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From The Times April 4, 2009 Do a pig a favour! Ban vegetarianism now! People who don't eat meat are not just pale, boring, vain and flaky. They are also suffering from an eating disorder Giles Coren
A report published this week in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association appears to show that teenagers and young adults are more likely to suffer from eating disorders if they have tried being vegetarian.
And I'm, like, “duh!” (I'm like that because that is how American teenagers talk, you understand, and I want them to understand what I am about to say). And the reason that I am, as I say, like, “duh!” is that vegetarians are more likely to suffer from eating disorders because vegetarianism is an eating disorder.
It's a better eating disorder than many others, because at least it doesn't make you fat, and in general it doesn't cause you to wither away and die. But it does make you pale, and flaky, and unbelievably tedious to be around.
Vegetarianism is a cry for help. A sadly transparent attempt to exercise control over your body, which you feel the need to do for psychological reasons of which you are probably unaware. It's why so many vegetarians have tattoos and exotic piercings (you know it's true). It's why anarchists, squatters, G20 protesters and art students are usually vegetarians. Frustrated that they cannot, and never will, control the world, or anything else of any significance, they starve themselves and carve holes in their bodies. It's as primitive a lifestyle as there is. It's why the very oldest religions eschew meat altogether, and others eschew some forms of it - because one exercises what control one can in the shadow of a mighty God with miserable little gestures of abstinence.
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“Don't mind me,” they say when they come to your house for lunch. “I'll just have the vegetables.” And you think: “It's immaterial to me what you put in your mouth, darling, because I can tell from the state of you that you're going to be in my downstairs bog with your fingers down your throat in half an hour, spraying whatever you've pecked at all over the Armitage Shanks.”
It's the same with all these bogus wheat allergies and dairy intolerances - codswallop the lot of them. Just a way of not having to say: “I'm on a diet so that I will look nicer and people will fancy me.” Vegetarians never love food. They merely tolerate it.
I absolutely concur with the notion that we in the developed world eat too much meat. We absolutely do. Current meat consumption levels are unhealthy for the people and a drain on the planet's resources. The neo-Malthusian projection that says there is not enough land to feed the nine billion people who will be living here by 2020 unless most of the meat-producing land is turned over to vegetable crops (or something) is probably not too wide of the mark.
So the thing to do is to eat less meat, not none. You don't make meat a moral issue and campaign to end it. You just lay off it a bit. That way there will be plenty to go round, the land will be able to yield its bounty much more efficiently (after all, without cow crap to nourish the soil, how are your precious carrots going to grow all big and juicy?), nobody will have to die of heart disease and we'll all be able to scoff a juicy steak from time to time.
Meat is not something to be eradicated, like cancer. Its total destruction is not a moral imperative for the human race. Nor is meat something with absolutely no visible function whose continued existence is a baffling mystery, like wasps or men's nipples or television chefs. Meat tastes good. It carries vitamins and minerals with a unique efficiency that is critical to the maintenance of a healthy life. And it gives pigs, quite literally, a reason to live.
To eat no meat at all is to take an extreme position in an area where extremism is not called for. People always say “Hitler was a vegetarian”, as if that were some sort of paradox, some sort of surprise. Well it isn't to me. He was a vegetarian because he was an extremist. He was incapable of doing things by halves. Annoyed that the banking system in Weimar Germany was largely controlled by Jews (as it certainly was), he might well have proposed a programme to make banking more attractive to gentiles, offered some economics scholarships to giant Bavarian pork-munchers, dragged some idle Christian dimbos out of the beer halls and taught them to count... but he didn't, he decided to kill every Jew in Europe.
In exactly the same way, had he been a more even-tempered man, he might well have reacted to the meat-heavy traditional German diet (which presumably didn't agree with him) by simply ladling more sauerkraut onto his plate and holding back on the wurst, by eating a bit of salad occasionally, and by not having ham for breakfast. But no. He was an extremist. He had to eat NO! MEAT! EVER! AGAIN!
The ideological road from nut cutlets to Belsen is straight, and short.