Jump to content
IndiaDivine.org
Sign in to follow this  
Guest guest

Giles Coren from The Times having a laugh at vegetarians expense

Rate this topic

Recommended Posts

Guest guest

Here is the restaurant critic from The Times weekly extremist rant, courting

with sensationalism as usual, normally with his tongue embeded in his cheek. I

have looked for a reply or comment option but couldnt find one.Here goes :

-------

 

People who don't eat meat are not just pale, boring, vain and flaky. They are

also suffering from an eating disorder says Giles Coren

 

A report published this week in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association

appears to show that teenagers and young adults are more likely to suffer from

eating disorders if they have tried being vegetarian.

 

And I'm, like, " duh! " (I'm like that because that is how American teenagers

talk, you understand, and I want them to understand what I am about to say). And

the reason that I am, as I say, like, " duh! " is that vegetarians are more likely

to suffer from eating disorders because vegetarianism is an eating disorder.

 

It's a better eating disorder than many others, because at least it doesn't make

you fat, and in general it doesn't cause you to wither away and die. But it does

make you pale, and flaky, and unbelievably tedious to be around.

 

Vegetarianism is a cry for help. A sadly transparent attempt to exercise control

over your body, which you feel the need to do for psychological reasons of which

you are probably unaware. It's why so many vegetarians have tattoos and exotic

piercings (you know it's true). It's why anarchists, squatters, G20 protesters

and art students are usually vegetarians. Frustrated that they cannot, and never

will, control the world, or anything else of any significance, they starve

themselves and carve holes in their bodies. It's as primitive a lifestyle as

there is. It's why the very oldest religions eschew meat altogether, and others

eschew some forms of it - because one exercises what control one can in the

shadow of a mighty God with miserable little gestures of abstinence.

 

Background

Gordon Ramsay's tastiest cauliflower recipes

Indian scientists to make curry fit for astronauts

Top tips for your vegetable patch

It's why vegetarians are mostly girls. Because vegetarianism is a way of

controlling one's food intake without drawing attention to one's vanity.

 

" Don't mind me, " they say when they come to your house for lunch. " I'll just

have the vegetables. " And you think: " It's immaterial to me what you put in your

mouth, darling, because I can tell from the state of you that you're going to be

in my downstairs bog with your fingers down your throat in half an hour,

spraying whatever you've pecked at all over the Armitage Shanks. "

 

It's the same with all these bogus wheat allergies and dairy intolerances -

codswallop the lot of them. Just a way of not having to say: " I'm on a diet so

that I will look nicer and people will fancy me. " Vegetarians never love food.

They merely tolerate it.

 

I absolutely concur with the notion that we in the developed world eat too much

meat. We absolutely do. Current meat consumption levels are unhealthy for the

people and a drain on the planet's resources. The neo-Malthusian projection that

says there is not enough land to feed the nine billion people who will be living

here by 2020 unless most of the meat-producing land is turned over to vegetable

crops (or something) is probably not too wide of the mark.

 

So the thing to do is to eat less meat, not none. You don't make meat a moral

issue and campaign to end it. You just lay off it a bit. That way there will be

plenty to go round, the land will be able to yield its bounty much more

efficiently (after all, without cow crap to nourish the soil, how are your

precious carrots going to grow all big and juicy?), nobody will have to die of

heart disease and we'll all be able to scoff a juicy steak from time to time.

 

Meat is not something to be eradicated, like cancer. Its total destruction is

not a moral imperative for the human race. Nor is meat something with absolutely

no visible function whose continued existence is a baffling mystery, like wasps

or men's nipples or television chefs. Meat tastes good. It carries vitamins and

minerals with a unique efficiency that is critical to the maintenance of a

healthy life. And it gives pigs, quite literally, a reason to live.

 

To eat no meat at all is to take an extreme position in an area where extremism

is not called for. People always say " Hitler was a vegetarian " , as if that were

some sort of paradox, some sort of surprise. Well it isn't to me. He was a

vegetarian because he was an extremist. He was incapable of doing things by

halves. Annoyed that the banking system in Weimar Germany was largely controlled

by Jews (as it certainly was), he might well have proposed a programme to make

banking more attractive to gentiles, offered some economics scholarships to

giant Bavarian pork-munchers, dragged some idle Christian dimbos out of the beer

halls and taught them to count... but he didn't, he decided to kill every Jew in

Europe.

 

In exactly the same way, had he been a more even-tempered man, he might well

have reacted to the meat-heavy traditional German diet (which presumably didn't

agree with him) by simply ladling more sauerkraut onto his plate and holding

back on the wurst, by eating a bit of salad occasionally, and by not having ham

for breakfast. But no. He was an extremist. He had to eat NO! MEAT! EVER! AGAIN!

 

The ideological road from nut cutlets to Belsen is straight, and short.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
Sign in to follow this  

×
×
  • Create New...