Well Done: Meat and its challengers

National Review, April 30, 2001 by Jonah Goldberg

At the same time, few people are making the positive case for eating meat. No intelligent discussion of vegetarianism can ignore this simple fact: Cows taste good. As one friend puts it, if God didn't want us to eat cows He wouldn't have made them out of steak. This is not a trivial point. Cows, like other livestock, are in many ways man-made creatures designed over thousands of years of husbandry to provide a ready supply of meat. If vegetarians had their way and everyone "converted" (their word) to a meatless lifestyle tomorrow, it wouldn't be like Muppets walking home after a long day at the office; there is no "natural" ecosystem for the millions of unemployed cows and chickens to return to.

More to the point, humans have a taste for meat for a reason: We were meant to eat it. Our teeth, for example, are the Swiss Army knives of the animal kingdom, divided in equal parts for eating T-bones and the vegetable accompaniment of your choice. Meat provides necessary proteins; vegans need to take supplements to get them. A British fruitarian couple goes on trial this summer because their baby died from the malnutrition that comes from eating the diet of a spider monkey.

Chef Passard, the self-appointed French minister of nutritional security, claims that not since the 1650s has a reputable (read "French") chef attempted to create a complete cuisine entirely out of vegetables. While this smacks of the sort of unprovable declaration we'd expect from a French chef-"Only cowards use store-bought creme fraiche!"-it's entirely plausible for one simple reason: Nobody wanted a chef to create a complete cuisine out of things that we usually use to soak up the gravy. While techniques have surely improved over the last few decades, throughout history saying "vegetarian cuisine" was like saying "Shaker orgy" or "sober Oktoberfest." Indeed, almost all of the famous 20th-century vegetarians-Gandhi, Hitler, George Bernard Shaw-were unconcerned with the tastiness of their diets. "Eating is not a pleasure to me," Shaw said, "only a troublesome necessity, like dressing or undressing."

This gets to the heart of why the vegetarians will have a rough time converting much of America to their cause: There's always been too much pride in the self-denial of vegetarianism. Food is among the most important, wonderfully satisfying things in our lives. It is more constant than sex and-unless you're Bill Clinton-you can share it with more people. Vegetarian ideologues get too much satisfaction from denying themselves this enjoyment; it is New Age culinary celibacy.

There is a legitimate case to be made that, in a statistical sense, we eat too much meat; this is not surprising in a wealthy and hedonistic country. Meat was a luxury for much of man's evolutionary history, and eating it every day, or every couple of hours-as I do-is probably not the best thing in the world for you. But surely, in a culture where "whatever floats your boat" is found in the penumbra of the Constitution and the legalization of PCP and heroin has gained traction, eating bacon shouldn't be considered outlaw activity. Besides, Bertolt Brecht had it right in the first place: "Grub first: then ethics."