Rhinocrisy

I had dinner with an old pal of mine last night, who is a vegan. As I often do,^* I began to probe him about the limits of his veganism and why he chose to abide by his particular set of standards. He was remarkably good-natured about it and readily admitted that, of course, like all philosophies veganism invariably breaks down around the edges.

My particular test case was oysters. I had recent experience with these myself, watching some friends drip raw oyster over the tongue and into the back of the throat, and I was left wondering why exactly such a tantalizing experience must be taboo for me.

Another example that came up today: ciona, also known as the sea squirt. This little bugger is actually a chordate, so more closely related to us than a mere mollusk. But it amounts to little more than a stomach with attached mouth and heart. It (like the oyster) lives an almost purely vegetative lifestyle, breathing in sea water and filtering out whatever nutrients it can.

Compare this to the mustard plant, or a corn stalk. Not even the most susceptible of vegans feels a twinge when their teeth cut into an ear of corn. But in point of fact, the differences amount to mere biochemistry; one lacks a chloroplast and cell walls, the other produces no hemoglobin, etc. This, I very much doubt, is what motivates most vegans. (”No heme molecules shall pass these lips! Except the ones from kissing my girlfriend when her lips are chapped! Those are okay!”)

Of course, most vegans these days are hardly strict, and not surprisingly their patterns of consumption are frayed around the edges. But it seems a difficult thing for us, with our dichotomizing minds, to live in a frayed world. Is that something we can escape? Or must we learn to live at odds with the knottiness of reality?

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^* Not because I’m a bastard, although I am, but because I enjoy understanding how well-grounded people’s deeply-held beliefs are, and why.

Over the weekend, some evil spammers seem to have discovered this blog and its abundant readership, which as of now measures in the full dozens (!). To thwart their nefarious schemes (which include going so far afield as posting an actual blog full of news articles with links in its sidebar to spamvertising-blogs), I have enabled the by-now ubiquitous image-verification schema for posting comments and modified the comments hack so it appears inline. Apologies for any inconvenience to you and yours.