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personally, i am mostly vegetarian. i eat seafood. i do eat meat, but not very often.
i considered becoming vegan, but i like cheese.
anyway, there are two level of decisions about food intake that i think are important, but in conversations about being-vegetarian they tend to get reversed---one is if you accumulate enough information about the industrial food production systems, it will probably make sense to you, if you can rig it up, to opt out of it. switching the distribution systems of which you are part seems to me a bigger deal that is the question of whether within the industrial food system you are a vegetarian or not.
the problem comes with whether you can rig up that switch or not. reasons it can be difficult range from the fact that economies of scale have advantages and price is one of them--so switch away and you pay more. but this assumes that you can find consistent sources of what you want to eat that enable you to opt out, if you can rig it up economically.
i try to live outside the industrial food system to the greatest possible extent, but i don't beat myself up if it doesn't work exactly at all points. when i lived in philly, it was easy because i was part of a co-op---in chicago i had a csa share and gradually found a sequence of places i could go that would enable to me stay outside the ifs (sorry, i'm just tried to typing it)...here in tiny town, it's a bit more complicated logistically to be consistent, and it's just like that. it take a while to figure things out.
pollan makes this basic argument.
you'll notice that he is not a vegetarian, and that the book is not an argument for being vegetarian.
another way--i would think it less important that you are a vegetarian who gets vegetables from a regular supermarket than if you are an omnivore who tries to stay with sustainably produced local food as much as possible.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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