Cord Jefferson | The Nation

Customers gather by the hundreds outside the Gilbert, Arizona, Chick-fil-A restaurant, Wednesday, August 1, 2012. (AP Photo/Matt York)
 

As both a longtime vegetarian and someone who reads the news every day, I must say these new Gallup stats threw me for a loop. They’re all semi-interesting—I’d never have guessed that college graduates are less likely to be vegetarians than high school dropouts, for instance—but I find the one on age to be most shocking. If you’d have asked me last week, I’d have said with total confidence that Millennials are surely more prone to vegetarianism than senior citizens. And yet, I’d have been so wrong.

The only way I can square this in my head is that American culinary culture is entering a phase in which the trend is to eat everything, but do so mindfully. Whereas vegetarianism was once a very binary decision—you either are or aren’t—in recent years, chefs and food writers like Michael Pollan have started preaching the gospel of rational and moderate meat consumption. The New York Times’s Mark Bittman, for instance, says he’s vegan before 6 pm, at which point he allows himself to eat whatever he wants, meat or no.

Pompeii (Photo via Flickr user bonnieann1815)

Easily the best thing I’ve seen on the internet in a while I found late last week while cruising around Tumblr. It was a link to Pompeiana.org, a website from some classics scholars interested in educating the public on Pompeii, which was destroyed in the first century by Mount Vesuvius. The whole site is interesting, if not a little dated aesthetically, but what I found most intriguing was the graffiti page.