So . . . I'm a carnivore. I have no qualms about eating the roasted flesh of animal carcasses. No moral dilemma, no health concern, just a love of meat. I know that not everyone feels this way, and this was brought to the top of my mind recently. I was walking the halls at the university and passed a display set up designed to convert people to vegetarianism (or veganism). I also overheard a snippet of conversation between the people manning the booth and a passerby. And as I am in the habit of writing blog posts about an overheard sentence that came to me out of context, here we are. More about cows, people, and how they juxtapose after the jump.
I'm not going to write about whether someone should become a vegetarian or not; nor will I be writing in defense of my own veal-eating ways. My topic today is how people execute their belief system and the rationlizations they engage in.
So I'm passing this display, where there's a geeky-looking guy in a cow costume (it is my sense that he would be geeky even without the costume). If that wasn't enough to turn me off, there's pictures of tortured animals on the boad - not something I want to see. I understand what they're going for, but with that kind of display they're probably only going to get the previously-converted. Anyway, here is what I overheard from the booth:
Passerby: "Yeah, even if you order a veggie burger, it's still being cooked on the same grill as the meat, so there might be a tiny bit of meat on it."
Clearly, this is the basis for an extended treatise on person lifestyle choices. Sarcasm aside, it got me thinking. Depending on your reason for avoid meat, the veggie burger picks up a molecule of meat during grilling could matter a whole lot or not at all. If you avoid meat for religious reasons (only eating kosher/halal meat, Hinduism, etc.), that molecule is very important; it is equivalent to eating a whole steak. If you just don't like the taste or texture of meat, it doesn't matter at all. If you are allergic to meat (are people allergic to meat? Poor them!), there could be potentially fatal consequences.
But if you do not eat meat for so-called moral reasons (e.g. you are against the mass slaughter of animals for our delicious consumption) the question becomes more complicated. Presumably the veggie burger is ordered so there is no additonal demand for meat and hence no animal is killed (to my mind a fallacy, but let's stick with it). Therefore, the half-gram of meat that may end up on the veggie burger is inconsequential, because the vegetarian did not create meat-demand in the process. Hence my puzzlement at the passerby's indignation.
But it does make me wonder why a vegetarian would purchase anything at a restaurant that even serves meat, because their food dollar goes towards the purchase of meat for other customers. So really vegetarians should not be placing themselves in this situation in the first place.
Instead, what happens is that people rationalize their choice and narrow their focus. If I don't eat meat, that's one less burger's worth of cow that is killed. I love animals and don't want to eat them, but I love going to Harvey's with my friends more, so I'll get the veggie burger. Just as long as there is not a speck of meat on it.
If you truly want to stop the mistreatment of succulent veal, don't patronize any business that sells meat in any form. Which is probably pretty difficult to do (vegetarian grocery stores?). And I'm not saying that some animals are killed needlessly for their meat. And if you want to convert people to the cause, don't dress up as a cow - it just makes you look silly.
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