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    How to Explain Why You're a Vegetarian to Your Dinner Guests
    How to Explain Why You're a Vegetarian to Your Dinner Guests
    How to Explain Why You're a Vegetarian to Your Dinner Guests
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    How to Explain Why You're a Vegetarian to Your Dinner Guests

    By John Tilston

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    About this ebook

    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.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateMay 12, 2004
    ISBN9781412223287
    How to Explain Why You're a Vegetarian to Your Dinner Guests
    Author

    John Tilston

    John Tilston has over 25 years’ experience writing for leading financial publications reporting on economies and stock markets from close quarters. He has worked as Melbourne Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review; Economics Editor for Business Day; and London-based Economics News Editor for Dow Jones Newswires. He has contributed to New York's Business Week; the London-based Investors' Chronicle; the Financial Mail in Johannesburg; The Sunday Times; and Finance Week. He is the author of four books, most recently: NIMBY! Aligning regional economic development practice to the realities of the 21st Century. Others are Meanjin to Brisvegas: Brisbane’s journey from colonial backwater to new world city; How to explain why you’re vegetarian to you dinner guests (published in Japan, 2004); and a work of historical fiction, Churchill’s Mole Hunt (novel) (2006)

    Read more from John Tilston

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      Book preview

      How to Explain Why You're a Vegetarian to Your Dinner Guests - John Tilston

      How to

      explain why

      you’re vegetarian

      to your dinner guests

      John Tilston

      ©

      Copyright 2004 John Tilston. All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

      A cataloguing record for this book that includes the U.S. Library of Congress Classification number, the Library of Congress Call number and the Dewey Decimal cataloguing code is available from the National Library of Canada. The complete cataloguing record can be obtained from the National Library’s online database at: www.nlc-bnc.ca/amicus/index-e.html

      ISBN: 1-4120-2735-7

      ISBN: 978-1-4122-2328-7 (eBook)

      Image294.JPG

      This book was published on-demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing.

      On-demand publishing is a unique process and service of making a book available for retail sale to the public taking advantage of on-demand manufacturing and Internet marketing. On-demand publishing includes promotions, retail sales, manufacturing, order fulfilment, accounting and collecting royalties on behalf of the author.

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      10 98765432

      Contents

      1 A Personal Journey

      2 Animals’ Effect On The Environment

      3 More Fishing Is Not The Answer

      4 What’s The Environment’s Future?

      5 Is It Healthy To Be Vegetarian?

      6 Animal Suffering And Ethical Life

      7 Research Challenges Old Beliefs

      8 Fringe Dwellers

      9 Journey’s End?

      A Note On Sources

      For Jared and Sam,

      Jackie and Mo.

      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

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