The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror by Laura Wright

Author:Laura Wright [Wright, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Final Thoughts

A study by C. Alix Timko, Julia M. Hormes, and Janice Chubski published in the June 2012 issue of the journal Appetite is titled “Will the Real Vegetarian Please Stand Up? An Investigation of Dietary Restraint and Eating Disorder Symptoms in Vegetarians versus Non-vegetarians.” It is the sole analysis to address the ways that previous studies are flawed, and it seeks to account for their inconsistencies by looking at the ways that distinctions between different categories of nonnormative dietary choices are often conflated: “A possible explanation for these inconsistent findings is that there are major differences between semi-vegetarians and vegetarians (who are often combined into one group), with semi-vegetarians exhibiting more dietary restraint than vegetarians. The hypothesis is supported by findings that suggest that semi-vegetarians are twice as likely than true vegetarians to restrict their meat intake for weight reasons” (983). Within most of the studies examined by these authors, “vegetarianism is defined as eliminating red meat; however, that does not reflect a true vegetarian diet” (983, my emphasis). The authors define vegetarianism as “a spectrum of inter-related food selection and food avoidance patterns” (982) that includes, in this study as in those that precede it, the category of semivegetarian, people who undertake a “partial restriction of meat” (983), as well as ovo vegetarians, lacto-ovo vegetarians, and, finally, vegans, a group that excludes “all red meat, fish, poultry, dairy, and other animal-origin foods such as eggs from their diet, and generally also avoid[s] non-edible animal products such as leather” (982). Because they predicate their findings on the realization that there are “problems with the operational definition of ‘vegetarian’” (983) in the majority of these previous studies that posit a link between vegetarianism and anorexia, the authors’ conclusions are markedly different from those of their predecessors.

Prior to discussing those results, I want to return to the “operational definition” issue that plagues these studies. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “vegetarian” is “a person who abstains from eating animal food and lives principally or wholly on a plant-based diet; esp. a person who avoids meat and often fish but who will consume dairy products and eggs in addition to vegetable foods.” Even this definition, while more absolute in what defines the appropriate parameters of a vegetarian diet, still allows for the possible inclusion of fish, and such a potential clearly indicates at least a modicum of fluidity with regard to a vegetarian diet, even as it allows for the continual and seemingly unending debate about what does and what does not constitute vegetarianism. But including people who simply do not eat red meat or who abstain from meat sometimes (semivegetarians or “quasi vegetarians,” depending on the study) in studies that focus on the supposed connections between a vegetarian diet and eating disorders would necessarily generate results that have little or nothing to do with the purported subject of the study. People who do not eat red meat but still eat other meats—pork, chicken, and fish—are not vegetarians; they are omnivores. People who abstain from eating meat sometimes are not vegetarians; they, likewise, are omnivores.

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