You don’t look like a vegan.
In the last 5 years, I’ve had this comment (you don’t look like a vegan!) made to me more than a few times. I was a bit puzzled the first time I heard that comment, but never thought much of it until I heard the same comment being made multiple times by very different people. I wondered whether the comment was meant as a complement or as a jibe. I soon learned that it was meant to be a mix of a complement and a jibe. Something to the effect of:
“You seem to be a sane and reasonable person, so what went wrong with you?”
I grew up in the beach environs of Goa and Pondicherrry — both former colonies that belonged to the Portuguese and French respectively, until they were kicked out of India in the early 1960s. Growing up in these cities, eating “good food” meant eating a nice lamb dish, pork Vindaloo, a pig roast, beef Xacuti or some nice Goan chicken or fish curry. I relished chicken and mutton dishes whereas vegetarian food would always be my distant second choice. While my mother was a vegetarian, there were no controversial discussions at home on the subject. In my twenties, I got married to my college sweet heart who happened to be a “born vegetarian”. I continued to eat meat for the first 12 years into our marriage. Through those 12 years, my wife and I had healthy discussions on the subject, none of which led to any condescension from either side. I turned vegetarian in 2006 (in my mid 30s) and turned vegan after another 14 years (only 10 months ago). While I routinely see “vegan hatred” in online interactions and discussion forums, I had not experienced that in my day to day life until recently. I’ve had some conversations recently with close friends where I’ve seen them roll their eyes in exasperation when they learned that I had turned vegan. Even some very liberal and progressive friends of mine refer to vegans as “irrational vegans” or “annoying vegans”. I had no idea that vegans invoked such wrath. A few google searches on “vegan hatred” revealed that this was a global phenomena. Vegans are largely perceived as a group of irrational people who consider themselves “holier than thou”.
The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once wrote:
“vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit” and called vegans their “Hezbollah-like splinter faction.”
The Hezbollah comment had me in splits of laughter. But one wonders what evokes such wrath. This article is my effort to understand why vegans are considered irrational and if that criticism holds water. Secondly, I explore the foundations of how we form our moral value systems and how we can coexist as long as we understand each other’s moral thesis and framework. This article is not about urging anyone to turn Vegan. Enough has been written on saving the planet and the benefits to health — this is not the scope of this article.
PART A: WHERE DOES ANTI-VEGAN HATRED COME FROM?
Did you know that vegans are amongst the most loathed sub-groups?
In 2011, sociologists Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan observed a phenomenon they called “vegaphobia”, demonstrating that the British media consistently portrayed vegans in a negative light. Zaria Gorvett in her recent article “The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred” writes: “People love to moan that vegans are annoying: research has shown that only drug addicts inspire the same degree of loathing. Now psychologists are starting to understand why — and it’s becoming clear that the reasons aren’t entirely rational…and the least popular vegans of all are those who cite animal cruelty as their reason for turning vegan”.
Abigail Higgins in her Vox article writes “People (non-vegans) tend to interpret someone’s choice not to eat meat as condemnation of their own choices, which can make them pretty defensive”. In article in The Guardian, George Reynlods writes: In a study by Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson of the University of Calgary show that vegans are viewed more negatively than atheists, immigrants, homosexuals, and asexuals (I happen to be an immigrant, an atheist and a vegan — checking three hate boxes!). The only group viewed more negatively than vegans were drug addicts. Another analysis found that “labeling a product ‘vegan’ causes its sales to drop by 70%.” While almost everyone I know would like to see lesser physical and emotional suffering in the world, why is there such resentment towards people who are working towards reducing human and animal suffering?
Speaking from personal experience, I have never asked anyone why they chose to or continue to eat meat, neither do I advertise to anyone that I am a vegan. It is only in a situation where it is essential for me to declare my food restrictions that I have to use the “vegan” word. On the contrary, I get this unprovoked question frequently (usually at a friend’s house for dinner or at a restaurant): “You don’t look like a vegan, were you always vegan/vegetarian? Why did you go vegan?”. Without getting into the why, I usually explain that I used to be an avid meat eater and that I turned vegetarian in my mid-30s and then vegan a decade later in my late 40s. Most of the time my effort to dodge the “why did you turn vegan?” question is unsuccessful and I still get pushed to answer it. Note the irony here: I am being pushed to answer the question and yet I am at risk of being labelled “preachy” if I answer the question. I’ve mostly tried to dodge the “But why?” question in social or professional circles; unless it was a close friend who genuinely wanted to understand my point of view with an open mind. But even there, in a few instances, I’ve sensed a discomfort, eye-rolling or annoyance. Why is it that some of my friends think that I am judging them because of a choice that I made about my food? There was a time not too long ago when people owning EVs like the Toyota Prius were made fun of. I’ve heard sarcastic statements made to friends of mine who owned a Toyota Prius a decade ago: “Oh, you are trying to save the planet now?”. Today, saving the planet seems to be a rational choice — times have changed.
Take a look at this infographic that was sent to me by a friend via whatsapp during the early days of the covid-19 crisis.
I laughed at the joke, but noticed that “preachy vegans” were next to “randomly toxic friends”, “religious fanatics” and “flat-earthers”! (yes, there is a large group of people who believe that the earth is flat!). I haven’t lost my sense of humor, but I found it curious to lump vegans with irrational cohorts like flat-earthers and religious fanatics.
Julia Minson, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, surveyed people about their attitudes towards vegans and then asked them to think of three words that they associated with them. 45% of the participants had something negative to say, and included a word which referred to their social characteristics. Vegans were associated with the words “weird”, “arrogant”, “preachy”, “militant”, “uptight”, “stupid”, and — mysteriously — “sadistic”. I recently watched the TV series “Big Little Lies” starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon that is set in Monterey, California. Again, I was quite surprised to find many instances of vegan hatred that was depicted in the series.
Why does this happen? Zaria Gorvett writes (in The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred): “There’s mounting evidence that we’re particularly threatened by people who overall have similar morals to us, but are prepared to go further than we are in order to stick to them. In the end, our fear of being judged far outstrips any respect we might have for their choice.”
Benoit Monin, a psychologist from Stanford University who was also involved in this study on vegan hatred says:
“these studies suggest that rebels are resented when their implicit reproach threatens the positive self-image of individuals who did not rebel”
I do understand where some of this vegan-hate comes from — I have met rabid, judgmental and “fundamentalist” vegans — I don’t enjoy their company either. But the Stanford research is also showing that the hate largely arises from a kind of self-doubt in meat eaters, which leads to defensive shaming of the rebel party; in this case vegans.
We have seen this phenomenon of rebel-hating in other instances such as:
i. Dog lovers who eat all types of meat (but won’t eat dog meat), hate people who eat dogs and other meat. People all over the world protest against the Chinese dog eating festival that is held in Yulin every year. In retaliation, dog-eaters in China criticize generic meat eaters for showing hypocritical moral superiority. The dog-eaters in China say: “eating dog is no different from eating pork or beef”. Dog lovers argue that dogs are domesticated and lovable animals and should not be eaten and should not be subject to any cruelty. Who gets to decide which animal is worthy of love and compassion? Seriously.
Aren’t dog-lovers “preaching” to the dog-eaters that they are superior to them in moral standing? Arguments from either side sound reasonable on first glance, but as we’ll see later in the article, these are examples of cognitive dissonance where the person holding a strong moral view has not developed a proper framework or thesis that can withstand a rational challenge. A very close of friend of mine (let’s call him Mirza) who is an avid meat eater, scoffs at the vegan choice. Recently Mirza and his wife had a baby boy and coincidentally acquired a pet dog at the same time. Ten months in, Mirza is madly in love with his baby and also has fallen in love with the dog. A scientist by nature, Mirza has been observing the interactions between his baby boy and his dog for the last ten months; he has been bewildered by the love and care he witnesses between the two different species. Over a recent chat, Mirza made the following statement: “We are making a mistake by saying things like dogs are like us; ie sentient beings. Dogs and us humans share consciousness and have a common experience — dogs are not like us, we are both conscious beings in essence”. It would have been impossible for Mirza to feel the level of camaraderie and compassion for this animal, had he not personally experienced living with a dog and falling in love with it. While dog lovers do not struggle to understand the choice of people to not eat dogs for food, they struggle to understand why someone like me chooses not to eat other sentient beings that are capable of experiencing pain and suffering. I find this very intriguing. My wife grew up on a farm and has a special love for cows — I found this weird when I first visited her farm house, but quickly realized that I’m simply finding it weird because I had not spent time with cows in the way she had. Our apathy to an animal arises because we have not experienced what the other has experienced.
These are examples of cognitive dissonance that we are all afflicted by. Dog lovers or cat lovers are appalled by people who eat cats and dogs, but when it comes to eating a baby goat or a cow for dinner, their entire framework shifts arbitrarily. My point here is that we have to break down every moral standard into its constitutive moral axioms to have a rational dialogue — most of the time we are looking at the same information, but with different perspectives.
ii. As a second example of moral cognitive dissonance, imagine fighting for the right of women to vote in the early 1800s. Women were looked down upon as lesser beings in comparison to men in Western society and were not allowed the right to vote. It took women a hundred years to win that equal right. Anyone who was “pro-women” during that time was deemed crazy and preachy. People against women’s equality quoted the Holy Bible, evolutionary biology and jungle law (aka “circle of life”) to justify the case for the male gender being superior to the female gender. The poster below shows how even the majority of women in the 1800s were against their own emancipation. If you were a “pro-woman” person in the 1800s, you would have been part of a minuscule minority that was campaigning for equal voting rights with men — You would have been labelled as a “holier-than-thou” and a “preachy” person.
“Natural Law” and “The Circle of Life” are the most abused concepts that are used to dominate and abuse a helpless cohort. In the 1800s, protestors against the women’s right to vote (The Women’s Suffrage movement) claimed that in the animal kingdom, the “circle of life” (a euphemism for law of the jungle) clearly showed that male members of a species dominated the females. Using the “Circle of Life” or the “Jungle Law” argument to run our human values today should seem like a regressive idea— we aspire for equality between men and women, which, we’ll see in the next section is a gradual process of expansion in circles of equality and compassion. This expansion is a conscious human process and using “jungle law” or circle of life as reasons to not evolve as humans should start to appear as a primitive tool of reason and logic to us. Just because something happens in the jungle, doesn’t mean we need to follow it as Homo sapiens (homo=human, sapien=wise).
We can discuss many more examples of cognitive dissonance such as the practice of Apartheid, segregation of black people in the US, unequal status for LGBT communities, caste system in India and colonialism. When one looks at these historical examples which entailed a massive societal change in entrenched beliefs, it is easy to see that the rebel minority is first labelled as preachy or crazy.
PART B: EXPANDING THE CIRCLES OF COMPASSION
Coming back to the dog-eating example, we don’t label dog-lovers who refuse to eat dog-meat as preachy or crazy because we intuitively understand that they’ve developed compassion for that specific animal, a dog— we understand that the very idea of eating a dog will induce disgust in them. Moreover, most of us won’t eat dog meat even if we were not dog-lovers. Let’s say that my meat eating eating friend Mirza (who loves his dog) happened to be at a business lunch in China with a client, and he was asked: “Why don’t you eat dog meat Mr. Mirza?”. If Mirza were trying to be polite to the host, he’d probably dodge the question (like a vegan does, usually) by saying something like “Oh, I just don't feel like it” or “I am allergic to dog meat” or “I don’t like the texture”. Yet, in reality we know that Mirza cannot eat dog meat anymore because he sees dogs as sentient beings like himself. This is not an imaginary scenario, I know meat lovers who have thrown up when they were offered dog meat at a dinner table in China (dog eating is not a fringe phenomena, about 25 million dogs are eaten every year).
If we don’t ask dog lovers “why don’t you eat dog meat?” why do we feel compelled to ask a vegan “why dont you eat meat?”. Similarly, when a vegan says that they are “unable to eat any sentient being that has experienced psychological suffering in the process of being cooked”, why is it suddenly perceived as irrational or “holier than thou”?
I hope we are beginning to see that this is a tricky subject and labelling people as crazy or preachy without understanding their point of view doesn’t help anyone. I quit eating meat 14 years ago, and it just happened one day — I had not planned to turn vegetarian. I was up in the mountains in the foot hills of the Himalayas at a boutique holiday resort that unbeknownst to me was only serving vegetarian food. After a week at the resort, I was bored with eating vegetarian food everyday and I was beginning to feel craving pangs for meat; my brother and I drove down to a restaurant in a nearby town to eat chicken tikka masala. As we were approaching the restaurant, I saw a person chopping off the neck of a chicken and I witnessed the screaming and writhing of the bird in distress. I looked away and went inside the restaurant while trying to keep my mind off what I saw. I went ahead and ordered the chicken tikka masala with butter Naan. When it arrived on the table, I dove into the food in full gusto and saw my brother do the same. However, within a few bites I had to put my food down — I just couldn’t eat it. That was the turning point — there was no “free will” in that instance, I cannot say that I made a “choice”, I simply could not eat meat anymore — something in my brain had shifted at that moment — witnessing the pain of that being is what caused the involuntary mental shift. It has been 14 years now since I stopped eating meat. Well, I have cheated twice in the last 14 years and I have given into the temptation of my tongue. Yes, the craving for good taste can and does overrule compassion sometimes — no free will there either! After having turned vegetarian, I feel I am pretty much the same person (on any morality scale) as I was when I used to eat meat — not superior, nor inferior in moral values to anyone else, I just have a different personal view on animal suffering and the extent to which I am willing to change my habits and lifestyle. Just like my friend Mirza won’t eat dog meat after having developed compassion for his dog.
If you asked me why I don’t eat meat or don’t consume other animal products today, I would say “As much as I can avoid it, I do not want to inflict suffering on any sentient beings by my voluntary actions — as long as my right to life and being free of suffering is protected” (so yes, I will kill something to protect myself). Dog lovers, cat lovers, animal lovers etc , are just a matter of Venn diagrams; we all have our relative circles of compassion. Some people draw a line at humans, some at dogs, some at cats, some at cows and so on. What you’ll notice in the diagram below is that we all have our own “boundaries” of where our compassion ends. But this boundary can and does change with time, experiences, circumstances and thinking — just like achieving equality for all humans has taken us hundreds of years to “expand” into — from the end of slavery, end of women’s suffrage, end of colonialism, end of the segregation of blacks in the US and to the end of Apartheid in South Africa. We are yet to completely get over the cast system in India.
Albert Einstein said:
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
People like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington who were slave owners in the 1700s, were not evil people by the moral standards of the white people of their times; their idea of morality and equality was dialed in differently by the values of society back then — their values of compassion were contracted back then compared to a more expansive and inclusive value system today. Similarly, dog-eaters in China are not people with inferior moral values, it is just that their moral sensibilities are tuned differently than ours because of circumstance. It is intellectualy lazy and irresponsible for us to call call “dog eaters” or “cat eaters” inhumane or evil people. Conversations and healthy challenges to the status quo need to be maintained though.
Dr. Richard Dawkins (Author of The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene. Professor Emeritus at Oxford University, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is also a meat lover) was asked the following question:
Question: A hundred years from now, what would our descendants look back at and cringe at?
Richard Dawkins: “In a 100 or 200 years time, we may look back on the way we treated animals today as something like we today look back on the way our forefathers treated slaves. I would like to be a vegetarian. I would like everybody to be a vegetarian.”
These are the words of an eminent evolutionary biologist who is a meat eater. Dawkins continues to eat meat, but is intellectually honest about his view on animal cruelty even though it is in contradiction with his behavior. He recognizes that his life long habit of eating meat and enjoying its taste are hard things to give up despite his contradictory intellectual and moral view on the matter (from an interview with Peter Singer). My brothers and father are in a similar position — they agree with the rationale of not wanting to contribute to animal suffering, but are unable to let go of the desire for meat. It will happen when it has to happen. It took me 12 years to give up eating meat and then another 14 years to go vegan — it was one of the hardest things to sustain in the early days. Two of my closest friends recently gave up meat after reading Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens. They sustained their vegetarian diet for six months and then fell back to the calling of pork ribs (for me it was koobideh murgh — Iranian chicken on a skewer). We go through this back and forth in so many other areas of life — desire trumps rationality and will power — this is a normal human condition. We don’t need to judge ourselves or other people on that; whether we eat meat or not. But there is no need to shut conversations down with labels — let’s keep talking; this is the only tool we have for reason.
PART C: ARE VEGANS IRRATIONAL?
The main purpose of my writing this article was to reflect on why vegans are perceived as irrational. In the research discussed earlier, we saw that vegans and vegetarians are routinely labelled as “irrational” or “stupid” and are considered a fringe group of crazies. Since I was curious about the specific allegation of being “irrational”, I started researching the ideas and opinions of leading scientists and philosophers across centuries who have had a major influence on human thought and our achievements as a species. I stayed away from the opinions of eastern mystics and spiritual personalities (such as Gandhi or The Dalai Lama), since they may have been biased in their views on vegetarianism by their religious affiliations and beliefs. I’ve presented 20 opinions and I list what I believe are the top-10 views on the subject here (the rest are at the bottom of the article as an addendum). These opinions were expressed by these great thinkers in an era when it was heresy to make such statements in the western world — there was no “vegan fad” back then. They were lone rebels in their time making bold utterances. Before you read these quotes, I must admit that some of these famous intellectuals do have a judgmental tone, but I invite the reader to cut them some slack if you can…sometimes to be heard, one has to get dramatic — especially in the times they lived in.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
“Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle. Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.” Translation of letter to Hermann Huth, December 27, 1930. Einstein Archive 46–756
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” — Wikiquote from New York Post, 28 November 1972
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was an Italian polymath. He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived.
Andrea Corsali was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci and he visited India in the year 1512. In a long letter to his patron, Corsali made a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci while describing followers of vegetarianism in the region of Gujrat, India. Here is an excerpt:
English Translation: “Certain infidels called the ‘Gujrati’ [in India] are so gentle that they do not feed on anything which has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our own Leonardo da Vinci.”
Three other biographers cite the Corsali letter: Eugène Müntz (1845–1902) in Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science; Edward McCurdy in The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci; and Jean Paul Richter in The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, Richter, 1977; Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists: Part 3, Karger Publishers, Basel, 2010 p. 3 http://books.google.it/books?id=NTmyjVWIrTYC&pg=PA3.
“…The mere idea of permitting the existence of unnecessary suffering, still more that of taking life, was abhorrent to him. Vasari tells, as an instance of his love of animals, how when in Florence he passed places where birds were sold he would frequently take them from their cages with his own hand, and having paid the sellers the price that was asked would let them fly away in the air, thus giving them back their liberty.
Edward MacCurdy wrote in The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci (1928)
Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and author who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. The discoverer of what we call Newtonian Physics and the person who invented Calculus, Newton was a genius.
A contemporary of Newton’s, the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, wrote about Newton’s compassion for animals:
“There is in man a disposition to compassion as generally diffused as his other instincts. Newton had cultivated this sentiment of humanity, and he extended it to lower animals. He was strongly convinced that God has given to them a proportion of ideas, and the same feelings which he has to us. He could not believe that God, who has made nothing in vain, would have given to them organs of feeling in order that they might have no feeling.
He thought it a very frightful inconsistency to believe that animals feel and at the same time to cause them to suffer. On this point his morality was in accord with his philosophy. He yielded but only with repugnance to the barbarous custom of supporting ourselves upon the blood and flesh of beings like ourselves, whom we caress, and he never permitted in his own house the putting them to death by slow and exquisite modes of killing for the sake of making the food more delicious. This compassion, which he felt for no other animals, culminated in true charity for men.”
(Voltaire, Elements de la Philosophie de Newton, 1741, V., quoted in Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet, University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 145).
Nikolai Tesla (1856–1943) — The unit of magnetism “Tesla” is named after him. He was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Yes, Elon Musk named his car company after this genius.
“With the passing decades, Tesla shifted away from a meat diet. He substituted fish, always boiled, and finally eliminated the meat entirely. He later almost entirely eliminated the fish and lived on a vegetarian diet.”
The Life of Nikola Tesla by John J. O’Neill, 1944
“It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit. That we can subsist on plant food and perform our work even to advantage is not a theory, but a well-demonstrated fact.”
Nikola Tesla, Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) The man that gave us the scientific theory of evolution. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
“Experience unfortunately shows us how long it is before we look at them (animals) as our fellow creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they extend to all sentient beings.”
Quoted from Darwin’s Compassionate View of Human Nature by Dr. Paul Ekman. Dr Ekman is Professor Emeritus at UC San Francisco and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine and ranked fifteenth among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century.
Darwin’s ideas on morality and compassion appear in his 1838 notebooks. In concluding the introduction to their edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man, Moore and Desmond wrote: “Darwin’s thinking about compassion, altruism, and morality certainly reveals a different picture of this great thinker’s concerns from that often portrayed by those unacquainted with his writings who focus on the catchphrase ‘the survival of the fittest’”. Even many scientists are unaware of Darwin’s commitment to the unity of mankind, his abolitionist convictions, and his intense interest in moral principles and human and animal welfare.
Yuval Noah Harari —
I’m vegan, though not completely religious about it. While writing ‘Sapiens,’ I became familiar with how we treat animals in the meat and dairy industries. I was so horrified that I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore
In a 2016 interview by The Guardian
Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. Initially an associate professor at Harvard and later at Cornell, from 1976 to his death.
“A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behaviour of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”
Carl Sagan in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992. Also verified on Nick Sagan’s blog (Carl Sagan’s son).
Brian Greene is a leading theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. He is a Professor at Columbia University. He has an undergrad from Harvard and Ph.D from Oxford University. He is known for his best-selling books: String Theory, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality.
Q:Why do you think other scientists are still not vegetarian?
BG: I would ask, more generally, why the vast majority of people are not vegetarian. I think the answer is that most people don’t question the practice of eating meat since they always have. Many of these people care about animals and the environment, some deeply. But for some reason — force of habit, cultural norms, resistance to change — there is a fundamental disconnect whereby these feelings don’t translate into changes of behavior.
Interview with Brian Greene, Supreme Master Ching Hai News website (accessed Dec. 7, 2011)
Richard Dawkins — an evolutionary biologist is the author of the bestsellers The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. Professor Emeritus at Oxford University, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is also a meat lover.
Question: A hundred years from now, what would our descendants look back at and cringe at?
RD: “ In a 100 or 200 years time, we may look back on the way we treated animals today as something like we today look back on the way our forefathers treated slaves. I would like to be a vegetarian. I would like everybody to be a vegetarian.”
In a 2018 interview at George Washington University in Washington, D.C
To close this section out, the objective of sharing these quotes was to highlight the fact that these brilliant minds expressed their views independently across centuries and without any religious or political pressure. These personalities have laid the foundations of modern science and the methods of rational scientific investigation — I assume that we would not intuitively place them in the category of “irriational people”. You may not share their point of view, but I hope that their views on the subject might induce a healthy acceptance for the choice that vegans make for themselves (rabid and preachy vegans notwithstanding). There are 10 more quotes from the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Van Gogh, Thoreau etc. You can explore those here → link.
Personally, I can’t wait for plant-based-meat such as The Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat to go global — I do miss the taste and texture of meat! The Impossible Burger bleeds like meat and tastes like meat, has better health outcomes (Stanford study) and there seems to be much lesser suffering — ultimately, rather than bouncing around with confusing moral axioms and frameworks, I think science will deliver to our gustatory needs.
A Darwin quote to end with. Charles Darwin was very clear about the weakness of the survival-of-the-fittest argument and the strength of his “sympathy hypothesis” when he wrote:
“Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
What Darwin called “sympathy,” in the words of Professor Paul Ekman (UCSF), “today would be termed empathy, altruism, or compassion.”
The Four Immeasurables — Tibetan Chant
“May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings rejoice in the well-being of others.
May all beings live in peace, free from greed and hatred.”
