Well, I certainly feel like I’ve learned a lot about why vegetarians give up meat. While I may not agree with everything they have to say (and certainly don’t plan on becoming a vegetarian anytime soon) I can certainly understand why they feel the way they do. I feel the best way to describe vegetarianism would be to compare it to a boycott of meat. By boycotting meat, vegetarians are trying to get the government and agribusiness to change their ways, to encourage human and animal rights. Unfortunately, I really don’t see this as the best way to get people involved in their cause. Efforts to spread the word about the abuses the meat industry makes get lost in the hard-line “don’t eat meat” message. At the same time, however, it’s hard to change an industry when you keep buying their product; if you continue to buy their product, you’re still supporting them!
Anyways, I’ve learned that vegetarians aren’t just crazy fanatics trying to recruit people into some kind of cult. They have a very clear and honorable political goal: they want to save animals, the environment, and ourselves from a reckless industry that cares nothing for their consumers as long as they continue to make money. They have a huge obstacle to overcome, however: meat is part of our cultural heritage; meat defines what being American is all about (hamburgers and hot dogs, anyone?). As long as PETA continues to challenge this staple of American culture, I doubt they will see the major changes they are looking for.
4 comments:
Hey, I am so glad that I got a chance to read your blog. I love hearing other people’s thoughts on meat eating and the lack thereof (lack of eating meat, not thought). I thoroughly enjoyed seeing your perspective as a meat eater and your take on the vegetarian. I myself currently eat meat, but fairly irregularly. As a past vegetarian, I saw a few discrepancies with the “vegetarians” that you wrote your blog about. PETA has always been a place of activists and soap-box-vegetarians; getting information to start there was great, but I felt that other, quieter vegetarians and vegans went unrepresented. Like I said, PETA is a place for “go-getters,” the type of people who will look at your plate and make comments like “your eating the carcass of a dead cow,” or “do you know how many people and animals suffered for that burger?” The other type is the veggie that chooses not to eat meat for their own reasons, not a political campaign to get the world to stop eating meat. There are many good reasons to have less meat in your diet. Many people believe that it is more health to eat no meat (including fish ect.), and, partly, it is, but mostly, its not. Humans evolved to eat meat; it was a staple of our diet as a developing race. Food was gathered from plants, and food was hunted and we ate meat on a less scheduled basis dependant on the availability of game. Our bodies require many proteins that are not easily acquired from plants and some that are not present like B12 that cannot be gained unless one were to get an injection or take supplements (which certainly were not around several thousand years ago). So our bodies were actually made to eat meat, believe it or not. (Part of the reason I cannot be a vegetarian, because I get severely deficient without proper meat and my body rejects the fake proteins in soy. A veggie trapped in a meat eater’s body.) But I digress, I felt that many vegetarians don’t act the same and cannot be pigeon holed.
Overall, your blog hit many of the essential points to looking at a cultural practice though I think for an anthropologist a wider variety of sources should be consulted, to get a full look at this cultural practice. Thank you for posting so we al can read your blog.
I must say, when I first started reading your blog, I feel that you were only looking at how you could disprove the ideas PETA made rather than trying to understand why people choose to live a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. The whole time you were proving why eating meat makes sense and not why being a vegetarian or vegan makes sense for sense for those who choose that lifestyle. It is ok for you to not be a vegetarian/vegan but I felt you were harsh and weren’t looking at why being a vegetarian/vegan (V/V) makes sense in their life and is a meaningful design of living. For example, you mention in your blog that pigs are deemed “filthy” in society and therefore ok to eat. That is one viewpoint but obviously V/V don’t feel this why. I think you would have been able to engage better in this cultural encounter if you maybe discussed that even though it is normal within society to think of a pig as food and not a dog, why is it that V/V feel this isn’t so? Clearly they view animals differently. I think exploring that would have been a better way to understand the internal logistics and practice of this cultural site. Then, as I continued reading, I say that you were taking the blog in a better direction that meets the requirements of the assignment. It was great how you included the course material on structural violence, it really flowed in nicely and relates well with that article. One thing I wish you did discuss would be how some religions require a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle. That could have also tied into the class with the spirituality and religion section. Overall, it was nice to see the progressive you made. I think this blog is a good example of how we can take something we don’t understand culturally and use the “anthropology glasses” to separate our own thoughts and beliefs that prevent us from understanding why that cultural practice makes sense in the lives of those who practice it. This blog also demonstrates that it is hard to do this.
Your blog was very interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First of all I am a vegetarian so it was interesting to see a meat eaters perspective on vegetarians. At first I was not impressed with the way that you went about trying to understand vegetarians. I think that you were right that you went through a bit of “culture shock” when first learning about why people become vegetarians. I also agree with David, that you could have looked at other types of vegetarians, like me who are not crazy people who want to make the whole world convert to vegetarianism like PETA. It is important to realize that some people just don’t agree with meat eating and keep to themselves about it and respect those who do eat meat.
I was, however, impressed with the second part of your blog when you had a “realization”. I too had a similar moment when writing my blog when I realized why people in the culture I was investigating do the things they do. This is the whole point of the cross cultural blog. You don’t have to go into your kitchen and throw away all the meat in your fridge but the point is to understand without being bias why people who are different from you do these things. I think that you met the requirements of the assignment by changing the way you saw vegetarians and recognizing your initial hostility as culture shock. Good Job!
I found this blog interesting for several reasons. First of all, you did a good job of tying in concepts learned from class, even ones that I initially would not have expected. I did not realize that structural violence still existed towards workers in the meatpacking industry of America, and before reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” this summer, I had not really thought about how much control the government has over what I eat. This makes vegetarianism even more than a lifestyle choice… it is almost more of a political stance. I agreed also with your post concerning culture shock; at the beginning of the blog you seemed to be quite critical towards vegetarianism, but then again the purpose of this exercise was to pick a topic or lifestyle we found disturbing or weird. I think your learning process became clear as the exercise went along and by the end you seemed to have a better understanding about why vegetarians choose their lifestyle. I can somewhat sympathize with your initial fear that vegetarians were trying to “undermine your beliefs” – one of my best friends is the type of vegetarian who goes through life stocked with pictures of chicken fetuses and rotting carcasses, which have more than once made it impossible for me to eat my dinner (which I assume was her purpose). Many vegetarians aren’t like this at all, however, and I agree with the other comments that you probably got a somewhat biased view from PETA.
Just a little note on the thing about pets… my mother used to have a pet chicken. There are a lot of unlikely animals that can prove to be very good pets. In addition, there are many cultures where dogs and cats are used as food.
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