Ragan Sutterfield

Let me first say that many of my closest friends are vegetarian and that what I say here does not apply to all ways of practicing vegetarianism, but I have a hunch that I am working through that there is something gnostic about many forms of vegetarianism. It seems to be uncomfortable with biology and embodiment; a denial of the flesh in the simplest form.

This hunch was further confirmed recently in an exchange between Anthony Boudain and Jonathan Safran Foer on Larry King live.

Eating Liberally offers a helpful play by play summary of the exchange:

Anthony Bourdain defended meat eating on the grounds that we’re designed to be carnivores:

Bourdain: …we have eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have eye, teeth and long legs. We were designed from the get-go, we have evolved, so that we could chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them…

Jonathan Safran Foer…took issue with Bourdain’s assertion that it’s natural to eat meat:

Foer: I’m not all that interested in what humans seem designed to eat or what is quote, unquote natural, because the entirety of human progress is defying what’s natural. If we’re so concerned with what was natural, we wouldn’t be in this TV studio right now having this conversation.

I am inclined toward’s Bourdain’s argument. We are, biologically, undeniably predators. So many aspects of the way we exist in and perceive the world is rooted in our predatory nature. It is doubtful, to counter Foer, that we would ever have TV if it weren’t for the intelligence and cooperative nature we gained through hunting animals.

There are, of course, limits to this view. We should hope to be more than our basest instincts, but there is something even more disturbing about Foer’s assertion that “the entirety of human progress is defying what’s natural.” This is a gnostic claim if I’ve ever heard one. It places the world of spirit and knowledge above that of the “natural” and animal. This sort of vegetarianism is more a disgust with flesh than it is an actual concern for animals.

The curious thing is that the very people who live in regular contact with animals that have some kind of independent existence (that is animals other than the bourgeois, manufactured creatures we call pets) are those least likely to be vegetarians. It is people like Foer, who rarely get their boots in the manure, that tend toward vegetarianism, essentially excluding real animal life and death from their view. But urban omnivores who never want to face the reality of the animals whose flesh they eat are just as bad. Both the vegetarians and the mindless meat consumers are of the same ilk. They are both, in my view, gnostics–unable to handle the full reality of embodiment or its responsibility. For both we are better off if the truly animal is kept at a distance.

These ideas are only a sketch and I realize they are incomplete. Look for a fuller account of these questions to come elsewhere.