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I’ve just barely cracked open Tristram Stuart’s 600-some page new book, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times, but I know enough about it to leap wildly to two conclusions: a) It deserves more than a blog entry to appraise it; and, b) it isn’t about Stuart trying to persuade anyone to subsist on seitan and short-grain brown rice. (If it were, he wouldn’t spend so much time on how Hitler’s abstaining from meat conflicted with his monumental cruelty.) So why do some reviewers treat the book as an attack on our right to eat meat?

Not every reviewer, of course: Steven Shapin in The New Yorker simply reviews the book and loves it (“a magnificently detailed and wide-ranging collection of scholarship . . .”); Salon’s Laura Miller, noting that few other subjects provoke such defensiveness, simply reviews the book and dislikes it: “[Vegetarians] have a reputation for being priggish, fanatical, kooky and a nuisance to hostesses, and unfortunately the parade of eccentrics that marches across the pages . . . only confirms that image.”

But Daniel Lazare in The Nation, although he starts out charitable in a review headlined “My Beef with Vegetarianism,” seems to regard The Bloodless Revolution as a declaration of intent: It's as if Lazare thinks Stuart wants him to pry his greasy jaws from that leg of organic mutton he's so proud of and surrender to "the silly defeatism of tofu and sprouts." He takes full advantage of those kooks Miller complained about, and he accuses Stuart of not doing a whole bunch of stuff a book on vegetarianism has no business doing, like considering “the possibility of meat produced according to the strictest environmental standards.”

Most of all, Lazare, appears to believe that avoiding meat denies mankind’s dominion over nature. And “[d]enying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even—dare we say it—to improve nature as well.”

Really? And here I thought my careful and occasional consumption of fish, following the guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, combined with my not-too-strict diet of vegetable protein and plants, was actually a way of accepting my “supreme responsibility” to safeguard the environment. What causes Lazare to leap from Stuart’s exhaustive and admittedly “cultural” history to this indictment of vegetarianism as the root of our ecological ills?

I can only conclude this: He was one of those guys who fell for that weird Hummer ad. You know, the one that equated tofu-eating with sissiness, and urged veggie-men to "restore the balance" (of their hormones?) by buying a Hummer.

Vegetarianism makes people nervous. When you tell someone you’re a vegetarian, seven out of 10 omnivores – a conservative estimate – will feel obligated to tell you, a) why he or she is not a vegetarian; b) how he or she used to be a vegetarian but came to understand that he or she simply craved meat; and/or c) why you need to eat meat: You will become anemic, suffer early menopause or, in the case of men, turn effeminate.

Except for those brief lapses when I tried to adapt to the eating habits of unsympathetic friends or family members, I have not consumed the flesh of beast or fowl since I was 14. I have never asked that anyone else give up meat; I frankly don’t believe everybody should. I became a vegetarian mostly to get out of eating my mother’s weekly liver suppers.

But the fact is, good reasons to not eat meat -- or to eat less meat -- abound. For starters, there’s resource issue: As Frances Moore Lappé wrote in her 1972 Diet for a Small Planet, “it takes 16 pounds of grain and soybeans to produce just one pound of beef.” That hasn’t changed in 35 years; if anything, the ratio’s gotten worse.

Then there’s the health issue. People love to tell me how all the vegetarians they know are sick, and I don’t know what to say to them. None of the vegetarians I know are sick, and I’m certainly rarely sick, and even Michael Pollan, in yet another delightfully sane trip into the world of What We Eat in this week’s New York Times Magazine, casually drops the assertion that vegetarians tend to be healthier than meat eaters.

My mother would have chafed at this: As a young woman living through the Second World War in Canada, she donated too much blood, became anemic, and was prescribed a liver diet and recovered. For the rest of her days she associated her good health, and ours, with liver. But at 56, my mother died of colon cancer, a fate I can’t help but blame on a diet high in organ meats and iron supplements and low in fiber.

When I get right down to the bone of my own eating philosophy, though, I avoid meat mostly for emotional reasons, the same emotional reasons with which Stuart introduces The Bloodless Revolution, quoting early 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville: “I question whether ever anybody so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time, yet all of them feed heartily and without remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.”

I eat some fish because I can and have killed fish, not remorselessly, but at least not with the great grief and tears that would follow my bringing down, say, a deer. It seems dishonest to me to eat something I’d be unwilling to kill.

But if you can stomach the hunting and shooting of deer, and you eat those deer and make moccasins from their hides, I salute you; I really do. I would ask, though, that you not fight the reintroduction of natural predators just so you can have more game to pursue. And eat your venison with a good helping of wild rice and sweet potatoes. Whether you’re exercising your dominion over nature or just eating food you like, you still need the fiber.

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