Someone in my neighborhood was getting rid of a bunch of old magazines and I picked up from their stack an old issue of the unfortunately now-defunct magazine Satya, which billed itself as a journal of “vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy, and social justice.” Happily a lot of their archives are online, and I found this 2006 review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma scored some points. The reviewer complains, with justice I think, that Pollan didn’t put the same investigative effort into exploring the world of vegetarian eating as he did the worlds of factory, organic, and pasture-based farming, as well as his experiment in being a hunter-gatherer:

Pollan becomes a vegetarian temporarily, but most of the discussion is a mental debate with Peter Singer. Compared to other chapters of in-depth investigative research and practical experience, this journey to vegetarianism is mostly academic, and poorly so. While Pollan found Joel Salatin and Angelo Garro to be his guides to grass farming and hunting, he had no such vegan guru to show him the ropes of plant-based eating.

Pollan scrambles to find justification for eating meat, writing off animal rights ideology as urban, parochial and, in some cases, puritanical. He asserts with no further backing, “To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact a symbiosis between the species.” This statement, to me, highlights other flaws in the book, in that there are very few female voices, with interviews being almost entirely men. Also, the dairy and egg industries are not fully explored. Given that women are responsible for 70 percent of world food production, and that female layer hens and dairy cows endure the most suffering, had Pollan incorporated more women’s voices and explored the lives of the female animals, perhaps he would have construed a different view of domestication and symbiosis.

Pollan explains when people “dare to look” at the wrongs of industrial animal agriculture, they are often left with two choices: ignore it, or become vegetarian. Neither of which was acceptable for him. He leaves looking for a new descriptive, an omnivore that still eats meat but from animals less egregiously raised. In the letter response to his original article, one reader coined an appropriate term—“Excusavor.”

Pollan subtly dismisses vegetarianism: “I have to say there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.” Had he spent time really experiencing vegetarianism, he might realize that it’s not about moral purity, but trying to make the best decisions with the least amount of harm—the vegan’s dilemma. Searching for a kinder, gentler meat is perhaps where the real denial of reality sets in.

I find that this accusation – that vegetarians are more interested in personal purity than in the effects of their dietary decisions – comes up a lot. It’s kind of a strange argument when you think about it, as though trying to do what one believes is the right thing is the same as an unwholesome concern with ritual “purity.” As Andrew Linzey, the Christian theologian of animal rights, never tires of pointing out, there is no “pure land” on which to stand. All of us are complicit to some degree or another with the suffering in the world, even the most conscientious vegan. But it hardly seems to follow from this that it’s somehow wrong or unsavory to try and reduce the harm one is directly responsible for.