Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

My friend Keith gave me the heads up on an excellent article over at Salon.com, an interview with Hal Herzog whose new book: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat looks at our conflicted relationship with animals.

Here are two of my favorite bits from this really fascinating article:

The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that's been occurring.

I think the fact is that we're natural meat-eaters. And a lot of my vegetarian friends don't like that. But it's our biology and our evolutionary heritage. It's tough to fight that. That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight it. But most people lose that balance. And two-thirds of vegetarians eventually resume eating meat.