Religion, Politics and (of course) Food …what really matters is Speed

"Americans don't dine. They gobble, gulp, and go."—A 19th Century European traveler, quoted in The Good Old Days—They Were Terrible! by Dr. Otto L. Bettman

"I love most things from the US except McDonald's, your football and this fiasco of electing a president."—
Graham J. Weeks

I'm sitting here reading a news story about ConAgra, the huge food conglomerate, recalling 1.45 million pounds of corn flour and other products because they may contain StarLink biotech corn. That corn, in turn, might possibly cause allergic reactions in some people. Now, while I certainly don't have any problem with such a display of concern about the public's welfare, as a vegetarian I do have to wonder why ConAgra doesn't also recall its "Big Mama" pickled sausage, or its "300% hotter" cousin, "Tijuana Mama". After all, those products, along with countless other ConAgra "foods," contain ingredients (animal fat, nitrates and nitrites, etc.) that, without a doubt, cause cancer and heart disease.

Hmmm…. A company recalls products that are possibly linked to allergies, but leaves products on the market that are certainly linked to much more serious diseases. Why?

Well, I could chalk it up to the craziness of meat-eaters, but I think the real answer is speed. Allergies manifest themselves right away, while heart disease and cancer take a lot longer. And in modern America if something isn't going to occur quickly, we really don't care. Call us when it happens.

Of course, nowhere in our culture is the "need for speed" more apparent than in our food industry. I stopped at a grocery store this morning in search of oatmeal, and was surprised to see that even the Quakers (not known to be the fastest group of Americans!) were promising me hot oats in only 5 minutes. If that wasn't fast enough, I could opt for "quick" oats that cook in only 1 minute, or "instant" oats that must cook even before a person can get the package open. Judging from the product selection at my store, it's pretty clear that most Americans want their oats instantaneously.

Even as they race to copy us, the rest of the world makes fun of this American preoccupation with speed. Sometimes their criticism even gets serious, like just last week when a prominent Catholic theologian criticized McDonald's in an Italian newspaper. In an article endorsed by the Catholic Bishops' Conference, Massimo Salani denounced the eat-and-run culture promoted by McDonald's, and warned that eating a Big Mac with fries was the antithesis of receiving communion. He said fast food "completely forgets the holiness of food," should be spurned by Catholics, and is appropriate only for atheists, or possibly Lutherans.

Wow, those are strong words! There's obviously a "whopper" of a gap between the laid-back, family-oriented Italian Catholics, and those crazy, mile-a-minute, American Quakers! As a Lutheran, I may only be one French fry away from eternal damnation, but I must admit that I share Mr. Salani's views about McDonald's being unholy. Their speed, though, would not be my #1 complaint.

In a culture known for doing things fast, it seems ironic that as I write this nearly two weeks have already passed since the enormously entertaining election of 2000, and we still don't know who the next President of these United States of America is going to be. (Yes, I know that as you read this you know how the election turned out—but that's just the advantage you have of living in the future!)

The election didn't represent a Constitutional crisis, but rather a technological crisis. (When the ballots cast for each candidate are closer than the inherent margin of error in counting those ballots, its pretty hard to identify the winner, no matter how many recounts you have!) In any event, it certainly was a turn of events that for once Americans were the ones keeping everybody waiting. Again the world criticized. (Do they secretly love our speed, or do they just hate whatever we do?)

However the 49 recounts eventually turn out (only you know for sure), the message for America seems clear: what we need in this country are faster elections and slower food. Now, you may think the solution to all this is to ship all the bigwigs at McDonald's to a monastery in Italy and let the Quakers run our next election. Sure it sounds silly, but I'm with you.

A Word About Restaurants

Dining out as a vegetarian can be a gratifying experience. There's a real thrill in finding a new restaurant with an array of creative vegetarian dishes. And, at those places we frequent, there is a certain satisfaction and sense of place to be experienced, knowing that we, along with the rest of the vegetarian community, constitute an important part of the clientele and keep the vegetarian items on the menu.

It goes without saying, however, that the negative side to restaurant eating for the vegetarian looms very large. When navigating the uncharted menu of a new or unfamiliar restaurant, hazards abound for the unwary vegetarian. For every new restaurant that holds some promise, there are at least five others with no redeeming social value. Dinner at one of these can mean an evening of anger, starvation, embarrassment, or all of the above.

As a fairly frequent traveler, I have the fortune, or misfortune, to try lots of new restaurants around the country. Since most of my travel is on business, the choice of these places is often not my own, and the choices are often not the greatest. Below, I've compiled a list of a few disasters that regularly befall the vegetarian restaurant diner. You can probably think of lots more.

1. There's nothing on the menu I can eat. I can't begin to count the number of times this has happened to me. Nor can I describe the sense of horror and panic in sitting down with a group of people and finding nothing (I mean nothing!) on the menu without meat in it. It usually means that one is relegated to the "old standbys" an iceberg lettuce salad and a baked potato. The "old standbys" have saved many a vegetarian from starvation. I once lived on them for a week in Texas.

2. I bet there's nothing on the menu I can eat. This may be the only thing worse than #1 above. It usually happens when you're with a group of people, you're starving, and everyone decides to go to a restaurant with a name like "The Branding Iron" or "Ed's Steak Pit." Not only are you likely to have a miserable meal, but you'll have to spend a couple of hours worrying about it beforehand.

3. My God! There's meat in this! Let's say you find something on the menu that looks all right, and you breathe a sigh of relief and order it. You're still not out of the woods. Restaurants seem to delight in subtly slipping meat into almost everything, especially when it isn't mentioned on the menu. This, of course, is most common in Chinese eateries where shreds of beef are hidden beneath the bamboo shoots and pork invades the egg rolls. But it happens in many other restaurants too. I've found chicken broth in pasta primavera, beef gravy on top of fettuccine Alfredo, and lots of Italian restaurants that put pepperoni in their salads.

4. The "Local Color" Syndrome. It can be said that restaurants in sophisticated big cities will be more likely to have good food for a vegetarian than restaurants in small towns or rural areas. While I've found this to generally be the case, it isn't always true. I've had wonderful vegetarian food in Wyoming and North Carolina and found absolutely terrible, uncreative (and very expensive) restaurants in Los Angeles and New York.

An almost foolproof way I've found to weed out a huge number of undesirable restaurants is to avoid any place that hints of having any measure of "local color." This category of restaurants obviously includes steak places in the Midwest and seafood restaurants along the coasts. But it also includes every restaurant that serves "American Cuisine," has the word "grill" in its name, or has been in the "same location for 20 years." And it includes almost every place with red carpeting and black vinyl chairs. In short, if the "locals love it," a vegetarian won't.

No matter what "local color" restaurant you go into, you'll get the same waitress. Her name is Marge, and she's worked there since she was 17 (she's about 50 now). Marge is pretty saucy and prides herself on being a "colorful character." She thinks vegetarians are communists (see #5 below).

Since you won't see anything vegetarian on the menu, you'll have to ask Marge what vegetables are available. She will curtly respond, "We don't have any vegetables," and will try to make your evening miserable from that point on. She won't even smile when she brings you the "old standbys."

5. Everybody hates me. As if the hazards set forth above aren't enough for the restaurant-going vegetarian, there is one more: by the end of the meal everyone will hate you. Even if you're lucky enough not to get Marge for a waitress, whomever you do get may be just as bad. You can't really blame the country's waiters and waitresses. After all, they've been trained to think their restaurant's prime rib is the absolute height of gastronomic perfection. And even if the vegetarian isn't directly insulting the food, he or she probably is creating some additional work.

If the people you are eating with aren't vegetarians, don't expect them to love you either. They'll be almost as embarrassed as you are when you ask if the soup of the day is made with a chicken stock or if the manicotti sauce has meat in it. While the vegetarian is desperately trying to find something to eat, everyone else at the table will be wondering to themselves why a simple thing like ordering dinner has to be made into such a production.

Sometimes it all gets to be so discouraging that I feel like eating at home the rest of my life, and packing a brown bag whenever I have to travel. But it's usually when I'm at my most demoralized that I get some encouragement—like the time in Wyoming that I found a whole list of fresh vegetables on a steak house menu, or the seafood restaurant in Florida that had wonderful black bean soup without the meat stock. Sometimes it's just a nice waiter who will take pity on me and go out of his way to see that I get fed. When something like that happens, I think maybe, on the whole, restaurants aren't so bad after all.

Save the Meat-Eaters

[Editor's note: The following is the text of a television advertising campaign recently produced for the Save the Meat-Eaters Foundation. Over the coming months it will be rolled out in 37 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.]
 

Off-Screen Announcer: "Half-way around the world, in America, millions of children face malnutrition every day. Won't you help?"

The camera focuses in on an eight-year-old boy dressed in khakis, a polo shirt and Air Jordan sneakers. He has a plaintive look on his face, a half-eaten hamburger in one hand, and dried ketchup at the corners of his mouth.

Announcer: "This is Conner. He lives in the village of Westport, Connecticut with his parents and younger sister Megan. Shockingly, Connor's diet consists almost entirely of hamburgers, chicken nuggets and cows' milk—a diet severely lacking in necessary vitamins, minerals and fiber.

"The story is the same for millions of children across America." [At this point the picture shifts to a group of children eating pizza at a Chuck E. Cheese franchise. A six-foot mouse in a purple shirt and baseball cap looms in the background.] "Left to the mercy of the US school lunch program and their tacky suburban parents, these children will almost certainly grow up fat, unhealthy, and totally lacking in good taste.

"Fortunately, the future doesn't have to be so grim for Connor and his friends. The Save the Meat-Eaters Foundation has helped thousands of meat-eating children like these to enjoy fruitful (and vegetableful) lives." [The picture changes to smiling children shoving string beans up their noses.] "Won't you help? For a donation of as little as $2 a day you can give a six-year-old girl in Indianapolis her first taste of mustard greens, or send a lentil pilaf to a young boy in Scarsdale.

"And when you sponsor a meat-eating child, you will get a picture of that child and receive letters in his or her own handwriting…"

[The camera zooms in on a cute blonde girl reading from her letter. "Dear Mr. Gupta, Thank you for your generous donation of the basmati rice and the dal. All the kids at school said it was the best dal they ever had. We don't miss hamburgers at all anymore, and tomorrow Mrs. Godfrey, our Save the Meat-Eaters counselor, is going to teach us to eat artichokes. God bless you, Mr. Gupta! With help like yours us American kids have a chance to grow up just like kids do in the rest of the world."]

Announcer: "Yes, we are blessed to live in a land where good food is plentiful. But in the United States, a country with a long history of war, privilege for the wealthy, and governments that cater to the agricultural special interests, the choices are limited. Here there is no national health-care program, and doctors are untrained in nutrition and preventative medicine. …Sadly, children are often the first victims." [A screen shot of teenagers drinking Pepsi and eating fried pork rinds in front of a Quickie Mart is accompanied by ominous music.]

"Please call the number at the bottom of your screen today. Save the Meat-Eaters will turn your generous, tax-deductible contribution into whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, and rush them to the places where the need is most critical—Nebraska, Idaho, and (god help us!) Texas. Just imagine the joy on an American teenager's face when he eats his first carrot. Imagine the sense of accomplishment young mothers in Save the Meat-Eaters' training classes will feel when they make their first salad without iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing." [The music turns bright and perky, and the camera shows a smiling mother serving frisee tossed with walnuts and raspberry vinaigrette to her smiling children.]

"It's not too late to make a difference in the life of a meat-eating child. Call the number at the bottom of your screen right now, and support the Save the Meat-Eaters Foundation. You'll be glad you did!"

Miscellaneous Ramblings

This column isn't about anything at all. (Are they ever?) It's just a collection of miscellaneous junk that has been taking up space in my brain (limited capacity you know—something's got to go) for the longest time. There are some questions here (mostly rhetorical) and, of course, a few unenlightened observations. None of them rated a whole column, but I'll feel better getting them off my chest, so here goes.

1. I've been annoyed for years that the dairy industry gets away with blatantly lying about the fat content of its products ("2%" milk is really about 34% calories from fat), but I'm really disappointed that the producers of plant-based milks (soy, rice almond, etc.) use the same deception. It doesn't stop there, either. I recently read the label of a "fat free" salad dressing from one of the health food companies and found that 25% of its calories were from fat. That's fat free? Can't these people make money without lying to their customers?
   
2. And isn't it also annoying that for whatever reason (economies of scale, government support) we have to pay more for those plant-based milks than for cow's milk, when in reality they have to be much simpler and cheaper to produce?
   
3. Speaking of finances, how come restaurants never give us vegetarians a discount when we ask them to exclude the meat and/or dairy ingredients from their meals? After all, when we order the "linguini with shrimp marinara, hold the shrimp," we're saving them big bucks. Couldn't they at least offer to throw on a few artichoke hearts?
   
4. Wouldn't it be nice if there was at least one kind of universally-accepted vegan sandwich that we vegetarians could always count on? Something that we know we could find on the menu at every sandwich shop, deli or truck stop we might walk into? Is that too much to ask? It would make life much easier for us when we're looking for lunch in, say, Jersey City or the suburbs of Des Moines. We're not fussy--a black bean burger or hummus sandwich would do just fine. (No, peanut butter and jelly doesn't count!)
   
5. Does the Department of Agriculture ("DOA") have an obscure regulation somewhere mandating that all prepared foods must have at least one dairy product in them somewhere, even if totally unnecessary? Does someone out there get some kind of perverse pleasure from thinking about us weird vegetarians perusing the ingredients lists on the sides of packages, knowing that we'll invariably find "whey," or "non-fat milk solids" or "caseinate" listed as the 39th item down? (Sure, it's better not to eat prepared foods anyway, but I'm not always up for baking my own crackers.)
   
6. Three cheers for all the folks with lactose intolerance! They probably outnumber vegans a dozen to one, and they create most of the demand for what few truly non-dairy products we can find on our smiling grocers' shelves.
   
7. What would happen if basketball players spit through the whole game the way baseball players do?
   
8. It occurs to me that, despite the availability of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary in the local paper every day, most people still believe meat and dairy products are good for them (at least they believe the good stuff outweighs the bad), and that these "foods" are necessary in their diets. Consider a meat eater and a vegetarian eating side-by-side. Each of them looks over and makes a mental assessment of the other's meal...
   

   Meat-eater: A person can't live on that. My dinner is healthier.
   

   Vegetarian: This person is committing suicide. If he lives 'til dessert it will be a miracle.
   

9. At the observation of the most minor health imperfection (a cough, a sniffle, a heart attack), meat eaters simply cannot resist teasing us vegetarians with the line: "If you ate a good steak once in a while you'd be healthier." I know they are being very witty, but the next time I hear this I'm going to scream. I think if I ever did "eat a good steak" I'd certainly be dead.
   
10. Speaking of which, it is a terrible burden on us vegetarians to represent our minority to the rest of the world. We have to be healthy and vivacious all the time. Sometimes I just don't feel like it.
    
11. Yesterday I noticed the slogan on the front of my local health-food grocery. It said: Helping you to make healthy choices. I wish it said: Helping you to make ethical choices.
    

    There. That's it— that's all I have to say. I feel a lot better now.
    

So Much for Being a Vegetarian… It was Nice While it Lasted

I went off my vegetarian diet yesterday. Yes, it's true. I ate an animal. One that was alive—at least until I ate it. Now it's dead, and I feel bad, in more ways than one. It wasn't even tasty.

It's not that I intended to become a meat-eater again, mind you. It was just something that happened. I was in the park at the time, riding laps on my bicycle. There's one place where the road goes uphill, and I was gasping for breath, trying to keep up my speed against a stiff headwind. That was when this unfortunate creature, whatever it may have been, apparently mistook my open mouth for an inviting cave, and flew right in.

Now, you'd think that at the point the bug entered my mouth it would have realized its mistake and made a quick exit. ("Uh-oh, those stalactites and stalagmites look strangely like teeth! Mayhaps this isn't a cave after all!") But instead, he or she just compounded the problem by making a bee-line (yeah, I suppose it could have been a bee) down my throat. At that point all hope was lost.

I tried to keep from swallowing the poor thing, of course. I coughed and I spit (much to the chagrin of the other bike riders passing by), and I probably looked like I was having convulsions right there on my bicycle. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of that "bug-in-the-throat" feeling. As a matter of fact, I swear I can still feel it the next day. Maybe that's the kind of psychological damage that meat-eating causes!

Before yesterday, I had been a vegetarian for almost 30 years. (Thirty years?! Is that possible? I must have been a very small child when I started.) Now all of that is history, and I feel deceitful even using the "V" word. I feel like all of those people who say they're vegetarian, but what they really mean is, "I've been vegetarian ever since I finished breakfast, and I intend to stay vegetarian right up until lunch." I used to make fun of those people, and now I am one.

If I was going to end my vegetarian diet I suppose I could have picked more pleasurable ways of doing it. I could have eaten lobster dripping in butter, or a greasy cheesesteak sub, or any one of a dozen things I loved back in my meat-eating days. But to tell you the truth, I have no desire for any of those things anymore. They probably would have grossed me out even more than eating that bug. At least the bug was small. At least I didn't get sick.

Of course it's tempting to rationalize my way out of this thing entirely. Last night my neighbor's daughter tried to cheer me up. "You don't know it was a bug," she said with the kind of optimism 14-year-olds often display. "It could have been a piece of a plant." Yeah, I thought for a second, maybe something just fell off of a tree and floated down into my mouth. Then I realized how unlikely that was. No, whatever I ate felt like it was going from point A to point B with a purpose when I got in its way. If it wasn't a bug exploring a cave, it was probably a bug intent on committing hara-kiri in the back of my throat.

So now I have to start all over again. Here's what I'm going to tell people: I'm a new vegetarian. I've been a vegetarian for almost 24 hours now, and I'm proud of myself. I intend to stay a vegetarian too. …At least until the next Oriental restaurant I eat at slips chicken broth into the sauce or hides a piece of shrimp in the "vegetable" spring roll. …At least until some well-meaning friend who doesn't read labels serves me something with gelatin in it. …At least until my next bike ride in the park.

Oh, The Wonders of Those High-Protein Diets!

Everywhere I turn these days I'm reading about people eating more meat. Meat prices are soaring, and the "meat packers" (a euphemism if ever there was one) can scarcely keep up with demand.

Part of this, I think, has to do with the "millennium bug" (which, as we all know, turned out to be nothing more than an entomological hoax cooked up by former KGB agents now in the flashlight-battery business in New Jersey). I can just hear people all across America in mock despair the day after New Years: "Oh gosh, I bought 300 pounds of sirloin steak to get me through the Y2k crisis. Guess I'd better eat it this weekend before it goes bad!"

Of course the current trend towards flesh foods goes way beyond purchases made by America's 250 million militant survivalists the last 2 weeks of December. Indeed, if you look at the numbers you'll find that meat consumption in the US has been way up for some time. (It's a "bull" market, you might say.) The #1 reason for all of this is no secret: Everybody and his brother are on high-protein diets.

I first realized something was up when people started to react to my vegetarianism a little differently. Instead of the usual excuses ("Of course I'd be a vegetarian [sigh]—if only my Bohemian husband and sumo-wrestler son didn't have me chained to the stove boiling hot dogs…"), I started getting aggressive responses ("Vegetarian, huh? [sneer] That's fine for you, but a finely-tuned body like mine needs extra protein [more sneers]."). And my friends changed too. Suddenly, all they wanted to talk about was protein, and how they'd reached dietary Nirvana.

I decided I'd better learn more about these high-protein diets before I got left behind. Here's what I found out:

1. High-Protein Diets are the Latest Thing. Whereas vegetarianism is old news (Adam & Eve, and all that dusty stuff), eating protein is a new and exciting cutting-edge idea. It's the subject of dozens of new self-help books, so you know it must be the right thing to do for the new century. Funny though, I could swear I was on one of these diets myself when I was a fat little kid back in the 1960s. (I was still a fat little kid when I went off that diet, too.) And weren't high-protein diets fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s? (Do the names "Stillman" and "Scarsdale" ring any bells?) Whatever happened to all the folks on those diets?

2. High-Protein Diets are High-Tech Weight Reduction Programs. For years we all thought it was calorie intake vs. calories burned that determined whether we'd be overweight. Now we know better. As long as we don't eat those evil carbohydrates our bodies will burn fat. Isn't it great to discover that those stuffy old laws of thermodynamics don't apply anymore? (It sure makes me feel better about not paying attention in science class!) Of course, there are vegetarian doctors who claim to be able to prove that people on high-protein diets only lose weight because they (1) become dehydrated, (2) go into an abnormal and dangerous state called "ketosis", and/or (3) starve themselves. But what do those doctors know? The algebra they base their calculations on is hopelessly old-fashioned too.

3. High-Protein Diets Cure Diseases. In a recent interview with CNN, protein diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins said his diet, which includes rib-eye steak, roast beef, lobster and butter, cures diabetes and high blood pressure, and reverses heart disease. (With news like this it's no wonder he's sold 9-1/2 million books!) And to think—for so many years everyone (with the possible exception of Woody Allen in Sleeper) believed it was just the opposite. Thank goodness we've finally learned the truth! Thank goodness all those silly health organizations (the American Heart Association, the American Dietetic Association, the National Cholesterol Education Program, the American Cancer Society) that have been endorsing high-fiber, low-fat diets, have finally been put in their place.

4. High-Protein Diets Get People More In Touch With Their Bodies. This has happened to many people I know personally. My friend John, for example, found out from a "doctor" that his blood chemistry was practically screaming at him, demanding that he eat high-protein foods. (This isn't to be confused with the blood-type diet—my friend Sandy is on that one!) My old college buddy Lee, who's never been healthy a day in his life, has been on a hundred different diets over the years and swears high-protein is finally "it". His body is at peace now that he's given up fruit and grains entirely and eats 3 eggs with bacon every morning for breakfast.

And several of my friends claim to have "protein meters" in their bodies that tell them when they are running low. (Are these the same things "Morris the cat" has? How come I didn't get one???) My friend Patty went into virtual "protein shock" one day when she was visiting my house. She ran to my refrigerator for a protein fix and flung open the door with the highest of expectations, only to be hugely disappointed. ("Isn't there anything dead in here?")

5. People Love to Eat High-Protein Foods. Who can argue with this? Wouldn't everyone rather eat a high-protein meal (e.g., a hamburger—plain) instead of something they'd get on a stupid vegetarian diet (e.g., a veggie burger on a Kaiser bun with pickles, lettuce, tomato, onions, roasted red peppers, and a pile of fries on the side)? A while back I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant with a couple of high-protein dieters. After they carefully picked all the green peppers out of their beef stir fry (vegetarians in reverse!) they liked their food so much that they decided to take 90% of it home in a Styrofoam box so they could savor it later. Now that's enjoying a meal!

It's great that the news about the benefits of high-protein diets has gotten out to the masses. The meat industry is happy, the lobster folks are raking in the money, and I guess no one has to feel guilty about anything anymore.

I do feel kind of sorry, though, for all the older vegetarians out there who have already lived, say, 95 or 100 years outside "the Zone" on their outdated high-carbohydrate, low-cholesterol diets. The great news about protein may be coming too late to do them much good. As for the rest of us, though, thank goodness we've been enlightened. If we can just get our protein meters adjusted, we're fixed for life.

People (“People who need people…” and all that)

The other day I was talking to a friend in the animal rights movement, and I happened to mention that people are my favorite animal. I guess that didn't impress her. She looked at me like I'd been eating those funny mushrooms again, and said, "Oh, I don't feel that way at all!"

I can certainly see her point. A quick perusal of the local TV news on any given night will tell you exactly what kind of selfish and vicious animals humans are. Kidnapping, rape and grisly serial murders are everyday events—and that's just in your neighborhood! It's all become so commonplace we take it for granted. Just this past week a friend of mine came home from a business trip and found her house had been robbed. Most of what was taken had little or no value to the thieves, but represented huge sentimental losses to her. Who would do such a thing? People, that's who.

Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the horrors of the factory farm, the slaughterhouse and the medical research laboratory. There's seemingly no end to the violence and the suffering, and virtually everyone we know is in on the action. It's enough to make any vegetarian swear off the human race and spend the rest of his/her life cavorting with frogs and trees.

Okay, so it's no secret that humans are the only animals that commit "inhuman" acts. Sometimes, though, that reality can be overwhelming. It causes us to lose perspective, and that, especially for vegetarians, is a very bad thing.

In those moments when I'm not too depressed about the state of the world, I try to focus my attention on the other side of human existence—the kind and good side of people. Take war, for example. (Yeah, war. There's something that makes me want to live out my life on a deserted island away from people!) But even in war, amidst the pervasive death and destruction, there are constant examples of humans doing extraordinary things. People who have lost everything find something inside them to reach out and give comfort to those in similar circumstances. People give their very lives for their countries and causes. (As misdirected as those efforts sometimes are, the act itself is noble nonetheless.)

And of course astonishing courage, valor and selflessness aren't limited to times of war. I see those values in the people I come in contact with every day—from my friends who are teachers and social workers, to cancer patients dying with dignity, to the retarded man who always bags my groceries with a smile and a cheerful greeting. I see it every day in my vegetarian friends too—people who care so much, and work so hard to eliminate the suffering and disease and environmental destruction caused by eating meat.

People are my favorite animal. I think that's because the same mental and physical capabilities that allow them to do so many horrible things empower them to do extraordinary things as well. And I love those extraordinary things! I can't watch a space shuttle launch without getting a lump in my throat, and when I listen to a Beethoven piano concerto… well, let's just say I've never been anywhere closer to God.

I hate it when I hear meat-eaters say to vegetarians: "You don't care about people." It's an easy cop-out that allows them to feel better at our expense, and it's never true. On the other hand, it's sad when vegetarians and animal rights activists and environmentalists get so caught up in their causes that they momentarily lose their goodwill for humans. Without people the world would be an awfully lonely and boring place.

"Speciesism" seems to be a bad word in the vegetarian and animal rights communities. But I suspect all animals are inherently "speciesist," and a little of that may not be a bad thing for everyone's survival. Maybe it's not so wrong to revel in our humanity, as long as we keep it all in perspective and don't lose our compassion. (Compassion—another one of those characteristics at which humans are capable of excelling!)

Human rights is a mere subset of animal rights, but it's a necessary subset. You simply can't have one without the other. When every human being on earth finally realizes that it's imperative to love animals and humans, that's when we'll see real progress.