book review of “Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat” by Marta Zaraska, published by Basic Books, 2016

Meathooked by Marta Zaraska

Meathooked “is an investigation into why humans love eating meat.” (page 6) The author, Marta Zaraska, calls those reasons “hooks.” (page 7) Hence the neologism of the book’s catchy title.

Meathooked stands as one of most insightful books about vegetarianism that I’ve read in fifty years, since 1975 when I read Animal Liberation the very first month it was published. Given the book’s title, anybody of the vegetarian or vegan persuasion might seem an unlikely reader, yet such a person should be among this book’s prime readership.

The author is a self-described “sloppy vegetarian,” meaning she regularly eats fish and around twice a year she “nibbles” on a tiny sliver of bacon or sausage because she is “lazy.” (page 5) Self-righteous vegans might mock her as a quasi-pescatarian manqué. I’d call her simply a lazy omnivore.

Despite her own human foibles, she nevertheless still advocates that humanity worldwide must (must!) reduce its consumption of meat, and she presents all of the compelling health, humane, and environmental reasons for vegetarianism as forcefully as in any book written by a vegan or animal rights advocate. I dare say that her rational arguments are likely to make more converts to vegism than those advance by the zealots on the veg side. (I prefer to refer to Vegetarianism and Veganism with just one word, a neologism of my own, Veg.)

In the Epilogue of the book, Zaraska asks, “Why do we eat meat?” (page 199) Her simple and sincere answer is, “Because we can.” (page 199) She further poses serious questions, for instance, “Which saves more lives—one person stopping eating meat altogether or millions cutting out just one meat-based meal a month?” (page 201)

While the two-hundred pages between the Introduction and Epilogue are well worth reading, for vegheads two chapters stand out as the most thought provoking. These are Chapters 8 and 9.

Chapter 8, “Why Vegetarianism Failed in the Past,” presents a world history of vegism. The author explains that vegism took root in the East but not in the West largely because Hinduism and Buddhism accepted it among their tenets, while Christianity and Islam rejected it. That makes sense. What seems preposterous is her further notion that historically the Indian subcontinent supported the cultivation of beans and grains, in contrast to Europe that relied upon animal husbandry.

The author further posits that until the 20th century, animal welfare rarely had been the motivating factor for going veg. For instance, in Ancient Greece, the Pythagoreans were more concerned that the killing and eating of animals was debasing for humans. And in 19th-century US, American proponents of vegism such as Peter Paul Kellogg, Sylvester Graham, the Transcendentalists, and the Seventh Day Adventists had been more attentive to matters of human health. I must counter that the author Henry S. Salt is a 19th-century American exception. In his pioneering book, Animals’ Rights, he did address the issue of animal cruelty. Read it on Project Gutenberg.  https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64498

I suppose that animal welfare was an obscure issue because until our own time, the cruelties of factory farming were neither widely employed nor well documented. Curiously, the very coining of the word Vegan in 1944 was aligned with the post-1945 development of factory farming. Maybe veganism gained traction in our 21st century precisely to counter the widespread implementation of factory farming.

Chapter 9, "Why Giving Up Meat May Be Harder for Some of Us," provides concrete scientific evidence in support of my own long-held opinion that the veg diet is not suitable for all human populations throughout the planet. I know that some nutritionists have attributed our dietary diversity to "biochemical individuality." Food for thought for vegan evangelists who hope to convert the entire human race.

In a conversation of interest to vegans, Zaraska documents her phone interview with Peter Singer, the author of the acclaimed 1975 book, Animal Liberation, and co-author in 1980 of Animal Factories. A prolific author, he more recently in 2020 published a short collection of essays titled, Why Vegan? You’d think, the dude must be a vegan. In which case, you’d be wrong. “Singer himself says he is a ‘flexible vegan’; he tries to avoid animal products, but when a situation makes it too difficult (visiting friends, travel), he doesn’t always turn down a dish just because it contains cheese or eggs.” (page 193)

Foremost, I applaud Singer’s candor. On an emotional level, I feel disappointment with him. On an intellectual level, I am baffled by him. As a native Australian now residing in the United States, he travels the globe for his lectures and his professorships, and such distant travel does present challenges. So he adapts by eating eggs and cheese when visiting friends?!? Singer is the world’s most distinguished and best known living philosopher, yet his non-vegan friends don’t honor him in their homes by providing him with vegan meals?!? Something seems askew here.

Me, I’m a big nobody, yet my few non-vegan friends would never insult me by serving me cheese, much less eggs. Egg on Singer’s face, as an embryonic chicken is still a chicken. As for cheese, on a mere physical level Singer’s inaction is self-defeating. Vegans learn after months of abstinence that your first time regressing to eating dairy will cause you diarrhea, sometimes even nausea, because over time the human body stops secreting the digestive enzyme lactase needed to digest the milk’s lactose. Thus eating dairy products, say, once a year is physically prohibitive … unless you’re a ‘flexible vegan’ who more realistically eats dairy products more like once a month.

I found an answer to the Singer puzzle on page “x” of his Introduction to “Why Vegan?” He routinely eats sea animals such as clams and oysters, but not fish. His reasoning is fishy, so I won’t waste bandwidth to repeat it here. Singer needs to relabel himself a “flexible omnivore,” not a vegan. End of my disappointment. Regardless whether he’s a veghead or an omnivore, whether or not he practices what he preaches, I still deeply respect Peter Singer’s writings, if no longer the writer.

Ghandi, similarly, might lose your respect after you read this book. Ghandi’s writings in advocacy of vegetarianism are widely circulated within vegetarian canon. But the author of Meathooked reminds us that Ghandi was not always a vegetarian. While born a vegetarian, when he moved from India to London, “Ghandi began to eat meat in fancy restaurants and began to enjoy the taste.” (page174) When he returned to India, he did return to vegetarianism.

Shattering our high regards for Singer or Ghandi is not the goal of this book. I have seized upon their human shortcomings in my essay only as examples of how this thought-provoking book will cause you to reexamine your previously held beliefs regarding vegism.

I think that vegans can indulge in a vegan diet largely reliant upon fresh produce and limitless varieties of international foods because of our own affluence and because of the modern innovations of rapid transportation, canning, freeze drying, vacuum storage, freezing, and refrigeration. Until the 20th century, fresh produce was affordable and available only locally and seasonally. Veganism could never have flourished in contemporary society until now.

“The future is vegan” is a slogan I’ve seen touted on the walls of some vegan restaurants. This book shows us that such pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking is unfounded. Meathooked explains that, like addicts, most humans are hooked on meat. This book explains that humans might substitute real meat with mock meat, or with laboratory-grown meat, or with insect meat, but most humans somehow will continue to eat some meat. As the human population continues to increase, and as there will be less meat to go around, humans will just eat less of it, but they will continue eating meat. Like Peter Singer eating eggs and oysters.

( Reviewed by Mark Mathew Braunstein www.MarkBraunstein.Org )