Today I was watching the food network and thinking how disappointed I was that they aren’t vegan-friendly and their coverage of vegetarian topics and recipes is very much lacking. But, to be fair, some of the programs do make a point, albeit seldomly, to present some vegetarian dishes, or at the very least, mention how one can convert a dish to be vegetarian. And more recently they have begun to add more vegetarian recipes to their web site. For fun, however, I enjoy watching and trying to figure out how I could convert various recipes into vegan recipes. For example, it seems to be easy to think of ways to “veganize” pasta and rice dishes.
The particular food network show that I had been watching is called Throwdown with Bobby Flay. He was trying to outdo in a jerk chicken throwdown the cookbook and children’s book author, Angela Shelf Medearis. Among her works is a book titled The Ethnic Vegetarian. I am not reviewing the book here because I have only read the Amazon.com excerpt. But when I heard about this book on the show, I was surprised to discover that Medearis herself is not a vegetarian–hence the jerk chicken. Her other cookbooks are not vegetarian books, which is not to say that they contain no vegetarian recipes, because they do. In fact, if you read their reviews at Amazon and browse their contents, you’ll find some vegetarian recipes.
So as I contemplated this I wondered. Is it not hypocritical for an author who is not a vegetarian to write a cookbook on vegetarian food? To me this did seem hypocritical. But as I wrote this I realized that I was sounding ridiculous. Certainly it’s alright if she does. But what if the book contains not only information about vegetarian nutrition, but also espouses the virtues of a vegetarian diet diet in regards to it being cruelty free? This is what seemed to me to be hypocritical, but because I haven’t read her book to know if she writes on the ethical topic of being vegetarian, I decided instead to engage myself in a smal thought experiment (my favorite pastime) about a hypothetical author and her cookbooks.
So, would it be hypocritical, then, if this was the case? But more importantly, as an ethical vegan, should one purchase such books? If I purchased this hypothetical vegetarian cookbook which, according to some reviewers, had a number of vegan recipes, would I not be supporting someone who exploits animals by writing about non-vegetarian food as well as consuming it?
I think that I would be a hypocrite if I bought this book, and I think it would be ethically wrong to do such a thing. I think that by contributing money to an author like this that I, indirectly, would be encouraging her to do more of the same. But I wonder, what do other people think about this? Certainly if one tried to live his life by conforming totally to Ahimsa (a Sanskrit word meaning non-violence), he would probably become a hermit living in the woods or a cave wearing only hemp, eating only those things that caused no harm to animal or insect alike. He might very well stop shaving and cutting his hair so that he wouldn’t have to disturb the critters living in his beard and hair; perhaps he might even stop bathing.
But regardless of the degree of veganism and non-violence you decided to practice, ask yourself this: do you want to be a hypocrite or a hermit or something in between?
