Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Is eating personal?

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

That’s the question posed by James McWilliams in an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post.

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”

I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

Read the rest of the article. It’s not an entirely new argument, but it adds insight to the current debate on meat-based diets.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/kitsa_sakurako/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0