How not to change my mind
I am confounded! Twice this past week I have read articles about individuals lashing out violently at people around them because they disagree with someone’s life choices, and in these cases, life choices involving the food.
The first incident involved Lierre Keith’s author of “The Vegetarian Myth”. So-called militant vegans attacked her at a recent speaking engagement and threw pies filled with cayenne pepper in her face. A video of the pieing can be seen here on YouTube. The second incident took place right here in Indiana, when a knife wielding vegetarian destroyed and contaminated packages of meat in a grocery store. Police had to be called because the man threatened employees at the store with the knife when they attempted to stop him. According to the article, his reasoning for the attack was “to save little girls from food he believes would make them chubby.”
Now I understand wholeheartedly that people have different view points on food in our country and all over the world. What I don’t understand is how anyone can justify physical violence against another person simply because they have different opinions on food OR what they hope to accomplish with this violence.
In my opinion, trying to convince other people to join a cause or change their habits through violence, coercion, or scare tactics isn’t likely to garner many converts. Instead, it is likely to create resentment and fear. Fear of a particular type of individuals instead of an informed concern that causes people to evaluate their lives and make a change. Not to mention the fact that it is plain wrong to be violent towards another individual just because you don’t like what they are doing or saying!
There are plenty of other much more effective ways to get a point across and inform people! I personally have a large number of friends who are either vegetarian or only eat locally grown or produced food, and at first I disagreed with their life choice. However, through open dialog, education, and living in community, while I still don’t chose to be a vegetarian, I respect and appreciate their choice. Because we did not attack each other based on different life choices either verbally or physically, there was an opportunity for communication and education that has lead to new understandings, big changes in eating habits on my part, and a greater concern for food issues as a whole. This could have never been accomplished through violence.
Food, specifically the consumption of meat, is a very hot button issue right now in our society. There are very impassioned people on both sides of the discussion who believe strongly that the solution to our world’s ecological and health care woes could be solved by changing our relationship to meat, either by consuming less, consuming none, or in some cases making no changes at all. These differences in opinions lead to strong feelings, resentment, and unfortunate violence.
But I ask, what are we accomplishing through the violence? What could we accomplish if we worked together and engaged in honest and open conversations instead of name calling and pie throwing?
Images of food provided by Matt McKimmy
April 29th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
That was a superb read,I recently subscribed to your feed.