Put down the celery and no one gets hurt

So much is wrong with this Time magazine piece that it’s hard to know where to start. The condescending tone, the misinterpreted data, and the ill-timed link to the Wikipedia article on candy flipping all serve only to assure the parents in the audience that we’re talking about something really, really scary: Vegetarianism.

This article assumes there are no good reasons beyond animal rights (and concealing a teenager eating disorder) that anyone would kick the meat habit. Here are three better ones:

• It’s more efficient. It takes 20 times as much protein to raise a cow for slaughter as people will eventually intake eating that cow. There’s a whole lotta hunger in this world, and we could be doing a better job producing more/cheaper/healthier/easier-to-transport food if we redirected our efforts.
• Meat’s gross. Reading a chapter in this book called ‘Down on the Factory Farm’ changed my life more directly than anything else I’ve read. I don’t agree with a lot of things that Peter Singer thinks, but I knew right away that I never wanted to give another dollar to people who do the atrocious things he describes. Even if you see nothing unethical about killing animals for food, we shouldn’t have to do this to feed ourselves.
• You get healthier and lose weight. Maybe not a great retort to an argument about eating disorders and definitely not true for everyone (starchitarians, we call them), but for many people having to image meals without meat leaves a lot of extra room on the plate … which can be filled with less calorie-dense and more vitamin-rich vegetables.

Where the author mocks teens for a lack of conviction (“For one thing, many young ‘vegetarians’ continue to eat the white meat of defenseless chickens”), you might recognize a common philosophy on healthy eating known as flexitarianism. That’s a stupid, made-up word that has an important principle behind it: what we do on the margins matters. Even one meatless meal a week means a little better health and little less needless suffering. So if you thought this article was dumb too, cook a meal without meat tonight and send the money you saved to the World Food Program—a group with a real reason to be “extra vigilant” about food.