Crunchy-con carne?
30th August 2008
Megan McArdle, ordinarily so sound, just doesn’t get it when it comes to food.
Crunchy cons–and everyone else–wouldn’t be so afraid of this if the rest of us didn’t get mad at people who have difficult ideals, and then put them into practice. As long as no one else is doing it, we can let our own behavior go, swept along unthinkingly in the comforting certainty of the herd. But once one of the sheep starts moving in a different direction, we have to start wondering if we’re going the right way.
Whenever there are a group of people who discover what they consider to be “the way”, they get very tedious on the subject to those to whom it isn’t quite as obvious. Vegetarians are especially boring about it, but “crunchy cons” are almost as bad. They ascribe all sorts of character defects to those who resist their blandishments, because the alternative is to accept that hey, there just might be cogent arguments on the other side of the question — and the True Believer refuses to entertain that thought, or any like it.
You don’t like to eat meat? Fine, give me your share. If God had intended me to be a herbivore I would have been born with hooves. You want to cancel the Industrial Revolution and go back to buying from local farms? Fine, but I prefer to keep my food budget small and spend the rest on, oh, say, books.