March
2002
In
the Land of the Carnivores
Book Review by Norm Phelps
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Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook
by Carol J. Adams (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002). $15 paperback.
324 pages.
It’s the Dilemma With a Thousand Faces—most of them belonging
to your friends and family—a triple bind that leaves you feeling
guilty no matter what you do, even though you haven’t done anything
to feel guilty about. You’re with a group of meat eaters when one
of them remarks on your vegetarian diet. And no matter how politely
the question may be raised, you know that you’re being attacked.
(Don’t ask how you know. It’s happened so often, you pick
up the signs subliminally—you just know.) You see three choices:
You can refuse to discuss it, in which case you feel like a coward
for
passing up an opportunity to enlighten others about animal suffering,
ecology, feeding the hungry, and good health. You can try to enlighten
your companions with facts, figures, and anecdotes, in which case you
get to watch helplessly as half of them turn hostile, the other half
drift into a bored stupor, and everyone gets annoyed at you for making
them uncomfortable, a state not particularly conducive to enlightenment.
Or, you can snap off a good zinger and convince everyone that vegetarians
are zealots best left to our tofu and sprouts. No enlightenment there,
either.
In Living Among Meat Eaters, eco-feminist philosopher and vegetarian
activist Carol Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat, 1990; The
Inner Art of Vegetarianism, 2000—see the review “Bridges
Over Troubled Waters,” Satya, Sept. 2000) turns her attention
to the Vegetarian’s Dilemma. Starting from the premise that vegetarianism
is natural to humankind and meat eating an aberration, Adams tells us
that meat eaters are “blocked vegetarians” who “have
a hole in [their] conscience.” When we encounter the Dilemma, the
meat eaters who create it are not engaging in rational discourse—however
rationally they may couch their arguments; instead, they are defending
their blockage. For them, the point of the conversation is not to exchange
ideas, learn new facts, or examine different values; it is to avoid
having to acknowledge the hole in their conscience. Simply put, our
food choices make them feel guilty. And the quickest way to shed that
guilt is to make us an object of blame.
This insight leads Adams to the guiding principle behind the practical
advice that occupies the bulk of Living Among Meat Eaters: “How
do we repair the hole in the conscience? The process cannot be one
of
simply filling the hole with information, as though we could shovel
dirt to fill a hole. Consciences are not formed like this. I imagine
the hole in the conscience to be like the hole in a finely knit cotton
sweater. Repairing it requires adding some new thread and interlacing
it with the old. It is a delicate process. We have to start with what
is there. It is the same with a meat-eating culture and individual
meat
eaters. We have to start with what is there. What is there is awareness.
Awareness may be blocked, but it is there.”
The way out of the Dilemma, Adams tells us, is not to worry about the
content of the conversation, because it’s not really about content;
focus instead on the dynamic of the conversation. Content, she suggests,
should be provided to unsympathetic meat eaters in the form of pamphlets
and books that they can peruse privately in a setting that is not emotionally
charged. Then, if they come back to you with honest questions, you
can
respond with your facts, figures, and anecdotes.
Adams’ tactics for coping are custom-tailored to different situations,
but they all derive from her fundamental strategy, which is to help
carnivores get past their blockage so they can see us as living proof
that a vegetarian diet offers sensual enjoyment, emotional comfort,
and a sense of abundance. Her suggestions for managing situations that
invest meat with a heavy emotional and symbolic significance—such
as the office luncheon, where if we don’t eat what everyone else
is eating, we’re not “part of the team;” or the family’s
traditional Thanksgiving dinner, where love and loyalty are judged by
the enthusiasm displayed for devouring a dead bird—will be warmly
welcomed by those who have come to regard these sacrificial bonding
rituals with fear and loathing.
To new vegetarians, Living Among Meat Eaters offers hope: it is possible
to live by your principles without saying good-bye to family, friends,
and job. To every vegetarian who lives, works, and eats with carnivores,
it offers peace of mind, as well as the prospect of opening the meat
eaters in our lives to vegetarianism. It should be read by everyone
who encounters the Dilemma on even an occasional basis.
Norm Phelps is spiritual outreach director of The Fund for Animals;
you can visit their Web site at www.fund.org.
His book The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible
will be published by Lantern Books in June, 2002.
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