My mother was shocked when I told her. She said she never saw it coming. My brother couldn’t believe I’d gone over to “the other side.” My friends wondered if I’d still be able to go out to lunch with them on Fridays.
It wasn’t that I’d gone to live on a commune or joined the Church of Scientology. I just decided to stop eating meat.
I imagine many vegetarians, upon making their public debut, experienced similar reactions. First your friends and relatives express concern for your protein intake, as if protein deficiency – and not heart disease, diabetes and obesity – were a major health problem sweeping the nation. Then come the usual stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and (if you’re lucky) acceptance. Yet even in this last phase some doubts linger, and those closest to you may still eye you with suspicion, judging you and wondering if you’re judging them.
So I can tell you from experience that vegetarianism makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But where does this discomfort come from? Are non-vegetarians secretly guilty about eating meat, or have they simply encountered one too many angry vegetarians to maintain an openness to this different lifestyle?
Neither of these answers seems to offer a sufficient explanation. To understand why omnivores and herbivores alike are extremely defensive of their eating habits, we should acknowledge that people’s relationship to food is more complicated than one might initially suspect. Sure, the main purpose of food is to keep our bodies running properly, but for our species, food often takes on cultural and psychological meanings that go well beyond sustenance.
In the first place, food and culture are highly intertwined. We associate different foods with different ethnicities and nationalities (such as Mexican, Indian or Mediterranean), and consequently, food becomes a part of our cultural heritage. On top of that, food plays an integral part in religious ceremonies, and thus some of us keep kosher, while others take communion, while still others get really drunk (or, more traditionally, just eat a lot) on Mardi Gras. And finally, our celebrations are often marked by the consumption of very specific foods – birthday cake and wedding cake, Oktoberfest brats and fraternity party beer.
But primarily, it is our individual relationships to food that can make us defensive of our eating habits when confronted with the dietary choices of others. For many women such as myself who grew up doing ballet, food becomes more of an indulgence than a mundane fact of life, and eating habits become a kind of secret sin to be guarded fiercely from prying eyes. More generally, most of us probably associate different foods with memories we value – the dish our uncle always cooked on Thanksgiving or the comfort food our mother made us when we didn’t make the soccer team.
I think these kinds of subtexts are always present in our dietary choices, so when those choices are questioned, all those cultural and psychological undertones are being questioned, as well. The perfect examples of this phenomenon are vegetarians themselves. They are fully conscious that their diet says something about who they are. They all have different reasons for not eating meat, but they each have a reason.
The same source appears responsible for the non-vegetarian’s defensiveness and the vegetarian’s passionate diatribe against meat-eaters. We’re not just defending our diets; we’re defending our identities. People on both sides of the argument feel threatened. The best thing we can do is be candid about our dietary choices. And remember, too, that giving up meat doesn’t mean giving up your culture, your celebrations or your memories. Whether you’re a vegetarian or not, it seems impossible to escape the fact that you are what you eat. That is, after all, what’s so threatening and so powerful about the vegetarian’s diet: It displays that fact in bold letters at all times.
Susan Holcomb is a physics major. She can be reached at holcombdbk@gmail.com.
