Attacking the vegan

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Recently I was visiting an elderly friend of mine and her youngest and eldest daughters were visiting at the same time.  The younger one, who had once been a vegetarian, once been friendly, now had a ‘more mature’ attitude to her diet and an awkwardness whenever she saw me.  Perhaps she needed to assuage her guilt, ‘needed’ to make jokes about a subject she knew I took seriously.  She had to tell everyone, me included, about her choice of food at a recent dinner in a restaurant.  She wanted me to know that she had had ‘the lamb’.  This was her way of saying "up yours" to me, underlining how much her views differed from mine.

I’d known her since she was a child and have followed her progress over 30 years.  As a kid she was sensitive to animals and as she grew older developed an interest in vegetarian cuisine.  But now she’s enthusiastic for eating meat, hence her mischievous joke about ‘having the lamb’.  With her throw-away line, she meant to attract attention.

I knew that whatever I said in reply would escalate things between us.  I’m always up for a stoush over such things, but I never want to rub salt into a wound or quarrel just to score a point.  Maybe she wanted a fight, but I didn’t hang around to find out.  I don’t know her well enough, these days, to be sure of her boundaries.

I think she meant to make a joke at my expense.  For her it was probably mandatory that she should joke, to counter my stand on Animal Rights, as if whenever ‘animal-eating’ comes up in a conversation it needs to be joked about.  She needs to show people like me how un-cool it is to get sniffy about traditional eating regimes.

She says she enjoys eating lamb, and this turns into a challenge.  And that’s okay, if there’s mutual respect.  But if there’s not ...

Perhaps it’s the meat-eater’s revenge, wanting me to rise to her bait.  She probably regards me as fair game.  But for me it depends on who I’m talking to, as to whether I take up the challenge.  Sometimes I’ll withdraw, at other times I’ll take them on.  But that’s why I’m writing about this incident, not to put her down and not to justify myself but as a fairly typical example of how neither side of the debate can win, when there’s no real debate going on.

Carnivores love to win an argument with a vegan (and vice versa).  They usually make the standard joke about being a proud meat-eater, just to wind us up.  They intend to win, but more importantly they need to gather material for future conversations with their friends, to make a good story out of it.  Vegans do it too.  We make fun of meat eaters amongst ourselves - "These carnivores, what bastards they are. They’ll even eat a lamb!"

Gossip is satisfying.  We all do it.  We all bad mouth our opponents.  But nothing is achieved by it, either in our relationships with our adversaries or for the benefit of the animals themselves.