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How To Explain Why You're A Vegetarian To Your Dinner Guests

by John Tilston

100 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0563; ISBN 1-4120-2735-7; US$14.00, C$16.60, EUR11.50, £8.00

Vegetarians get a grilling from people they meet about why they don't eat meat. In this thoroughly researched investigation interlaced with personal experience, journalist John Tilston lucidly explains their case.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

Journalist John Tilston often got tongue tied when trying to explain to dinner guests why he was vegetarian. He decided he'd better find out whether his gut feelings about vegetarianism were right, so he embarked on an exploration of the reasons for not eating meat and whether they stacked up.

He casts his eye over the environmental, health and ethical reasons most often cited by vegetarians as reasons for not eating meat, and he sprinkles the exploration with personal experiences and anecdotes about his life as a vegetarian.

The result is a concise investigation and report into the rational reasons for being vegetarian. The author found that recent research has cleared up debates in many of the previously contentious areas and he has validated some of the latest scientific results by relating them to his own experiences of vegetarianism. He finds that there are sound reasons for not eating meat and that there is irrefutable evidence that most vegetarians are healthy.

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About the Author

John Tilston is financial journalist and economist who has worked for some of the world's leading media, including Dow Jones Newswires, the Australian Financial Review, the Sunday Times and Business Day, over a 25 year career. He now lives in Brisbane, Australia, where he works as a freelance writer, and on his next book.

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Excerpts

from Chapter 1 A Personal Journey

Ten years ago my wife announced she was going vegetarian and though she wasn't forcing the family to join her, there were likely to be some spill over effects on us as she was doing most of the cooking.

We were not unduly concerned. Our youngest son Jared, ten at the time, had long asked at the dinner table about the antecedents of the meal.

"What part of the cow does this come from, Mum?" was a frequent question.

The answers didn't provide him with any comfort and he had become vegetarian by inclination.

The rest of us had not given it much thought up to then. We had lived in Southern Africa and Australia, both regions notable for heavy meat consumption, including at barbeques, the scene of much male bonding as the intricacies of cooking meat over open flames were discussed at some length.

I think Jared's persistence had started Sheila questioning her own approach to food. He was, after all, innocent and unsullied by culinary traditions. Perhaps he provided a glimpse of man's natural inclination, not yet indoctrinated by conventional wisdom. A sudden and unexpected halt in her career had provided the opportunity to launch into what proved, surprisingly, a major emotional experience.

I do not wish to give the impression that I was an unwilling participant in this family experiment. I wasn't. I just had not thought about it much up to then - not much of an excuse really.

Ten years later I am a committed vegetarian. Though there are still things I am learning and adjustments I am making. I do not feel I have lost anything or that I have had to make tough choices. But the first year or so was strange. Meals seemed incomplete.

One thing above all else has amazed me during this journey of ours. It is the vehemence of many people's opposition to vegetarianism. I had not realized it was such an emotional issue. I didn't expect people to respond with thinly veiled anger. It seemed we were posing a threat to something they held dear. It was difficult to hold rational discussion. We were interrogated, and under metaphorical arc lights.

Most amazingly, if any chink in our armour was detected - that we wore leather shoes, that very occasionally, out of politeness to a host, we had had eaten some fish - our commitment was questioned. It was like having proved we were lapsed Christians.

Men would metaphorically nudge and wink at me, suggesting Sheila had dragged me into this, and for the sake of a quiet life, I'd gone along with it. I found this particularly annoying, occasionally offensive. It was a smudge on my character. But lurking not far below the surface is an assumption that meat eating is vital in supporting virility. Real men eat meat. Until the past couple of years or so there has been so little open discussion about consciously eating meat, so little about it in the media that is saturated with cooking advice, that one begins to suspect a conspiracy.

A few years ago, Sheila and I were at a dinner party in the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon. We did not know the hosts very well and so, not unnaturally, the subject of our vegetarianism came up. The host was not doing a very good job of hiding his derision, though the hostess showed what seemed more like genuine interest, if only from the challenges posed to setting menus.

I defended my vegetarianism in vague and wishy-washy terms. To the host's aggressively posed question about why I was vegetarian, I retreated behind a sort of mumbled, diffident response about my health.

I found out later rather forcibly from Sheila that she was incensed by my whimpering display. It made it look like she had dragged me into it, she said. She said that if I was willingly vegetarian, I should have the backbone to defend it vigorously. This posed a dilemma. Yes, I was a willing vegetarian, but I had difficulty defending my position because I was unsure of my ground. I needed to find out more. First comes the emotional commitment, then understanding.

So this book has been a personal investigation into whether the arguments for vegetarianism stack up; about seeing from a number of perspectives whether it's worth not eating meat and if there are any sort of risks involved. I have set out to sort the fact from the fiction. There is now a great deal of good research about our eating habits and their impact but there is also a mountain of bogus or half-baked "tips" that finds it's way into newspapers, magazines and television.

I have worked as an economist and a financial journalist, which is what I currently do in my day job. Both of these jobs have mostly involved investigation of other people's research and reaching some sort of conclusion on the balance of evidence - a sort of one-man jury on issues.

Maybe this lack of what most people would see as real work and making a living off the sweat of others is what makes both professions so unpopular. The advantage of this approach is that I've learned over the years not to come to a research project with preconceived views or prejudices. It is salutary how often these would have been wrong had I allowed them into my baggage.

For this small book, I have adopted the same approach. Although at the outset I was and today remain a vegetarian, I set out to find out whether this is sensible. If it turned out not to be, I would have wanted to know how to modify my lifestyle. This was not an academic exercise for me because I was looking into things that had a major impact on my well-being. And I will be using it at my next dinner party, if the host can bear to cook for a vegetarian.

A word of caution: the early stages of this journey can seem depressing. I started off wading through a steady stream of sad and distressing predictions of doom and gloom that seem to have become part of our daily media diet. This was affecting me and I started to see myself only as the messenger of bad news, even though I am by nature optimistic about the human condition and our collective ability to sort out our problems. The idea that being a vegetarian was a personal sacrifice, that it was my part in "Saving the World", was starting to develop in my mind. It is a rather sanctimonious, holier-than-thou attitude that I find insufferable in others.

I gradually emerged from that phase, thankfully. It would have been a sad cross to bear in life. The deeper into research I got, the better I was able to see past bogus problems and plain scare mongering. And then the news got better, especially with regard to health. I invite you to take this journey with me.

And now I can talk with confidence at dinner parties about being vegetarian, and I can throw facts and research around with gay abandon.

from Chapter 2 Animals' Effect on the Environment

Like many people, I reckoned that as the human race had been eating meat for thousands of years, it was possible that the voices raised about the damage to the environment lacked hard evidence. Maybe they were those of the disaffected Left, in the political sense; people who are driven to causes and who want to attack capitalism as the root of all evil. In the past many would have been communists but they now seek other bastions for their disaffection. But the doomsayers have a long and not particularly glorious history.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has reported that since 1995 over one billion fish have been killed from manure runoff in estuaries and coastal areas in North Carolina and the Maryland and Virginia tributaries leading into the Chesapeake Bay. These deaths can be directly related to the 10 million pigs being raised in North Carolina and the 620 million chickens on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

from Chapter 5 Is it healthy to be vegetarian?

My late, carnivorous father-in-law once asked me whether I was healthier as a vegetarian.

"How would I know", I said. "I can't compare with what might have been".

"Well, do you have as many colds as you used to?" he asked.

Actually, I don't. And suddenly, I realised that I was healthier as a vegetarian. Up to that point the health benefits of a plant-based diet had seemed to me to be convincing but theoretical. Up to that point I comforted myself with the belief that I was healthier than I would have been had I kept eating so much meat.

Since time began people have adapted to a wide range of naturally growing foods, but during the period we know as prehistory the types of food and the mix of nutrients (in terms of carbohydrates, fats and proteins) remained pretty much unchanged. At the same time, archaeologists tell us, the availability of food was variable and people often starved.

The agricultural revolution that started 10 000 years ago brought profound changes. Our distant ancestors developed the ability to grow and store food. During the industrial revolution, which started 200 years ago and is still underway, more recent ancestors, and now contemporaries, have made radical changes in the way food is produced, processed, stored and distributed.

from Chapter 6 Animal suffering and ethical life

The Stepford Lives of Brittany

The bucolic French province of Brittany is striking. The coastline is spectacular. The Atlantic crashes into a ragged, rocky coast. The countryside is green and appealing. Most of it has a human scale. The view around every twist and turn in the roads lulls you into feeling a walk to the next hill would be an entirely pleasurable experience. The country lanes are easily navigable; there are no traffic snarl ups. The verges of the lanes are tidy, neatly kept. Occasionally you see apparently contented animals, in very good condition, grazing in the fields.

The towns - Pontivy, St Brieuc, Landerneau and others - and villages are for the most part elegant and habitable. It is easy to find parking and wonder through the malls largely free of cars. The shops are full of elegant clothes. The wares on display are mostly inexpensive. The people in the streets are relaxed and friendly, though reserved. They are well dressed and look comfortably off, or at least not poor. And the bars, cafes and restaurants are comfortable and friendly, though the menus for vegetarians are very limited. Bacon seems to come with most dishes, even crepes, a regional specialty.

Everywhere is clean. The air is clear. There's no litter in the countryside, villages or towns. Pavements are not dirty, people don't spit in the streets, there's very little graffiti.

It is not a place under any apparent threat from the modern world.

Is this as close as you can get to heaven on Earth? Have the people of Brittany worked out how to organize their society for pleasant living?

Well, maybe.

There are two things wrong in this modern day Utopia, much as there was in the John Wyndham science fiction classic The Stepford Wives.

After a short while, it becomes very boring. There is no tension in this life. No frisson. People are not so much relaxed as soporific. Still one has to accept that the Bretons may not consider this a problem. Indeed they may not even identify the blandness as an issue. Maybe it's bland in heaven too. The second problem is not so easily dismissed. The Bretagne Utopia is built on factory farming.

from Chapter 7 Research challenges old beliefs

In very recent times some of the fast food companies - including McDonalds, Burger King and KFC - have sponsored some interesting research that is expanding our understanding of animals. They have financed research into the emotional, mental and behavioural states of our fellow beings. What they are finding is beginning to change our perception of animals. They are more like us than we ever believed.

Ethical debate

Mostly, I thought compassion was an emotional response until I read modern day philosopher Peter Singer on living an ethical life. I learned from him that living ethically is important for society and for a personal sense of psychological well being.

Singer, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and active, but non-violent animal liberationist has written extensively on what our ethical position in regard to animals should be. He argues that all animals are equal and that the principle on which human equality rests requires us to extend equal consideration to animals too.

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Catalogue Information