Vegetarian: a “Flexible Category”
Several months ago at work, while flipping through a trashy hollywood tabloid magazine to pass time, something caught my attention. Check out the following excerpt from the “GO GREEN 101″ sidebar of a spread entitled “Stars’ Ecofriendly Beauty Buys”; found within the August 20th edition of Us Weekly magazine [pages 83-84]. The subtitle is “Hollywood goes green! Organic beauty expert Kimberly Sayer explains why all natural chemical-free products are good for you”.”Vegan products don’t contain any animal-based ingredients at all, while vegetarian is a more flexible category that allows for animal-derived ingredients such as eggs and yogurt.What she says is essentially correct, and fairly insightful. Properly labeled “vegan” products must not contain ingredients derived from nonhuman animals, nor should they have been tested upon them. Two simple, yet very powerful criteria. Veganism is the principled opposition to all nonhuman exploitation, but when it comes to consumer wares, the preceding criteria are suitable.What then, defines a “vegetarian” product? The answer is rather unclear. There are some, like Pamela Rice, who “don’t like” the term vegan but imply the above criteria when they say vegetarian. Her view is particularly rare, and muddles an otherwise conspicuous line. Far more prevalent, both currently and throughout history, is the “flexible” notion of vegetarianism. If vegan were to be summed and restated as non-exploiter, vegetarian would, by extension, become non-”meat” eater. However, even this might be generous, as many vegetarians only consider mammal flesh problematic, and regard the bodies of birds and/or fish as acceptable food sources.Vegetarianism surrounds questions of diet, what one eats, not our behavior more generally. For example, some vegetarians find gelatin offensive, but rarely is “leather” questioned. Ethically, these products of exploitation represent a distinction without difference: one is eaten, the other worn, but both are taken from corpses. Institutions such as zoos, rodeos, circuses, races, “pets”, and “fur” all escape evaluation. Unfortunately, holistic moral principles have never been an essential aspect of vegetarianism. Even concerning diet, where avian eggs and bovine milk are usually embraced, vegetarianism takes no consistent stand against treating sentient beings exclusively as means to our ends. Nonhuman animals are available to be domesticated, oppressed, managed, dominated, enslaved, used, and killed… as long as it is not for “meat”, whatever that is. Flexible yes, but not in any positive or laudable sense. When it comes to exploitation, flexibility, at least of the kind vegetarianism stands for, should always be viewed pejoratively.
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