Written by Jenny Hanniver   

Extremism of any kind bothers me, and I often find extreme vegetarians tedious. I agree with the environmental and human health issues encouraging a plant diet, and deplore the abuse of any living creature, so I avoid meat, don't eat red meat--but please don't preach at me for eating occasional fish on a "non-toxic" list, or free-range chicken and eggs, while you tell me that your diet of carrot juice and baked potato is morally superior because you avoid anything related to animals but eat edible plants. I'd like to know how you justify eating root vegetables without a single moral twinge, despite the fact that as soon as they are pulled out of the ground those living plants are killed dead?

Are plants not our cousins, too? We share a high percetage of DNA with carrots. It would be less reprehensible for vegans to restrict your diet to organic fruits, nuts, tapped tree sap like maple syrup, flower nectar and honey, salad leaves and unfertilized seeds, since you wouldn't be destroying the plant, or the bees who manufacture honey from nectar.

Some plants, of course, aren't edible by humans--like grass, which is too rough for our digestive systems, and the poisonous ones--but a few clonal colony plants are edible, and they are the least damaged by being plundered by animal eaters. The full range of plants which evolved to grow using clonal propagation include algae, moss, fungi, rock lichen, many land grasses, seagrasses, baobab and aspen. You're not killing a baobab tree even if you remove huge portions of trunk, fruit and leaves, since it continues to live by sending out subsidiary vine-like trunks. "Single" clonal aspen trees, which shoot out adventitious underground stems that turn upward into slim trunks, can grow miles wide. Taking down a whole aspen tree won't disturb the life of the plant.

Vegans don't seem to realize that there are clonal colony animals, too, like certain seafood and amphibians that become clonal in difficult environments. Without moral qualms you could also eat unfertilized fowl eggs and (except for the eggs) blood pudding made from a cow or pig that enjoys a long and happy free-range life. Or by tapping a vein and drinking cow blood, like the Maasai who live on it and keep their cattle alive as long as possible.

I am about 90% vegetarian, but I believe humans evolved as omnivores and should eat some meat to maintain health. I don't want to hear any more high-level ranting that vegans are somehow "holier" than people who eat as I do, or as vegetarians who eat occasional eggs and drink milk.

Especially if you are a vegan who drinks carrot juice! The carrot sap and flesh that’s squashed up and mixed in a ferocious bladed machine becomes the juice. Did you ever ask if that hurts the carrot? You probably don’t know whether it does any more than I do. Should I say "ugh" and accuse you of moral turpitude for killing a living creature? No, because I enjoy drinking carrot juice, too. I don’t care how you eat since I’m sure you are not wrecking the planet, so please don't look down on others who feel the same but eat differently.