6th November 09
THE FACE ON YOUR PLATE -The TRUTH about FOOD by J Moussaieff Masson
When I was teaching Sanskrit at the University
of Toronto in the 1970s, I came across a phrase that stopped
me dead: ashrayaparavrtti—a sudden moment of life-changing
insight. Paravrtti is like a somersault, and ashraya is one’s
home base, so it means letting go of everything you have always
believed or understood for a leap into the unknown. The Chris-
tian equivalent is known as the Road to Damascus experience
in which Saul (later St. Paul) underwent a conversion on his way
to Damascus to slaughter Christians and instead became one.
Many people become vegan in just that way: a sudden
moment, a blinding insight, a turning one’s back on conven-
tional wisdom, in this case, conventional diet. How did it
happen for me? Well, I had the good fortune to grow up in a
vegetarian family: my parents were “disciples” of a vegetar-
ian guru, Paul Brunton. Even when I gave up the belief in the
Hinduism and Buddhism that he taught, I still maintained my
belief in the value of ahimsa, not doing harm, which included
not doing harm through one’s diet. Later, at Toronto, I had a
negative epiphany: what was I doing teaching this language
that had lost its magic for me? I entered psychoanalytic train-
ing. Alas, giving up Sanskrit somehow entailed giving up my
vegetarian ways. One day, after becoming a Freudian psycho-
analyst, I had another transformative moment: I was sitting at
Freud’s desk at Maresfi eld Gardens in London. I opened one
of the drawers, and found a stash of letters, all of which dealt
with the “hidden” reality of the sexual abuse of children. That
was to become my concern (some would call it an obsession)
over the next ten years. Only when I decided that I could no
longer be a psychoanalyst in good conscience did I reconnect
with my former vegetarian self: I started investigating the emo-
tional lives of animals, and what I learned turned me back into
a lifelong vegetarian.
During that time, I can remember hearing César Chávez say
that if you want to lessen animal suff ering, you would do bet-
ter to eat meat and give up dairy and eggs. Again, one of those
defi ning moments for me. Everything I thought I knew was
suddenly challenged, but I also knew that I was not yet ready
for such a challenge. I turned my back on that moment. Yet I
understood even then that sooner or later I would have to face
up to what I could no longer ignore.
That moment came for me when I began to visit dairy farms
and hen-laying facilities and saw the misery and suff ering that
the animals endured just so that we could enjoy their milk and
eggs. My denial was no longer possible, and I took the leap. I
have asked some other vegans how it happened for them, and
got some interesting answers. John Mackey, the CEO of Whole
Foods, told me: “I remember one day in August of 2003 I made
the decision to become (near) vegan and that once the decision
was made I felt great emotional alignment within my heart. I
knew this was the right thing for me to do and I also knew that
I was making a decision that I would be committed to for the
rest of my life. At last my beliefs and my ethics had come into
alignment.” Stanley Godlovitch, one of the people who began
the back-to-vegetarianism movement in the 1970s (he and a
friend fi rst confronted Peter Singer, then a graduate student in
philosophy at Oxford and now the best known animal rights
author, about eating meat), told me recently that every veg-
etarian who drinks milk or eats eggs knows from scratch that
there’s “something not quite right.” But for him and his wife,
“the push came from our teenage son Daniel, who brought out
the ancient Consistency Cannon over dinner and fi red at will.
I guess I must have been poised, ready, and that was it.”
There is a general feeling among the public at large that to
be concerned with the way animals live, or to become vegetar-
ian or even vegan, is now not nearly as odd as it once seemed.
Consider that the mainstream group Conservation Interna-
tional (CI) has partnered with McDonald’s to promote The Bee
Movie! When I saw that movie, I heard kids walk out vowing
never to eat honey unless it was “bee-approved.” On their Web
site, CI asks that children take the following pledge: “I recog-
nize that I play an important role in the future of our planet.
I pledge to get outside and do my part to learn about nature
and to protect all living things. I will be a force for good in my
neighborhood.” Protect all living things—even bees. Sounds
good. But how, exactly, does eating at McDonald’s accomplish
this? The old cliché still applies: We want the steak but don’t
want to hear about the slaughterhouse. That is why I devote a
full chapter to denial.
Sometimes denial, though, is just ignorance. I was having
dinner in Thailand in 2007 with my friend Stan Sesser, a writer
for the Wall Street Journal (he has also been a staff writer at
The New Yorker and food critic for the San Francisco Exam-
iner). He asked me why I don’t eat eggs or dairy. I told him it
was because of the cruelty involved. He was taken aback, never
having heard of this problem before. It had been the same for
me, and I am convinced that most people just are not aware
of how these animals suff er so that we can eat their eggs and
drink their milk.
We don’t hear the assertion very often today that animals were
born to be slaves, destined to be eaten, that they evolved for our
benefi t. It would take a certain kind of religious fundamentalist
to assert this. However, there is an assertion that is not all that
far removed. This time it is not about the animals, it is about us.
That we are the ones born to eat meat, the ones destined to do
the eating (as opposed to being eaten), and the ones who evolved
to hunt and kill our food. I have rarely seen this more baldly
expressed than by John Buff alo Mailer, in a dialogue with his
father, Norman Mailer: “You know, one of the outcomes of liv-
ing in such an organized society where everything is taken care
of—men don’t go out, kill their food, and bring it back, etc.—
is there’s a complicity, almost a sense of deliberately forgetting
that when you get right down to it, ultimately we’re animals.
We will fi ght each other down to our last bite when our own is
attacked. And I don’t know if this is true of everybody, but 95
percent of the time when I meet another man, under it all is that
sense of ‘Could I take you or could you take me?’ ”1
Perhaps if you are the son of Norman Mailer, this is under-
standable. I doubt that the rest of us constantly wonder about
the outcome of a fi ght with every male we encounter. But the
greater cliché is the earlier one, that in the past a man went
“out,” killed a formidable adversary, and returned with food
for his famished family. You can’t blame John Mailer for
believing this myth—after all, it has been fed to us for many
years now by the leading lights of anthropology departments
in American universities: Man the hunter. The myth goes back
a long way, and has an impeccable scientifi c pedigree. No less a
scientist than Charles Darwin believed it, along with the view
that women depended on men for survival—“Man is more
powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage
state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than
does the male of any other animal.”2
Hunting has been described as “the master behavior pattern
of the human species,” something that men have been practic-
ing for 99 percent of human history. The main message of the
infl uential book African Genesis (1961), by Robert Ardrey, the
anthropologist and Hollywood screen writer, was that we are
killer apes, who wiped out our peaceful vegetarian brothers.
His last book, published in 1976, was simply called The Hunt-
ing Hypothesis. These books had a notable infl uence on Arthur
C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s fi lm 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But in the 1980s this view was challenged, successfully it seems
to me, by female anthropologists with a broader vision, which
culminated in an excellent collection of essays called Woman
the Gatherer.3 This showed that all the evidence suggests that
the early human diet was omnivorous, so that meat was far less
important than previously thought. Plant foods provided the
staple diet of most hunter-gatherer societies (with the excep-
tion of those in the Far North) and these foods were provided
by women. Gathering plants required less energy than going
after mobile animals, the food provided a more stable diet, and
it was less dangerous to acquire. The women who gathered
these plant foods were social, food-sharing, and nurturing peo-
ple, and they were able to exert enormous pressure on men by
choosing those same qualities in men as mates.
This hypothesis has received very strong support recently
from Milton Mills, a researcher who graduated from Stanford
University School of Medicine in 1991 and now practices med-
icine at the Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. He is writing
a book which takes the position that people are slowly backing
into the truth: That humans are anatomically and physiologi-
cally adapted for a diet comprised primarily or entirely of plant
foods. I spent some time with Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard
in 1999, and he too told me that his study of human dentition
had convinced him that we were, evolutionarily speaking, pri-
marily herbivores.
Dr. Mills has taken this hypothesis further than anyone else
I know, and had already started to do so while he was a medical
student at Stanford. He uses as evidence comparative anatomy.
The simple proof is the shape of the human head—carnivores
have wide mouths, suitable for swallowing large chunks of
meat; we have small mouths, suitable for softer plant foods—
and the human jaw—when the jaws of a carnivore close, there
is a slicing motion that we lack; our jaw joint would be easily
dislocated if we tried to subdue struggling prey or crush bones.
Carnivorous animals do not chew their food but gorge rapidly,
whereas we humans need to eat slowly; the capacious single-
chambered stomach of carnivores contrasts with the stomach
of herbivores, which is a simple structure, with a long small
intestine; and the human colon has the pouched structure
typical of herbivores. Finally, human teeth are similar to those
found in other herbivores: our canines are neither serrated
nor conical, but fl attened, blunt, and small; our incisors are
fl at and spadelike, useful for peeling and biting relatively soft
materials. Human saliva contains the carbohydrate-digesting
enzyme, salivary amylase: if we attempted to swallow a large
amount of food poorly chewed, we would choke—just watch
how your dog swallows meat. In short, concludes Dr. Mills,
human beings have the mouth and gastrointestinal tract struc-
ture of a committed herbivore.
Think, too, how diffi cult it would be for an early human,
not armed in any way, to use his own body to kill a large ani-
mal. After all, humans at the time were less than fi ve feet tall,
and weighed less than 110 pounds.4 They were hardly a for-
midable adversary against the much more powerful hunting
and scavenging animals. Our nails are not claws. Notice the
damage that even a small animal like your cat can infl ict on
unprotected human skin. Cats are obligate carnivores: killing
machines. Imagine meeting and trying to subdue an animal ten
times that size. Indeed, in a recent book, the anthropologists
Donna Hart and Robert Sussman argue that for much of our
evolutionary history, humans have been hunted by other, more
powerful animals.5 In eff ect, we were the prey of any number
of predators, including the big cats, as well as dogs, hyenas,
snakes, crocodiles, and even birds. As a species, we would
have been wiped out long ago had we not depended on easily
accessible plants and fruits.6 Moreover, when researchers feed
animal fats and animal protein in large amounts to captive pri-
mates, it produces atherogenic eff ects (that is, they give you
heart attacks, hardly a good survival strategy).7
The archeologist Lewis Binford has published a series of
infl uential books arguing that there is no evidence for the
human transport and consumption of large quantities of meat.
Instead, he suggests that members of the early hominids were
marginal scavengers, at the bottom of the hierarchy of meat
eaters on the African savannah, sneaking in after the lions, the
hyenas, and the vultures had had their fi ll.8
Consider how gross just about everyone fi nds the idea of
eating carrion or rotting fl esh. Dogs don’t mind at all. In fact,
as we all know, they revel in it—rolling in it and eagerly seek-
ing it out. Carnivores prefer raw meat to cooked meat. Except
in unusual cases, we like our meat disguised. The more natu-
ral it looks, the more likely it is to cause disgust and physical
aversion. Part of this, I recognize, is custom. Nobody, surely,
takes pleasure in the thought of killing a rabbit with their bare
hands and then dismembering it and gulping down the raw
fl esh. Just reading these lines, I imagine, will make many a
reader queasy.
We really know very little about what is “natural” when
it comes to human behavior, and all attempts to proclaim
some preferred behavior as entirely “natural” is almost always
doomed to failure. This is especially true when it comes to
human diets in the past. For a while we were treated in the
mass media to the Paleolithic diet. Much can be learned from
traditional diets and just about any traditional diet would be
preferable to the junk food and heavily processed food we eat
today. Yet I agree with the authoritative recent opinion of The
Cambridge History of World Food that we are not going to
return to a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, and that, in fact,
history sheds no light on an ideal diet.
Nor, really, can we rely on the argument that we are “ani-
mals,” since animals eat entirely distinct foods. Primates?
Yes, chimpanzees do engage in hunting behavior, from time
to time,9 but gorillas do not. The kind of generalizations that
were common among popular historians at the beginning of
the twentieth century have fallen out of favor, and when one
reads the German amateur historian Oswald Spengler, famous
for his The Decline of the West, one can see why. He said,
“The human race ranks highly because it belongs to the class
of beasts of prey . . . [Man] lives engaged in aggression, killing,
annihilation. . . . Man is a beast of prey. I shall say it again and
again. The traders in virtue, the champions of social ethics, are
but beasts of prey with their teeth broken.”10
What some people mean when they talk about eating meat
is that since other animals hunt, kill, and eat one another, and
we are just another animal, why should we not do the same?
But if you observe what your cat and dog like to eat, you will
immediately recognize that we are somewhat diff erent in our
tastes. Even more important, which animal are we meant to
resemble most? After all, of the approximately 4,200 mammals,
only a small number are carnivores. There are surely as many
herbivores as there are carnivores, and many animals never kill
other animals. It is true that animals seem to have no choice
in the matter. No member of a carnivore species has ever been
known to choose only roots and fruits. We seem to be the only
animal that can “decide” to become a vegetarian.11 But vegetar-
ians cannot always take the high ground when it comes to other
behaviors, such as believing that if they eat no fl esh, they are
automatically a better person. A vegetarian can be as danger-
ous to his or her neighbor as someone who eats meat. Similarly,
animals who do not eat meat are not necessarily more gentle.
There is a common myth that carnivores are more dangerous to
humans than herbivores. Carnivorous wolves, however, avoid
humans whenever possible, and herbivorous elephants some-
times “decide” to kill people (as I learned when I attempted
to get too close to a matriarch with a small baby next to her).
No animals are more dangerous to humans than the com-
pletely non-carnivorous Cape buff alo, rhinoceros, and hippo.
They would not eat us; but they often kill us. You can be as
bad-tempered eating only grass as you can be eating only other
animals. So I would not argue that human vegetarians are more
peaceable than other humans—except to other animals.
What about the claim that the human brain owes its size to eat-
ing meat? It is true that the human brain is twice as encephalized
as is the brain of an adult chimpanzee and three to fi ve times
as large as would be expected for average body mass. Reviews
of hunter-gatherer diets indicate that meat varies from 12 to 86
percent of the total daily caloric intake per capita. In contrast,
animal products represent only about 5 percent of the average
daily calories consumed by chimpanzees, most of them eaten by
adult males. Thus, many researchers have claimed that meat is
what accounts for our large brains. But brain growth in humans
is generally restricted to a critical window of opportunity fol-
lowing birth, for brain weight accounts for 12 percent of body
weight at birth in all primate neonates, including humans.
The greater rate of growth occurs in humans during the fi rst
year and any dietary advantage therefore must be transferred
through breast milk. But milk quantity and quality is surpris-
ingly consistent cross-culturally and it is not dependent on
diet. The macronutrients are supplied by nature and have little
to do with any other variable. Comparisons of breast milk
from vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous mothers have shown
no diff erence in DHA (docosahexanoic acid) content. There
is absolutely no evidence that the breast-fed children of vegan
mothers suff er smaller brain sizes. Regardless of the ecological
circumstances, it would seem that all infants obtain or pro-
duce enough of the specifi c lipids they need to create the large
brains distinctive of our species.12
Some people, when they speak of eating meat as “natural,”
are not necessarily referring to our evolutionary past. They
simply mean that they have always eaten meat, and that most
other people on earth have always eaten meat. It is the human
tradition. Yet, as Gary Francione, distinguished professor of
law and philosophy at Rutgers University, points out: “Were
we slaves to tradition, Rosa Parks would still be riding in the
back of the bus.”13 It should also be pointed out that many tra-
ditional societies either did not eat meat for ethical or religious
reasons (as in India and many Buddhist countries) or ate very
little because it was simply not feasible on an economic basis
(rural China and other countries in Southeast Asia). I recently
visited the island of Efate in the New Hebrides, and learned
that except in Port Vila, the capital, most people rarely eat
meat simply because they cannot aff ord it. The men, who go
just about everywhere by running barefoot, look remarkably
fi t and athletic. The fact that your parents ate meat is not an
argument unless you feel that you must maintain all the values
of your parents or the community in which you were raised.
But even could we maintain that it is, in fact, natural to eat
meat, this would not weigh very heavily in the ethical scale.
Aristotle argued that it was natural to keep slaves. We believe
he was wrong. But even if he were right, would we not argue
that what is natural may not be what is moral or what we
choose to do? “Fighting,” or even weighing ourselves against
other men, may indeed be “natural,” but few men wish to be
enslaved to their nature in this way. Indeed, are we not human
precisely because, unlike just about any other animal, we can
choose our diet? The big cats have no choice, which is why they
are called obligate carnivores. But we can choose what we eat
for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with our species,
our traditions, our parents, or even our genes. We can choose
to stop eating meat because we feel it is wrong to do so. I don’t
believe any other animal has this astonishing ability.
“Don’t you care about humans?” I have been asked more
times than I like to think. (“You’re on a lifeboat: it’s your life
or the life of the dog. Which do you choose?” We are rarely
on lifeboats.) Of course I do. I am one. My wife is one. My
three children are. I care enough to want to save their health
and our planet. Why, I wonder, does caring for anything other
than our own species mean to some people that we don’t care
about ourselves? Perhaps, if we are suff ering, if the world looks
to be in a bad way, we do feel sometimes that we have only a
limited amount of empathy and need to save it for ourselves. In
extreme conditions, conventional wisdom maintains, we are not
concerned with “lesser” beings. But as is often the case, the con-
ventional wisdom is only conventional—not wise, and not even
true. Think of those people who survived the Holocaust only
to discover that this sharpened and deepened their compassion
for animals. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous comment springs to
mind: “When it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.”
We humans have a divided attitude. On the one hand, we
want to claim that we are just like animals (which, when you
consider that mice and men share about 97.5 percent of their
working DNA, only 1 percent less than chimps and humans, is
obviously true at some fundamental level). On the other hand,
we see ourselves as entirely separate, not just a diff erent species
but an altogether diff erent category of species. We are, above
all, not animals. I have recently noticed how often the phrase
“like an animal” is used in outrage. In David Lynch’s fi lm The
Elephant Man, John Merrick is chased by a crowd until he has
no escape. Finally, turning unmasked to his tormentors, he bel-
lows: “I am not an animal!” This seems to imply that had he
been an animal, the torment would be legitimate. In The Road
to Wigan Pier, George Orwell sees an exhausted woman, with
a desolate and hopeless expression, for a fl eeting instant:
It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that
“It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,” and
that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but
the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the igno-
rant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what
was happening to her—understood as well as I did how
dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter
cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a
stick up a foul drain-pipe.14
No doubt there are people who truly believe that if animals
are unaware how appalling the suff ering they must bear is, then
we should have no compunction in perpetrating it or feel no
obligation to end it. Yet if animals do not “know” they are
being tortured but merely suff er at an elemental level, surely
this means we have an even greater responsibility to stop the
suff ering? Jeremy Bentham’s famous remark belongs here:
“The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ Nor, ‘Can they talk?’
But, rather, ‘Can they suff er?’ ”
Another argument put forward to “prove” that humans are
not by nature vegans is that there has never been a single soci-
ety in the history of humanity that was vegan or nearly vegan.
While this is strictly true, a claim could be made that Jainism
comes as close as any society has to encouraging a near-vegan
lifestyle.15 Perhaps this is why George Bernard Shaw once said,
“I would like to be reborn in a Jain community.”
A few months ago, I went to visit my old friend Professor
Padmanabh S. Jaini, Professor Emeritus of Buddhism, Jain-
ism, and Hinduism at the University of California at Berkeley,
and arguably the preeminent Jain scholar in the world. Profes-
sor Jaini is a bit like me. We both enjoy unusual gems from
ancient literature. When I told him the purpose of my visit
(to learn more about Jain attitudes toward vegetarianism), he
immediately provided me with one such gem. He told me that
Jains speak of the three makaras (or words that begin with the
letter “m”) that must be avoided. They are madhya, mamsa,
and madhu—liquor, meat, and, to my surprise, honey!
Jains are not, strictly speaking, vegan. They eat no eggs, but
they do eat butter and cheese. So I was surprised by the remark
about honey. Vegans do not eat honey because it is an animal
product. The argument (with which I agree) is that bees make
honey for themselves, not for us. So, when we take their honey,
we are engaging in theft. Robbing the Bees is incidentally the
name of an excellent book about bee keeping! How could I
learn more about this prohibition? From my host, of course.
Professor Jaini immediately chanted a verse for me from a
twelfth-century text, the Yogasastra, by the Jain author Hema-
candra, which translates as:
One who eats honey, which is manufactured by the
destruction of tens of thousands of tiny beings, is
worse than a butcher, who only kills a single animal at
a time.16
I remember visiting Jain temples in India. Often over the main
entrance I would see inscribed: Ahimsa paramo dharmah—
Ahimsa (non-violence) is the highest religion. Jainism as a
religion predates Buddhism, probably by about 250 years. It
is the only religion in the world founded on this principle of
ahimsa. Ahimsa refers to the attempt to live without causing
any harm to other sentient beings. It is a noble ideal. The Bud-
dha believed in it, as did Mahatma Gandhi. The Jain scriptures
explain that all living beings want to live and do not want to
die. This idea has occurred to many people, religious and irre-
ligious, over the centuries. It is the kind of insight that even
small children suddenly develop. I have heard a seven-year-old
child say that she will not eat meat because the animal from
which the meat derived “did not want to die.”
I do not fi nd it surprising that the Jains, the Buddhists,
and the Hindus have all taken seriously the lives of others.
The ability to imagine ourselves into the minds and bodies
of “others”—whether humans we term diff erent from us
(Down syndrome children; Alzheimer suff erers; the so-called
mentally ill) or the animals we use for our food—is of central
importance because the failure to do so is precisely what led
to the horrors of Auschwitz. So, when people ask, Have you
nothing more important to think about? the answer is: There
is nothing more important to think about than the heart of
empathy, which in the fi nal analysis is nothing other than the
ability to love. Becoming a vegan is simply one manifestation
of that love.
of Toronto in the 1970s, I came across a phrase that stopped
me dead: ashrayaparavrtti—a sudden moment of life-changing
insight. Paravrtti is like a somersault, and ashraya is one’s
home base, so it means letting go of everything you have always
believed or understood for a leap into the unknown. The Chris-
tian equivalent is known as the Road to Damascus experience
in which Saul (later St. Paul) underwent a conversion on his way
to Damascus to slaughter Christians and instead became one.
Many people become vegan in just that way: a sudden
moment, a blinding insight, a turning one’s back on conven-
tional wisdom, in this case, conventional diet. How did it
happen for me? Well, I had the good fortune to grow up in a
vegetarian family: my parents were “disciples” of a vegetar-
ian guru, Paul Brunton. Even when I gave up the belief in the
Hinduism and Buddhism that he taught, I still maintained my
belief in the value of ahimsa, not doing harm, which included
not doing harm through one’s diet. Later, at Toronto, I had a
negative epiphany: what was I doing teaching this language
that had lost its magic for me? I entered psychoanalytic train-
ing. Alas, giving up Sanskrit somehow entailed giving up my
vegetarian ways. One day, after becoming a Freudian psycho-
analyst, I had another transformative moment: I was sitting at
Freud’s desk at Maresfi eld Gardens in London. I opened one
of the drawers, and found a stash of letters, all of which dealt
with the “hidden” reality of the sexual abuse of children. That
was to become my concern (some would call it an obsession)
over the next ten years. Only when I decided that I could no
longer be a psychoanalyst in good conscience did I reconnect
with my former vegetarian self: I started investigating the emo-
tional lives of animals, and what I learned turned me back into
a lifelong vegetarian.
During that time, I can remember hearing César Chávez say
that if you want to lessen animal suff ering, you would do bet-
ter to eat meat and give up dairy and eggs. Again, one of those
defi ning moments for me. Everything I thought I knew was
suddenly challenged, but I also knew that I was not yet ready
for such a challenge. I turned my back on that moment. Yet I
understood even then that sooner or later I would have to face
up to what I could no longer ignore.
That moment came for me when I began to visit dairy farms
and hen-laying facilities and saw the misery and suff ering that
the animals endured just so that we could enjoy their milk and
eggs. My denial was no longer possible, and I took the leap. I
have asked some other vegans how it happened for them, and
got some interesting answers. John Mackey, the CEO of Whole
Foods, told me: “I remember one day in August of 2003 I made
the decision to become (near) vegan and that once the decision
was made I felt great emotional alignment within my heart. I
knew this was the right thing for me to do and I also knew that
I was making a decision that I would be committed to for the
rest of my life. At last my beliefs and my ethics had come into
alignment.” Stanley Godlovitch, one of the people who began
the back-to-vegetarianism movement in the 1970s (he and a
friend fi rst confronted Peter Singer, then a graduate student in
philosophy at Oxford and now the best known animal rights
author, about eating meat), told me recently that every veg-
etarian who drinks milk or eats eggs knows from scratch that
there’s “something not quite right.” But for him and his wife,
“the push came from our teenage son Daniel, who brought out
the ancient Consistency Cannon over dinner and fi red at will.
I guess I must have been poised, ready, and that was it.”
There is a general feeling among the public at large that to
be concerned with the way animals live, or to become vegetar-
ian or even vegan, is now not nearly as odd as it once seemed.
Consider that the mainstream group Conservation Interna-
tional (CI) has partnered with McDonald’s to promote The Bee
Movie! When I saw that movie, I heard kids walk out vowing
never to eat honey unless it was “bee-approved.” On their Web
site, CI asks that children take the following pledge: “I recog-
nize that I play an important role in the future of our planet.
I pledge to get outside and do my part to learn about nature
and to protect all living things. I will be a force for good in my
neighborhood.” Protect all living things—even bees. Sounds
good. But how, exactly, does eating at McDonald’s accomplish
this? The old cliché still applies: We want the steak but don’t
want to hear about the slaughterhouse. That is why I devote a
full chapter to denial.
Sometimes denial, though, is just ignorance. I was having
dinner in Thailand in 2007 with my friend Stan Sesser, a writer
for the Wall Street Journal (he has also been a staff writer at
The New Yorker and food critic for the San Francisco Exam-
iner). He asked me why I don’t eat eggs or dairy. I told him it
was because of the cruelty involved. He was taken aback, never
having heard of this problem before. It had been the same for
me, and I am convinced that most people just are not aware
of how these animals suff er so that we can eat their eggs and
drink their milk.
We don’t hear the assertion very often today that animals were
born to be slaves, destined to be eaten, that they evolved for our
benefi t. It would take a certain kind of religious fundamentalist
to assert this. However, there is an assertion that is not all that
far removed. This time it is not about the animals, it is about us.
That we are the ones born to eat meat, the ones destined to do
the eating (as opposed to being eaten), and the ones who evolved
to hunt and kill our food. I have rarely seen this more baldly
expressed than by John Buff alo Mailer, in a dialogue with his
father, Norman Mailer: “You know, one of the outcomes of liv-
ing in such an organized society where everything is taken care
of—men don’t go out, kill their food, and bring it back, etc.—
is there’s a complicity, almost a sense of deliberately forgetting
that when you get right down to it, ultimately we’re animals.
We will fi ght each other down to our last bite when our own is
attacked. And I don’t know if this is true of everybody, but 95
percent of the time when I meet another man, under it all is that
sense of ‘Could I take you or could you take me?’ ”1
Perhaps if you are the son of Norman Mailer, this is under-
standable. I doubt that the rest of us constantly wonder about
the outcome of a fi ght with every male we encounter. But the
greater cliché is the earlier one, that in the past a man went
“out,” killed a formidable adversary, and returned with food
for his famished family. You can’t blame John Mailer for
believing this myth—after all, it has been fed to us for many
years now by the leading lights of anthropology departments
in American universities: Man the hunter. The myth goes back
a long way, and has an impeccable scientifi c pedigree. No less a
scientist than Charles Darwin believed it, along with the view
that women depended on men for survival—“Man is more
powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage
state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than
does the male of any other animal.”2
Hunting has been described as “the master behavior pattern
of the human species,” something that men have been practic-
ing for 99 percent of human history. The main message of the
infl uential book African Genesis (1961), by Robert Ardrey, the
anthropologist and Hollywood screen writer, was that we are
killer apes, who wiped out our peaceful vegetarian brothers.
His last book, published in 1976, was simply called The Hunt-
ing Hypothesis. These books had a notable infl uence on Arthur
C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s fi lm 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But in the 1980s this view was challenged, successfully it seems
to me, by female anthropologists with a broader vision, which
culminated in an excellent collection of essays called Woman
the Gatherer.3 This showed that all the evidence suggests that
the early human diet was omnivorous, so that meat was far less
important than previously thought. Plant foods provided the
staple diet of most hunter-gatherer societies (with the excep-
tion of those in the Far North) and these foods were provided
by women. Gathering plants required less energy than going
after mobile animals, the food provided a more stable diet, and
it was less dangerous to acquire. The women who gathered
these plant foods were social, food-sharing, and nurturing peo-
ple, and they were able to exert enormous pressure on men by
choosing those same qualities in men as mates.
This hypothesis has received very strong support recently
from Milton Mills, a researcher who graduated from Stanford
University School of Medicine in 1991 and now practices med-
icine at the Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. He is writing
a book which takes the position that people are slowly backing
into the truth: That humans are anatomically and physiologi-
cally adapted for a diet comprised primarily or entirely of plant
foods. I spent some time with Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard
in 1999, and he too told me that his study of human dentition
had convinced him that we were, evolutionarily speaking, pri-
marily herbivores.
Dr. Mills has taken this hypothesis further than anyone else
I know, and had already started to do so while he was a medical
student at Stanford. He uses as evidence comparative anatomy.
The simple proof is the shape of the human head—carnivores
have wide mouths, suitable for swallowing large chunks of
meat; we have small mouths, suitable for softer plant foods—
and the human jaw—when the jaws of a carnivore close, there
is a slicing motion that we lack; our jaw joint would be easily
dislocated if we tried to subdue struggling prey or crush bones.
Carnivorous animals do not chew their food but gorge rapidly,
whereas we humans need to eat slowly; the capacious single-
chambered stomach of carnivores contrasts with the stomach
of herbivores, which is a simple structure, with a long small
intestine; and the human colon has the pouched structure
typical of herbivores. Finally, human teeth are similar to those
found in other herbivores: our canines are neither serrated
nor conical, but fl attened, blunt, and small; our incisors are
fl at and spadelike, useful for peeling and biting relatively soft
materials. Human saliva contains the carbohydrate-digesting
enzyme, salivary amylase: if we attempted to swallow a large
amount of food poorly chewed, we would choke—just watch
how your dog swallows meat. In short, concludes Dr. Mills,
human beings have the mouth and gastrointestinal tract struc-
ture of a committed herbivore.
Think, too, how diffi cult it would be for an early human,
not armed in any way, to use his own body to kill a large ani-
mal. After all, humans at the time were less than fi ve feet tall,
and weighed less than 110 pounds.4 They were hardly a for-
midable adversary against the much more powerful hunting
and scavenging animals. Our nails are not claws. Notice the
damage that even a small animal like your cat can infl ict on
unprotected human skin. Cats are obligate carnivores: killing
machines. Imagine meeting and trying to subdue an animal ten
times that size. Indeed, in a recent book, the anthropologists
Donna Hart and Robert Sussman argue that for much of our
evolutionary history, humans have been hunted by other, more
powerful animals.5 In eff ect, we were the prey of any number
of predators, including the big cats, as well as dogs, hyenas,
snakes, crocodiles, and even birds. As a species, we would
have been wiped out long ago had we not depended on easily
accessible plants and fruits.6 Moreover, when researchers feed
animal fats and animal protein in large amounts to captive pri-
mates, it produces atherogenic eff ects (that is, they give you
heart attacks, hardly a good survival strategy).7
The archeologist Lewis Binford has published a series of
infl uential books arguing that there is no evidence for the
human transport and consumption of large quantities of meat.
Instead, he suggests that members of the early hominids were
marginal scavengers, at the bottom of the hierarchy of meat
eaters on the African savannah, sneaking in after the lions, the
hyenas, and the vultures had had their fi ll.8
Consider how gross just about everyone fi nds the idea of
eating carrion or rotting fl esh. Dogs don’t mind at all. In fact,
as we all know, they revel in it—rolling in it and eagerly seek-
ing it out. Carnivores prefer raw meat to cooked meat. Except
in unusual cases, we like our meat disguised. The more natu-
ral it looks, the more likely it is to cause disgust and physical
aversion. Part of this, I recognize, is custom. Nobody, surely,
takes pleasure in the thought of killing a rabbit with their bare
hands and then dismembering it and gulping down the raw
fl esh. Just reading these lines, I imagine, will make many a
reader queasy.
We really know very little about what is “natural” when
it comes to human behavior, and all attempts to proclaim
some preferred behavior as entirely “natural” is almost always
doomed to failure. This is especially true when it comes to
human diets in the past. For a while we were treated in the
mass media to the Paleolithic diet. Much can be learned from
traditional diets and just about any traditional diet would be
preferable to the junk food and heavily processed food we eat
today. Yet I agree with the authoritative recent opinion of The
Cambridge History of World Food that we are not going to
return to a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, and that, in fact,
history sheds no light on an ideal diet.
Nor, really, can we rely on the argument that we are “ani-
mals,” since animals eat entirely distinct foods. Primates?
Yes, chimpanzees do engage in hunting behavior, from time
to time,9 but gorillas do not. The kind of generalizations that
were common among popular historians at the beginning of
the twentieth century have fallen out of favor, and when one
reads the German amateur historian Oswald Spengler, famous
for his The Decline of the West, one can see why. He said,
“The human race ranks highly because it belongs to the class
of beasts of prey . . . [Man] lives engaged in aggression, killing,
annihilation. . . . Man is a beast of prey. I shall say it again and
again. The traders in virtue, the champions of social ethics, are
but beasts of prey with their teeth broken.”10
What some people mean when they talk about eating meat
is that since other animals hunt, kill, and eat one another, and
we are just another animal, why should we not do the same?
But if you observe what your cat and dog like to eat, you will
immediately recognize that we are somewhat diff erent in our
tastes. Even more important, which animal are we meant to
resemble most? After all, of the approximately 4,200 mammals,
only a small number are carnivores. There are surely as many
herbivores as there are carnivores, and many animals never kill
other animals. It is true that animals seem to have no choice
in the matter. No member of a carnivore species has ever been
known to choose only roots and fruits. We seem to be the only
animal that can “decide” to become a vegetarian.11 But vegetar-
ians cannot always take the high ground when it comes to other
behaviors, such as believing that if they eat no fl esh, they are
automatically a better person. A vegetarian can be as danger-
ous to his or her neighbor as someone who eats meat. Similarly,
animals who do not eat meat are not necessarily more gentle.
There is a common myth that carnivores are more dangerous to
humans than herbivores. Carnivorous wolves, however, avoid
humans whenever possible, and herbivorous elephants some-
times “decide” to kill people (as I learned when I attempted
to get too close to a matriarch with a small baby next to her).
No animals are more dangerous to humans than the com-
pletely non-carnivorous Cape buff alo, rhinoceros, and hippo.
They would not eat us; but they often kill us. You can be as
bad-tempered eating only grass as you can be eating only other
animals. So I would not argue that human vegetarians are more
peaceable than other humans—except to other animals.
What about the claim that the human brain owes its size to eat-
ing meat? It is true that the human brain is twice as encephalized
as is the brain of an adult chimpanzee and three to fi ve times
as large as would be expected for average body mass. Reviews
of hunter-gatherer diets indicate that meat varies from 12 to 86
percent of the total daily caloric intake per capita. In contrast,
animal products represent only about 5 percent of the average
daily calories consumed by chimpanzees, most of them eaten by
adult males. Thus, many researchers have claimed that meat is
what accounts for our large brains. But brain growth in humans
is generally restricted to a critical window of opportunity fol-
lowing birth, for brain weight accounts for 12 percent of body
weight at birth in all primate neonates, including humans.
The greater rate of growth occurs in humans during the fi rst
year and any dietary advantage therefore must be transferred
through breast milk. But milk quantity and quality is surpris-
ingly consistent cross-culturally and it is not dependent on
diet. The macronutrients are supplied by nature and have little
to do with any other variable. Comparisons of breast milk
from vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous mothers have shown
no diff erence in DHA (docosahexanoic acid) content. There
is absolutely no evidence that the breast-fed children of vegan
mothers suff er smaller brain sizes. Regardless of the ecological
circumstances, it would seem that all infants obtain or pro-
duce enough of the specifi c lipids they need to create the large
brains distinctive of our species.12
Some people, when they speak of eating meat as “natural,”
are not necessarily referring to our evolutionary past. They
simply mean that they have always eaten meat, and that most
other people on earth have always eaten meat. It is the human
tradition. Yet, as Gary Francione, distinguished professor of
law and philosophy at Rutgers University, points out: “Were
we slaves to tradition, Rosa Parks would still be riding in the
back of the bus.”13 It should also be pointed out that many tra-
ditional societies either did not eat meat for ethical or religious
reasons (as in India and many Buddhist countries) or ate very
little because it was simply not feasible on an economic basis
(rural China and other countries in Southeast Asia). I recently
visited the island of Efate in the New Hebrides, and learned
that except in Port Vila, the capital, most people rarely eat
meat simply because they cannot aff ord it. The men, who go
just about everywhere by running barefoot, look remarkably
fi t and athletic. The fact that your parents ate meat is not an
argument unless you feel that you must maintain all the values
of your parents or the community in which you were raised.
But even could we maintain that it is, in fact, natural to eat
meat, this would not weigh very heavily in the ethical scale.
Aristotle argued that it was natural to keep slaves. We believe
he was wrong. But even if he were right, would we not argue
that what is natural may not be what is moral or what we
choose to do? “Fighting,” or even weighing ourselves against
other men, may indeed be “natural,” but few men wish to be
enslaved to their nature in this way. Indeed, are we not human
precisely because, unlike just about any other animal, we can
choose our diet? The big cats have no choice, which is why they
are called obligate carnivores. But we can choose what we eat
for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with our species,
our traditions, our parents, or even our genes. We can choose
to stop eating meat because we feel it is wrong to do so. I don’t
believe any other animal has this astonishing ability.
“Don’t you care about humans?” I have been asked more
times than I like to think. (“You’re on a lifeboat: it’s your life
or the life of the dog. Which do you choose?” We are rarely
on lifeboats.) Of course I do. I am one. My wife is one. My
three children are. I care enough to want to save their health
and our planet. Why, I wonder, does caring for anything other
than our own species mean to some people that we don’t care
about ourselves? Perhaps, if we are suff ering, if the world looks
to be in a bad way, we do feel sometimes that we have only a
limited amount of empathy and need to save it for ourselves. In
extreme conditions, conventional wisdom maintains, we are not
concerned with “lesser” beings. But as is often the case, the con-
ventional wisdom is only conventional—not wise, and not even
true. Think of those people who survived the Holocaust only
to discover that this sharpened and deepened their compassion
for animals. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous comment springs to
mind: “When it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.”
We humans have a divided attitude. On the one hand, we
want to claim that we are just like animals (which, when you
consider that mice and men share about 97.5 percent of their
working DNA, only 1 percent less than chimps and humans, is
obviously true at some fundamental level). On the other hand,
we see ourselves as entirely separate, not just a diff erent species
but an altogether diff erent category of species. We are, above
all, not animals. I have recently noticed how often the phrase
“like an animal” is used in outrage. In David Lynch’s fi lm The
Elephant Man, John Merrick is chased by a crowd until he has
no escape. Finally, turning unmasked to his tormentors, he bel-
lows: “I am not an animal!” This seems to imply that had he
been an animal, the torment would be legitimate. In The Road
to Wigan Pier, George Orwell sees an exhausted woman, with
a desolate and hopeless expression, for a fl eeting instant:
It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that
“It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,” and
that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but
the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the igno-
rant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what
was happening to her—understood as well as I did how
dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter
cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a
stick up a foul drain-pipe.14
No doubt there are people who truly believe that if animals
are unaware how appalling the suff ering they must bear is, then
we should have no compunction in perpetrating it or feel no
obligation to end it. Yet if animals do not “know” they are
being tortured but merely suff er at an elemental level, surely
this means we have an even greater responsibility to stop the
suff ering? Jeremy Bentham’s famous remark belongs here:
“The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ Nor, ‘Can they talk?’
But, rather, ‘Can they suff er?’ ”
Another argument put forward to “prove” that humans are
not by nature vegans is that there has never been a single soci-
ety in the history of humanity that was vegan or nearly vegan.
While this is strictly true, a claim could be made that Jainism
comes as close as any society has to encouraging a near-vegan
lifestyle.15 Perhaps this is why George Bernard Shaw once said,
“I would like to be reborn in a Jain community.”
A few months ago, I went to visit my old friend Professor
Padmanabh S. Jaini, Professor Emeritus of Buddhism, Jain-
ism, and Hinduism at the University of California at Berkeley,
and arguably the preeminent Jain scholar in the world. Profes-
sor Jaini is a bit like me. We both enjoy unusual gems from
ancient literature. When I told him the purpose of my visit
(to learn more about Jain attitudes toward vegetarianism), he
immediately provided me with one such gem. He told me that
Jains speak of the three makaras (or words that begin with the
letter “m”) that must be avoided. They are madhya, mamsa,
and madhu—liquor, meat, and, to my surprise, honey!
Jains are not, strictly speaking, vegan. They eat no eggs, but
they do eat butter and cheese. So I was surprised by the remark
about honey. Vegans do not eat honey because it is an animal
product. The argument (with which I agree) is that bees make
honey for themselves, not for us. So, when we take their honey,
we are engaging in theft. Robbing the Bees is incidentally the
name of an excellent book about bee keeping! How could I
learn more about this prohibition? From my host, of course.
Professor Jaini immediately chanted a verse for me from a
twelfth-century text, the Yogasastra, by the Jain author Hema-
candra, which translates as:
One who eats honey, which is manufactured by the
destruction of tens of thousands of tiny beings, is
worse than a butcher, who only kills a single animal at
a time.16
I remember visiting Jain temples in India. Often over the main
entrance I would see inscribed: Ahimsa paramo dharmah—
Ahimsa (non-violence) is the highest religion. Jainism as a
religion predates Buddhism, probably by about 250 years. It
is the only religion in the world founded on this principle of
ahimsa. Ahimsa refers to the attempt to live without causing
any harm to other sentient beings. It is a noble ideal. The Bud-
dha believed in it, as did Mahatma Gandhi. The Jain scriptures
explain that all living beings want to live and do not want to
die. This idea has occurred to many people, religious and irre-
ligious, over the centuries. It is the kind of insight that even
small children suddenly develop. I have heard a seven-year-old
child say that she will not eat meat because the animal from
which the meat derived “did not want to die.”
I do not fi nd it surprising that the Jains, the Buddhists,
and the Hindus have all taken seriously the lives of others.
The ability to imagine ourselves into the minds and bodies
of “others”—whether humans we term diff erent from us
(Down syndrome children; Alzheimer suff erers; the so-called
mentally ill) or the animals we use for our food—is of central
importance because the failure to do so is precisely what led
to the horrors of Auschwitz. So, when people ask, Have you
nothing more important to think about? the answer is: There
is nothing more important to think about than the heart of
empathy, which in the fi nal analysis is nothing other than the
ability to love. Becoming a vegan is simply one manifestation
of that love.
)