This is fascinating stuff. But it is at this point that The Bloodless Revolution loses narrative steam, which is odd considering vegetarianism's dramatic resurgence in recent years among pierced and tattooed twentysomethings. Instead of Trotskyists, Maoists and Social Democrats going at one another hammer and tongs, progressive circles are now witness to arguments over the merits of soy versus dairy, while "dumpster-divers" demonstrate their contempt for capitalist waste by subsisting on the discards from restaurants. Stuart says nothing about such developments; instead he winds up with a rather cursory two-page summary in which he criticizes "the old anthropocentric speciesism which attributes moral worth to entities according to how similar they are to 'us'" and acknowledges that "human self-interest" will always be a factor in determining agricultural policy; but he never explains how we can have one without the other. While not embracing vegetarianism entirely, he is clearly sympathetic and, where meat is concerned, comes out squarely in favor of a policy of less is more. "The equation," he says, "is simple: if we ate less unsustainably produced meat we would destroy fewer forests, use less water, emit fewer greenhouse gases and conserve the world's resources for future generations."

But calling something simple does not make it so. No sane person favors unsustainably produced meat. But, tellingly, Stuart does not consider the possibility of meat that is sustainably produced in accordance with the strictest environmental standards. Should we eat less of that also? Or more? Perhaps the issue should not be quantity but quality--not whether we should eat more or less but whether we should eat better, which is to say chicken that tastes like something other than cardboard, turkey that tastes like something other than Styrofoam and so on. Maybe the solution is to reject bland industrial products and demand meat with character, the kind that comes from animals that have not spent their lives in industrial feedlots but have had an opportunity to walk around and develop their muscles.

On a more fundamental level, perhaps the problem has to do with the awful word "speciesism." In arguing for a balance between animal welfare, ecology and human self-interest, Stuart is advocating what some political theorists call the "parcellization" of human sovereignty, its division and subordination amid an array of competing interests. The idea is that instead of reigning supreme over nature, humanity should take its place within nature alongside its fellow animals. Instead of domination, this implies sharing, harmony and other New Age virtues. But the trouble with sovereignty is that it cannot be fragmented or reduced; either it's supreme and indivisible or it's not, in which case it's no longer sovereignty. Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even--dare we say it--to improve nature as well.

Besides, humans are already sovereign--the trouble is that most of them don't realize it or, for political reasons, refuse to acknowledge it, maintaining instead that real sovereignty lies with God, nature or the free market. But real-life experience tells us otherwise. Since vegetarians began warning in the eighteenth century that the earth would run out of food unless everyone immediately shifted to potatoes and grain, the global population has more than sextupled, global per capita income has increased nearly tenfold even when inflation is taken into account, while consumption of meat, poultry and seafood has risen as well, up 37 percent in the United States since 1909 and even more strongly in less developed portions of the world. More people are living better and eating more richly than anyone in the 1700s would have thought possible. Regardless of whether they are consuming more meat and poultry than is good for them, it is yet another reminder, as if any more were needed, of how thoroughly Malthusian myths about limits to human productivity have been shattered.

Scarcity no longer serves as an argument for vegetarianism, and neither, for that matter, does health, since we know from studies of Okinawan centenarians and others that small amounts of meat and dark-fleshed fish are good for you; that moderate amounts of alcohol (which vegetarians for some reason appear to avoid) is good for you as well; and that plenty of exercise, a sense of well-being that comes from a strong social structure and, of course, universal healthcare are equally essential.

So the next time you tuck into a plate of tagliatelle Bolognese, a leg of lamb or a proper coq au vin made from some rangy old rooster that's had more lovers than most of us can dream of, you should see it not just as a chance to fill your stomach but, rather, as an occasion to celebrate humanity's ongoing struggle to create abundance out of scarcity. Venceremos! It's a lot better than wallowing in the silly defeatism of a diet of tofu and sprouts.

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