Do a pig a favour! Ban vegetarianism now!

Giles Coren, the mercurial restaurant critic at the Times of London, is gloating over a recent study that shows that young people are more likely to suffer from eating disorders if they’ve tried vegetarianism. Actually, says Coren, vegetarianism is an eating disorder practiced mostly by pale, flaky, tedious extremists like Hitler (yes, he went there). Now, to the meat of his argument.

Vegetarianism is a cry for help. A sadly transparent attempt to exercise control over your body, which you feel the need to do for psychological reasons of which you are probably unaware …

It's as primitive a lifestyle as there is. It's why the very oldest religions eschew meat altogether, and others eschew some forms of it — because one exercises what control one can in the shadow of a mighty God with miserable little gestures of abstinence.

It's why vegetarians are mostly girls. Because vegetarianism is a way of controlling one's food intake without drawing attention to one's vanity.

After comparing vegetarians to bulimics, Coren argues that the way to make sure meat doesn’t put such a strain on the environment is to simply eat less of it instead of being an obnoxious blowhard. Speaking of which, the way to deal with vegetarians, if they annoy you, is probably to ignore them rather than use a major newspaper to call for their eradication.

[VIA Times UK and Grub Street]