The Vegetarian's Guide to Eating Meat
A Young Woman's Search for Ethical Food
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Growing up in a household of food-loving Italian-Americans, Marissa Landrigan was always a black sheep—she barely knew how to boil water for pasta. But at college, she thought she’d found her purpose. Buoyed by animal rights activism and a feminist urge to avoid the kitchen, she transformed into a hardcore vegan activist, complete with shaved head.
But Landrigan still hadn’t found her place in the world. Striving to develop her career and maintain a relationship, she criss-crossed the U.S. Along the way, she discovered that eating ethically was far from simple—and cutting out meat was no longer enough. As she got closer to the source of her food, eventually even visiting a slaughterhouse and hunting elk, Landrigan realized that the most ethical way of eating was to know her food and prepare it herself, on her own terms, to eat with family and friends.
Part memoir and part investigative journalism, The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat is as much a search for identity as it is a fascinating treatise on food.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Landrigan s interesting but somewhat meandering debut book argues that far too many people in Western societies are wholly disconnected from the people and processes that determine what winds up on their plates. Her detailed culinary journey charts her own course from an Italian-American home through a rebellious youth as a militant herbivore and, eventually, an accountable omnivore. Her current choices were heavily influenced by a series of life-altering experiences working on farms, hunting for game, and studying how vegetarian products are often sold by the same corporations running industrial feed lots and slaughterhouses. Landrigan s voice is friendly and accessible, but the book feels at times like an essay that s been stuffed to fill the requirements of a full-length tome. Biographical details about the author s personal relationships and peripatetic travels seem unnecessary to sustain her core argument that simply cutting out meat is not enough to define ethical eating. Her questionable inclusion of a gruesome chapter on cutting up raw chicken for the first time may prove stomach-turning for some readers and feels gratuitous compared to other, more nuanced analysis that better defines the most compassionate ways to consume nature s bounty.
