You can’t eat them because to do so would be to break the rules of the game. There are no such rules for the consumption of vegetable matter: whatever nourishes will do.

This distinction reveals something significant about meat eating: it is what you might call a charged domain of human activity, like sex and violence, and it is so no matter what kind of moral arguments you might offer up for or against culling deer herds, free range farming, and so on. Meat eating, like sex and violence, is regulated by religions, while for the most part plant-eating is not. Who can have sex with whom, or who can kill whom, or who can eat what meat when, are practically what religion is about. (The stuff about God is a later development, of interest to only a few.)

Justin Smith reviews Cătălin Avramescu’s book.
via 3qd

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