No Meat, No Problems
August 31, 2010
Filed under Features, Student Life
What do Paul McCartney, Sophie Monk, and Carrie Underwood have in common? They are all vegetarians, along with hundreds of other celebrities, and beyond those hundreds, there are countless others who are vegan.
There is a humongous difference between being vegetarian and being vegan. A vegetarian refrains from eating beef, poultry, fish, and other meats. A vegan, on the other hand, is a vegetarian that also abstains from eating any animal product including animal fat and dairy goods. To put it simply, a vegetarian can drink milk, but won’t eat cows.
There are three reasons that choir director Kevin Piner is a vegetarian: “one is environmental, two, health, and the third reason is the animal cruelty.” The United Nations led a study concluding that a vegetarian diet is the most effective way to help the environment. Also, a meatless diet has health benefits including lower risks of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. The animal cruelty is an obvious reason if you have ever seen a PETA video. Senior Dale French says his reason for being vegetarian is because “if I couldn’t go out and cook (an animal) and clean it myself, then why should I pay for someone else to do it?”
Of course, there have to be reasons people choose to eat meats. If people are intent on eating pork and that is all they eat, then it wouldn’t be as easy for them to change their diet. Sophomore Clayton Johnson, like several other students, “really likes steak,” so being vegetarian is almost out of the question!
Even those who are vegetarian sometimes find it hard to make a full switch to being vegan. Dale has been vegetarian for about two and a half years and he says he could honestly not be vegan because there would be “too much limitation on the food I could eat.”
Having a vegetarian or vegan diet is not for everyone. Anyone choosing that lifestyle has good reason and the same goes for anyone not choosing to go that direction. A meatless lifestyle may be healthier and less cruel for you, but diets with meat have familiarity that some find it hard to break away from.
