Shooting Mock Fish In A Barrel
by tristero
I'm a vegetarian. I suppose I'm supposed to be horrified by this rant, but I'm not. Just the opposite. I think he's essentially right.
All diets are arbitrarily constrained. Many Americans eat cows but are repulsed by the thought of eating a cat or a dog or a gerbil. Some folks in the South love squirrel. The French love snails and frog legs. Icelanders consume rotted shark. I know some people who did volunteer work in Africa villages and came back raving about the taste of honey ants and grasshoppers (for some reason, they both drew the line at eating cockroaches; I can't imagine why).
There's really no reason not to eat any of these things other than cultural familiarity. To quote W.C. Fields, somewhat out of context, properly cooked, they're delicious.
Likewise, a vegetarian diet is more of the same. It is not logical, or especially healthy,* nor is it moral. Like all other diets, it arbitrarily permits and limits certain foods and food groups. That is all it is. It's most certainly not an opportunity to feel holier than thou and preach to the unenlightened. It is a discipline.
Now, most folks think of limitations as restrictions on freedom. But limitations can empower creativity.** What I like about being vegetarian is that it requires me to come up with interesting and tasty meals, either ones I eat in restaurants or ones that I've recently learned to make myself. It may seem paradoxical, but after becoming vegetarian some 30 years ago, my willingness to eat diverse foods dramatically increased. Jerusalem artichokes, celery root, seitan, quinoa, strange unpronounceably-named gnarly tubers that look like the eggs of a monster from the planet Gnortfth... totally awesome. I probably never would have bothered to find out about these great foods if I could have easily popped a burger into my face. Nor would I have explored vegetarian cuisines like India's, one of the great achievements of humanity, up there with the works of Bach, Finnish sauna, or Gnawa drumming.
I understand the moral arguments for not eating meat, and some of them are ones I very much agree with on an emotional level. But the only compelling ones, ie, the ones that pass the test of reason for me, are ecological. Meat produced in the vast quantities and in the manner it is made in the modern world is a direct contributor to global warming/climate change. It simply has to stop, and eventually it will, or we will burger ourselves to death. And Ruhlman is absolutely right:Wake up! It’s not about the ducks and the lobsters. It’s about the corn and the oil. About big business and powerful lobbying in DC. They want your money and that’s all they want. They want your money and you can give it to them or withhold it. Make good choices about what you buy and what you eat and what you feed your kids.
I fully agree. Where Ruhlman and I part company is this:
Loquacious and moral vegetarians may annoy him (and even me, sometimes), but they have zero power. Ruhlman's efforts, as well as the efforts of all the gods he invokes - Bourdain, Rachael Ray (!), Steingarten, Emeril - would be far better utilized by focusing like a microwave beam (do microwaves beam? do they focus? well, you get the idea) on Big Ag, not by complaining about some powerless veggie's latest moralistic rhetoric. I sincerely doubt that the occasional excess, even from a Times critic, obscures or deflects the attention of anyone serious about food issues from the real problem.
By the way, Michael Ruhlman is a good guy (at least about food! I have no idea what his politics are but I can't imagine he's anything but a liberal). He's the author, among other things of Ratio, a terrific book if you are new to cooking but no longer a rank beginner. It provides you with a bunch of basic proportions for common foods - bread, pasta, stock, custards - and then says, basically, improvise from there, put whatever you want in that bread once you know the proper proportion of flour to water to salt, experiment.
Come to think of it, cooking from ratios is the food analog to how music gets written, so naturally I'd be drawn to it. (grin)
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*A mostly vegetarian diet is very healthy. But a diet consisting entirely of non-animal products requires the vegetarian to think very carefully about adequate sources of protein as well as iron and other things. You can, and people do, get very sick from a vegetarian diet. Obviously, that is no reason not to maintain one if you behave responsibly.
**Cue some idiot to opine, "So, are you suggesting that totalitarianism is good for creativity?" Sigh.