Vegetarians come in more than
Vegetarians come in more than half a dozen flavors, from sproutarians to pesco-pollo-vegetarians. The most notorious are the vegan (rhymes with intriguin' or fatiguin') vegetarians. The Green Party of the movement, vegans decline to consume, use or wear any animal products. They also avoid honey, since its production demands the oppression of worker bees. TV's favorite vegetarian, the cartoon 8-year-old Lisa Simpson, once had a crush on a fellow who described himself as "a Level Five vegan - I don't eat anything that casts a shadow."
Time magazine discovers vegetarianism.
Comments
Just for the record, I imagine most intelligent vegans aren't opposed to the oppression of bees, as to the methods used in factory farming bees.
Most of the large honey producers find that its simpler to simply kill off a hive as part of extracting the honey, then nuture it for the several years of productive life a queen will have.
This all has historical precedent, as there was really no way to extract honey from those cute straw hives that people used before the modern hive was invented, without destroying them.
And most bee populations other then honey bees die back to just the queen each season anyways.
Perhaps most damming is that the mass commercial farmers have been found to be culpable in the spread of the mites that have wiped out the wild honey bee population.
Posted by: kellan | July 8, 2002 5:02 PM
I know and respect plenty of "intelligent" vegans who do eat honey and plenty who do not. I see your point about the relative suffering of bees, but it's still a violent, exploitative interjection in the "natural order of things."
Personally I do eat honey - but rarely, because of the mess I invariably make.
Posted by: david | July 8, 2002 5:30 PM
"This is one reason that vegetarians, in a study of overall nutrition, scored significantly lower than nonvegetarians on the USDA's Healthy Eating Index, which compares actual diet with USDA guidelines."
It's quotes like these that piss me off. So, without having any background on the "usda guidelines" (for instance, the cattle and dairy industry involvement in creating the guidelines) one would be led to believe that this is a horribly unhealthy lifestyle.
Ummm...and I guess that's the whole point, isn't it. Pretty sneaky.
I also loved the really sensationalistic child abuse anecdote. Yes, all of us vegetarians starve our children to death because of our wacko delusions of healthy eating.
nyeesh. The scary thing is that most people fall for that bullshit.
Posted by: drublood | July 9, 2002 4:20 PM
I'm late on this one, but it's worth noting (I thought as I read last week's NYT mag cover story) that all the vegetarians I know are healthy and hearty, and very few are overweight. I cannot say the same for my carnivorous friends. I think it might be because vegetarians pay more attention to what they eat.
(I'm a vegetarian + sustainable sushi, where I can find it.)
Posted by: judlew | July 18, 2002 2:20 AM