Topics Animals

Question I was recently thinking about what it means to be count as a vegetarian, but I think it's much harder than I originally thought. What does it mean to be a vegetarian? There are several cases where it isn't clear for me. What if a self-proclaimed vegetarian accidentally consumes meat, for example because it was hidden inside other food, or they were lied to about the contents of a meal? Are they still vegetarian? Is a person who just happens not to eat any meat, without having any sort of personal rules about eating meat (perhaps because of poverty, lack of interest or sheer coincidence), a vegetarian? If a vegetarian consents to eating meat meat once, it seems they stop being a vegetarian (or maybe never were?); when do they become a vegetarian again, if they don't eat any meat afterwards? Is there a time limit? If a person wants to avoid eating meat but is occasionally and predictably pressured into eating meat by their friends or family, are they only sometimes a vegetarian, or never one? I hope these questions aren't too silly...

Accepted:
August 2, 2012

Comments

Like a great many words, "vegetarian" doesn't have a fully-precise meaning; it almost certainly means slightly different things in different contexts and when used by different people. Take your case of the person who just "happens" not to eat meat - not by design, not on principle, but just as it turns out. Whether we call this person a vegetarian or not isn't something that usage fully settles. We might, for example, call them a "de facto vegetarian" as opposed to a "deliberate vegetarian." Part of what we generally mean when we use the word "vegetarian" has to do with what people actually eat, and part has to do with what their intentions are, but there's no simple formula here. A person who intends not to eat meat but eats it accidentally from time to time (e.g., because of misleading labels) would probably count as a vegetarian by most people's standards. If the accidents were frequent enough, many people might hesitate to call the person a vegetarian and would qualify what they say.

As for the person who consents to eating meat on rare occasions, my guess is most people would say s/he is a vegetarian who occasionally lapses, or a vegetarian who will eat meat if there's a good enough reason. (After all, the reasons that lead people to be vegetarian are often not beyond all possibility of reasonable exceptions.) But people will no doubt differ over cases, partly because they will differ about how good the reasons are.

So there's no precise answer to your question, but there do seem to be clear cases of vegetarians: people who have made a deliberate decision not to eat meat, who work hard at sticking to that decision and who are successful in their intentions with, perhaps, very rare exceptions. However, there's really nothing special about vegetarianism here. A great many terms clearly do apply in some cases, clearly don't apply in other cases, and generate variations in usage in yet other cases.