1) Nobody, vegetarians included, likes tofu

2) Vegetarians often have vague, wispy ethical reasons for how they eat.

3) Most still do crave meat because they know how good it tastes.

I like how the author has taken a half-hearted stand on animal cruelty so that he can congratulate himself on doing marginally more for the cause than the average person, and thus excuse himself from really thinking about why he doesn't take it further, or why he even does it at all.

As opposed to you who does nothing except judge how deficient other people are in their reasoning? Excellent.

I am an omnivore who loves tofu. Another myth destroyed.

Yes, I thought this article was a waste in every way. Of course we (the meat eating and Slate reading public) know this stuff. This was just bragging and bullshit. It's great that you don't eat meat. You can be healthy, you love bacon, whatever. It's fine, but don't say we know nothing about "you." We know. We knew you weren't a lunatic, we also knew you were smug. You're still smug. That's fine, everyone is. We read Slate. But don't defend it. Just don't eat meat.

So the article isn't aimed at you. A lot of people aren't like you - I'm a vegetarian myself and I still get a lot of the questions that are answered in this piece.

Reading an article that's explicitly about why someone is a vegetarian and is also clearly not aimed at you - then saying he's being smug about it, it's a bit silly.

qter:

Yeah, please go back and actually read the article this time (I underlined the key for you to help you out). This article was explicitly stated as NOT the reasons he is a vegetarian, only that not all vegetarians are uppity snobs, and many like the taste/smell of meat.

It's amazing to me all the people that comment on here that literally have NO CLUE as to what the article was about that they comment on. It's not like these articles are difficult reading. Did you get home schooled or something?

I read the article. I didn't say the article was trying to convert people or anything like that. The article is meant to inform, which is great, it has some points. However, it also has lots of extraneous information and points where it simply takes a moral high ground. Most of the good points are known to clear thinking omnivores. Slate readers are educated readers. They are not the real audience for this piece. So, we read an article which tells us nothing new. By the end of actually reading it, I was annoyed by the author's tone as well as the article's length. I did read it, and it was a waste of time.

What were your expectations? It seemed like a pretty innocuous article to me. And if you truly thought it was a waste of time, wouldn't you simply move on, rather than go to the trouble of posting on a message board about it, twice?