a professional bioethicist (well, everyone is a bioethicist). His sniffing about the superiority of “animal persons” which are grass fed until harvest is a moral fallacy predicated on the misconception that animals are mistreated in feedlots. A feedlot is no more immoral than people living in close proximity in concrete jungles called cities. Feedlots are scraped clean, the dust hosed down, protection from the elements is provided where necessary, the diets are optimal, health is monitored several times a day and ill animals receive immediate healthcare. Healthy, calm animals are profitable; mistreated animals are not.

I think that the fallacy of professional bioethics is demonstrated in this one single column. Here a human who calls animals “persons” has previously called meat eaters “bad people”. But having discovered, finally and on a personal health basis, that not eating meat is dilatory to human health, he inverts his prior condemnations into necessary truths. And even while doing so, he continues to promote his new gustatory victims as persons. It is almost as if he endorses cannibalism as a human necessity.

What this episode decorates is that ethicists of the bio-type do not have any special insight into morality which is in any way superior to the common sense of the general population. So for them to preach to the general population comes not from special insight, it comes from something else – the eliteness they feel, and the presumed entitlement to preach which comes from that eliteness.

ADDENDUM:
The obesity epidemic today is likely caused by overconsumption of sugar, corn syrup, and corn and vegetable oils used in frying... all of which are vegetables and legitimate on a vegetarian diet. It is unlikely that one gets to 300 or 400 lbs by overeating meat.