(Must see) Vegetarianism - Time Magazine Cover Story

[Guest guest]

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020715/story.html

 

There is at least five pages of this story, so anyone interested read it

while it's there. There is also a vote " Is a well balanced vegetarian diet

better than one that includes meat "

 

Here's the first part, for the rest go to the URL above.

**************************************************************

 

Should We All Be Vegetarians?

 

Would we be healthier? Would the planet? The risks and benefits of a

meat-free life.

 

By RICHARD CORLISS

Posted Sunday, July 7, 2002; 10:31 a.m. EST

 

 

FIVE REASONS TO EAT MEAT:

1) It tastes good

2) It makes you feel good

3) It's a great American tradition

4) It supports the nation's farmers

5) Your parents did it

 

Oh, sorry ... those are five reasons to smoke cigarettes. Meat is more

complicated. It's a food most Americans eat virtually every day: at the

dinner table; in the cafeteria; on the barbecue patio; with mustard at a

ballpark; or, a billion times a year, with special sauce, lettuce, cheese,

pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun. Beef is, the TV commercials say,

" America's food " —the Stars and Stripes served up medium rare—and as entwined

with the nation's notion of its robust frontier heritage as, well, the

Marlboro Man.

 

But these days America's cowboys seem a bit small in the saddle. Those

cattle they round up have become politically incorrect: for many, meat is an

obscene cuisine. It's not just the additives and ailments connected with the

consumption of beef, though a dish of hormones, E. coli bacteria or the

scary specter of mad-cow disease might be effective enough as an appetite

suppressant. It's that more and more Americans, particularly young

Americans, have started engaging in a practice that would once have shocked

their parents. They are eating their vegetables. Also their grains and

sprouts. Some 10 million Americans today consider themselves to be

practicing vegetarians, according to a Time poll of 10,000 adults; an

additional 20 million have flirted with vegetarianism sometime in their

past.

 

To get a taste of the cowboy's ancient pride, and current defensiveness,

just click on South Dakota cattleman Jody Brown's website, www.ranchers.net,

and read the new meat mantras: " Vegetarians don't live longer, they just

look older " ; and " If animals weren't meant to be eaten, then why are they

made out of meat? " (One might ask the same of humans.) For Brown and his

generation of unquestioning meat eaters, dinner is something the parents put

on the table and the kids put in their bodies. Of his own kids, he says, " We

expect them to eat a little of everything. " So beef is served nearly every

night at the Brown homestead, with nary a squawk from Jeff, 17, Luke, 13,

and Hannah, 11. But Jody admits to at least one liberal sympathy. " If a

vegetarian got a flat tire in my community, " he says, " I'd come out and help

him. "

 

For the rancher who makes his living with meat or the vegetarian whose diet

could someday drive all those breeder-slaughterers to bankruptcy, nothing is

simple any more. Gone is the age of American innocence, or naiveté when such

items as haircuts and handshakes, family names and school uniforms, farms

and zoos, cowboys and ranchers, had no particular political meaning. Now

everything is up for rancorous debate. And no aspect of our daily lives—our

lives as food consumers—gets more heat than meat.

 

For millions of vegetarians, beef is a four-letter word; veal summons

charnel visions of infanticide. Many children, raised on hit films like Babe

and Chicken Run, recoil from eating their movie heroes and switch to what

the meat defeaters like to call a " nonviolent diet. " Vegetarianism resolves

a conscientious person's inner turf war by providing an edible complex of

good-deed-doing: to go veggie is to be more humane. Give up meat, and save

lives!

 

Of course, one of the lives you could save or at least prolong is your own.

For vegetarianism should be about more than not eating; it's also about

smart eating. You needn't be a born-again foodist to think this. The

American Dietetic Association, a pretty centrist group, has proclaimed that

" appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, are nutritionally

adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of

certain diseases. "

 

So, how about it? Should we all become vegetarians? Not just teens but also

infants, oldsters, athletes—everyone? Will it help us live longer, healthier

lives? Does it work for people of every age and level of work activity? Can

we find the right vegetarian diet and stick to it? And if we can do it, will

we?

 

 

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next >>