Animal rights in the business section?

The New York Times has a story in the business section today on animal rights groups uniting around environmentalist arguments for vegetarianism-- and criticizing meat-eating environmentalists. I'm not a fan of the tactics Peta or HSUS uses, but this is certainly an issue we can all agree on. Meat = bad for environment, period. I'm not sure how I feel about going after Gore in particular though. I'm *not* saying he's beyond reproach, and certainly we need to talk about why the standard American diet wasn't mentioned in "An Inconvenient Truth," (ditto for the shop-happy consumerist green "solutions" getting so much press these days) but I think this is just another one of Peta's alienating tactics. By attacking an individual often seen as moving us in the right direction, I think Peta makes itself look negative and anti-people as usual. It's not as ridiculous as their letter to Michael Moore but similar in that they criticize a "liberal" for not incorporating vegetarianism (why can't we just start saying vegan already?) into their message and choose to make their arguments in a kinda nasty way rather than a "hey! you forgot this!" kind of way. You have the right arguments... so why use such yucky tactics ? I know, I know, nothing new there. Since most people think all vegans and animal people are automatically in line with Peta though (including the New York Times) it is frustrating.

Oh, and I also don't like their insinuating chickens aren't brave or something... don't they have it hard enough guys, hmm?

Read more:
*New York Times: Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change
*Alternet: So You're an Environmentalist; Why Are You still Eating Meat?
*Treehugger: Vegan Diets Healthier for Planet
*Go Veg: Meat and the Environment

He's just not that into your vegetables

'Cause you know I wanna date that guy right there. Eww.

It's sorta become part of my morning ritual: orange juice, toast, the eternal wash-hair-or-don't-wash-hair debate and a batshit crazy offensive article from the New York Times. Whether it's a piece on which outer borough neighborhood a trendy lady should gentrify (to save money for shoes, natch!) or Pulitzer Prize winner William Safire doing something straight up racist (I know the guy's gone now-- but tell me how someone who writes a column called "On Language" and doesn't think to look up the word "Womanism," which he had apparently thought he made up... for a *terrible* punchline no less) I can always count on The Paper of Record to remind me why I need to get out of bed and go yell at some people.

Anyway, today brought us "Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye" which is actually not about being yourself at all (least of all us vegan girls) but instead how to trick men into thinking you are going to be the least amount of hastle for them. Oh and clogging your arteries while you do it. Sexy. Excuse me while I get all Carol Adams on you NYT but I really do think that the fact that beef (especially the $$$ steak) has been fetishized and imbued with such meaning ("eating this dead hunk of animal means i'm 'one of the guys!' dontcha know?") is indicative of just how troubled we are by eating it. Certainly there are less conflicted food choices. No one gets too worried about pasta or curry for instance. I do not think it's a coincidence that we choose to read manliness into steak either. Beef is the *one* animal food that I've never heard a "vegetarian" say they eat (we all know those pesky pesce- and pollo- people). It's just uncompromisingly dead, red, bloody animal and we know it. To justify this then there is then an ethos of; "Hey, look, I had to kill it and eat it because my raw, violent masculine energy DEMANDED it." Right. Women then, according to the NYT can borrow a bit of this manliness (an ironically homosexual tactic to bait/hunt/catch a man) since it's you know, that particularly narrow vision of masculinity is so entirely unproblemmatic and all.

Insert mandatory self-deprecating vegansexual joke here.

Be Yourselves, Girls