Bravo for a honest non-vegetarian

Great article for those moderate meat-eaters among us. Required reading for those who want to challenge the sanctimony of some vegetarians.

Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even--dare we say it--to improve nature as well.

Besides, humans are already sovereign--the trouble is that most of them don't realize it or, for political reasons, refuse to acknowledge it, maintaining instead that real sovereignty lies with God, nature or the free market. But real-life experience tells us otherwise. Since vegetarians began warning in the eighteenth century that the earth would run out of food unless everyone immediately shifted to potatoes and grain, the global population has more than sextupled, global per capita income has increased nearly tenfold even when inflation is taken into account, while consumption of meat, poultry and seafood has risen as well, up 37 percent in the United States since 1909 and even more strongly in less developed portions of the world. More people are living better and eating more richly than anyone in the 1700s would have thought possible. Regardless of whether they are consuming more meat and poultry than is good for them, it is yet another reminder, as if any more were needed, of how thoroughly Malthusian myths about limits to human productivity have been shattered.

Scarcity no longer serves as an argument for vegetarianism, and neither, for that matter, does health, since we know from studies of Okinawan centenarians and others that small amounts of meat and dark-fleshed fish are good for you; that moderate amounts of alcohol (which vegetarians for some reason appear to avoid) is good for you as well; and that plenty of exercise, a sense of well-being that comes from a strong social structure and, of course, universal healthcare are equally essential.

So the next time you tuck into a plate of tagliatelle Bolognese, a leg of lamb or a proper coq au vin made from some rangy old rooster that's had more lovers than most of us can dream of, you should see it not just as a chance to fill your stomach but, rather, as an occasion to celebrate humanity's ongoing struggle to create abundance out of scarcity. Venceremos! It's a lot better than wallowing in the silly defeatism of a diet of tofu and sprouts.