Are Meat Eaters Just “Blocked Vegetarians?
” If vegheads and meatheads will be dining together at your gatherings this holiday season, you might want to pick up some tips from Carol Adams new book, Living Among Meat-Eaters (Lantern Books, 2001). Adams, a vegetarian theorist best known for her earlier work on the Sexual Politics of Meat, posits that humans will do anything to forget that, when we eat meat, we are eating an animal. Meat-eaters erect a “nice little picket fence” of arguments around their behavior, she says, and life is rosy – until a vegetarian comes along. Then its as if “worlds collide.” The “Meat Thruster” waves his fork at us, taunting, “you know you want it” and “The Deluder” cajoles us about our violence against plants – all while she is chomping on a burger. What they are doing, suggests Adams, is playing out their own issues about eating animals. They fear scarcity (“what would I eat if I was a vegetarian?”) and think that, deep down, we vegetarians must be very unhappy people – “blocked meat-eaters,” if y
