More from Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer has a piece in HuffPo on vegetarianism. The guy’s everywhere these days, and you might think it was his book launch I was pimping and not my own! (The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is this Friday, November 13. And you’re invited to my online launch party.)

Here’s an extract:

Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake sale cause to fill the self-conscious half hour of school break, an occasion to get closer to the breasts of activist women. (And of course I did also think it was wrong to harm animals and destroy the environment.) Which isn’t to say that I refrained from eating meat. Only that I refrained in public. Privately, the pendulum swung. Many dinners of those years began with my father asking, “Any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?”

And here’s a link to the full article…