Vegetarian

A vegetarian is a person who chooses to eat lower on the food chain, avoiding any animal flesh, such as red meat, poultry, or fish. This choice may be spawned by concerns over the environment, animal rights/welfare, personal health, world hunger, and/or spirituality.

Different levels of vegetarianism exist, including veganism on the stricter end of the dietary spectrum, and flexitarianism or pescetarianism on the looser end. Flexitarianism, or semivegetarian, is the term for someone who avoids meats as much as possible but may include them occasionally for convenience or necessity. Pescetarians also have some dietary flexibility, as they allow themselves to consume fish and other animals from the sea but avoid land animals. Some vegetarians dislike inclusion of any semivegetarianism in the category of vegetarian because vegetarianism, by definition, means the abstinence of any animal flesh. Because vegetarians do eat some animal products that do not require killing, such as eggs and dairy, they are sometimes referred to more specifically as “ovo-lacto” vegetarians. Those who eat a strictly plant-based diet and avoid all animal products, including eggs and dairy, are called vegans.

Because of varying definitions of vegetarianism, exact numbers are difficult to obtain. Although approximately 7 percent of the North American population self-identifies as vegetarian, millions of these people eat some meat, as flexitarianism is gaining popularity. So the percentage of North Americans who actually abstain from animal flesh is likely closer to 2–3 percent, or approximately seven million people, with approximately a million of those people being vegan. The typical Westerner most attracted to vegetarianism is a young, white, middle-class, atheist female. Statistics for Europeans show a similar low national percentage of vegetarians; the United Kingdom has the highest percentage, at 6 percent. Although worldwide statistics do not exist, several hundred million Indians are vegetarian for class and religious reasons, and a portion of Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and Krishnas worldwide practice vegetarianism.

One reason that meat is popular is the common modern assumption that humans have always hunted other animals and are biologically predisposed to a meat-based diet; however, some anthropologists theorize that early Homo sapiens were primarily herbivorous, based on humans descending from great apes, who mainly eat plants. Many Westerners today mistakenly assume that vegetarianism is a fad that originated during the hippy movement of the 1960s, but the practice of consciously avoiding animal foods has been around since ancient times and is an ethical cornerstone of several Eastern religions. Writings from the last several millennia indicate that ethical and spiritual rationales have predominated as a motivation for vegetarianism, although its healthfulness is also touted.

[Page 445]Ancient vegetarian proponents include Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu, Plato, Plutarch, and Porphyry. In fact, through the 18th century, Western vegetarians were often called Pythagoreans, after the most well-known vegetarian, Pythagoras. For centuries after, the hegemony of a humanist Christianity kept vegetarianism from growing. However, vegetarian writings surfaced again in the 18th century, largely in resistance to scientist Rene Descartes's popular instrumental theory suggesting that nonhuman animals were soulless automata with little consciousness.

Nineteenth-century authors, such as Dr. Anna Kingsford, Henry Salt, and Leo Tolstoy, often based vegetarianism on a concern for human peace, but they showed a concern for animal welfare by including vivid descriptions of slaughterhouse violence. In addition to promoting an ethical justification, 19th-century physician William Alcott was one of the only early writers to propose a sustainability argument regarding the inefficiency of using land to grow animals and not plants. However, his argument was motivated by humanitarianism more than environmentalism, as it claimed vegetarianism would enable more humans to exist.

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