Edging Towards Vegetarianism

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by Douglass Lea

I'VE always tried to be good. As a kid, I made my bed whenever possible. Later I joined the Peace Corps-mostly for the adventure, I hate to admit. Now I do green things. I separate my garbage, grow a garden without pesticides, drive a fuel-efficient car. Trendy, but still not wholly satisfying.

OUR times cry out for a larger response, an enterprise that matches the magnitude of the environmental emergency. Something in me envies Mother Teresa. She knows how to respond. I listen to Eastern Europeans, hoping to discover the secret of their recent miracles. "The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in ... human responsibility," Vaclav Havel, new president of Czechoslovakia, tells the U.S. Congress. "We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility." Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 198o Nobel Prize in literature, writes in Granta: "What remains today is the idea of responsibility, which works against the loneliness and indifference of an individual living in the belly of a whale." I am left with a quest: What is the link between the environmental catastrophe and personal responsibility?

Try being a vegetarian, suggests my neighbor, who later drops off Ellen Buchman Ewald's Recipes for a Small Planet, first published in 1973. It turns out my neighbor is a "beady eyed" vegetarian, her own description. She is perfectly willing to eat the flesh of fish and chicken, who have beady eyes, according to her, but not that of cuddly creatures with big brown eyes-not pandas, obviously, and not bears and pigs and sheep and certainly not Bessie and Bambi. Highly sentimental, I think to myself, and not much of a sacrifice, certainly not for someone who lives in Ralph Lauren country, where the calories count and the wine is white. She would appear perfectly normal in those circles. Her path is not exactly mine. So my search continues.

Try vegetarianism, insists my student, handing me a dog-eared copy of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, also first published in the early '70s and reissued this year with a lavish publicity campaign. Needless to say, she supports the animal-rights movement, and her advice is essentially ideologicalthat is, anchored in a new ethic for the treatment of animals. The vegetables 'in this kind of vegetarianism are beside the point, for they serve chiefly as an alternative to the killing and eating of animals. As one who has whispered sweet nothings to plants and seen them grow healthy and strong in response, I have come to doubt the moral superiority of cows over cowpeas.