You can’t raise a child vegan

Rarely is justice so quickly and so beautifully doled out

Excerpted from Day 21 Concluded in Losing My Religions.

In late November 2006, Peter [Singer] invited me to Princeton to speak on a panel with Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Happiness Hypothesis. Jonathan’s thesis that evening was, “Why Good Intentions Don’t Lead to Good Actions.” My talk was titled, “Causing Good Actions Anyway.”

Anne was at a big teaching conference, so EK, who was in seventh grade at the time, came along to New Jersey, handing out copies of “A Meaningful Life” to the crowd.

In his presentation, Jonathan said that whenever he spent time with Peter, he would decide to go vegetarian. Then when he would get home, he would slowly fall back into his old ways. (He showed a slide where his face slowly migrated from a picture of Peter over to a burger.) Of course, this is a typical story, given that the vast majority of people who give up meat revert back.

To give a sense of the stakes, my talk began with a short video clip about the conditions on factory farms. Then I pivoted to how food tech could help us overcome people’s inertia. If we could give people the burgers and the nuggets they wanted without killing animals, then good intentions would be enough.

(Producing meat without animals was an idea JL had told us about when he lived in our basement. [We let him out for meals.] In 2004, he started actively promoting the idea of cultivated meat – aka “clean meat” or, inaccurately, “lab meat” – actual animal cells grown in a clean manufacturing facility. That year, he founded New Harvest to promote research into cultivated meat. JL flew to Europe and convinced the Dutch Agriculture Minister to provide funding for research.)

The author Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Eating Animals) was in the Princeton audience for my talk, and he came to the dinner afterwards. That is also where I met the great Bob Wright in person.

The dinner, however, was a mess. It was as though the cook had heard my talk about giving people tasty animal-free food and said, “Hold my beer and watch this.” The main course was a slab of barely warm tofu with a slight drizzle of sauce. It could not have made vegetarian food look worse. I’m serious.

Sitting across from me was a grad student. She started holding forth on how her mom was a dietitian and had proven that while adults could be vegan, it was impossible to raise a child vegan. She went on and on, digging herself in deeper and deeper.

When she stopped, Peter, at the head of the table, nodded to his right and calmly said, “I think we should let EK* handle this one.”

Beautiful.

*Originally written in spring, 2016
Lifelong vegan Elwen currently has a 3.9 GPA in Molecular Biology (with an emphasis on Public Policy) at Pomona College (Forbes’ #1 school in the entire US, ahead of Harvard and Stanford). Elwen’s been accepted to grad school everywhere applied, including MIT. [Update - Elwen got an even more prestigious Fellowship in DC. 2023 update: earned a PhD in Economics.]

Since Pomona College’s founding in 1887, Elwen is only the 13th person on the women’s teams to letter in both cross country and track all four years (also earned eight varsity letters in high school). Not surprisingly, Elwen made the league’s All-Academic Team as well.