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Time Magazine Weekday Vegetarians–It’s Some Or Nothing For Progress

Written by Vegetarian Star on Monday, August 16th, 2010 in Animal Issues, Flexitarian, Food & Drink.

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Weekly Charting of Business Activities on Whiteboard

Time magazine is featuring a short article on the practice of flexitarians, or people who eat vegetarian sometimes, but not completely.

Green lifestyle website Treehugger‘s founder Graham Hill and his “Weekday Vegetarian” concept is discussed, as well as praise for the movement by people involved with animal rights like Animal Liberation author Peter Singer and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal’s president, Ingrid Newkirk.

“Absolute purists should be living in a cave,” says Newkirk. “Anybody who witnesses the suffering of animals and has a glimmer of hope of reducing that suffering can’t take the position that it’s all or nothing. We have to be pragmatic. Screw the principle.”

“The surge is due to a sense of a plateau,” Singer said. “You’ve already reached out to the base of strict vegetarians, and it’s hard to get beyond those numbers. People should go further, but it’s progress in the right direction.”

More at Time.

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Michael Pollan On Animal Rights, Oprah And Meat Eating

Written by Vegetarian Star on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 in Animal Issues, Authors, Flexitarian, Food & Drink.

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Author Michael Pollan hasn’t always expressed warm feelings for the vegetarian and vegan community, but in a recent interview with Time magazine, he said he has “enormous respect for vegetarians,” and eats a lot less meat than in the past.

In an exclusive interview with the Huffington Post, Pollan gave his thoughts on animal rights, criticizer of factory farming and author Jonathan Safran Foer and even Oprah.

That’s quite a combination, and here are a few highlights.

On Foer and “Eating Animals”
In terms of the argument that I don’t grapple with meat, I would refer Jonathan and anyone else to Chapter…hold on, I can dig it out… (flips through book)…it’s a very long…Chapter 17 of Omnivore’s Dilemma, “The Ethics of Eating Animals.” And that is where I try to grapple with the best arguments against meat eating, which in my view are Peter Singer’s arguments, and defend a very limited kind of meat eating, which is the kind I do.

On Animal Rights:
I think one of the changes you’ve seen in the animals right’s community in the last five or ten years is a lot more interest in mitigating the worst abuses of animal agriculture …which I think is a more realistic goal than abolition.

On Oprah Winfrey:
She had a very bad run-in with the cattle industry, and she doesn’t want to spend any more time in court, so it was much to her credit and it took a certain courage for her to air the issues and show clips from Food Inc., especially, and to have me on, and the fact that she was willing to re-engage on these issues of factory farming was all to her credit.

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Animal Liberation’s Peter Singer On Michael Vick: Critics Go Veg!

Written by Vegetarian Star on Friday, August 21st, 2009 in Animal Issues, Authors.

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Joel Travis Sage on Wikimedia Commons

Joel Travis Sage on Wikimedia Commons

The Michael Vick hype may take a long time, if ever, to wind down.

Until then, we’ll continue to update you on those in the veg community who have something to say about the matter.

Peter Singer, famous for his book, Animal Liberation, has a viewpoint somewhat like Alec Baldwin’s in that he feels Vick’s actions were horrible, but were minor compared to the meat industry.

“What he did was certainly awful. But many people do or participate in things regarding animals that are awful. To some extent, I think people may have rushed to judgment because he did something awful to dogs.”

“For example, the kinds of things that are done to pigs to turn them into ham or bacon are awful, but we don’t care as much about pigs as we do dogs. And I think there’s every reason to believe that pigs are as sensitive and intelligent as dogs.”

“What I’m saying is that the people who are very quick to jump on Michael Vick maybe could spend some time thinking about how they participate in the cruelty to animals just by walking into the supermarket, spend some time thinking about what happened to that animal before it was turned into meat.”

Continue reading Peter’s entire interview at philly.com.

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