Oh, Natalie! Meat = Rape? Really?

It's funny, because we were just talking about this last week.  Natalie Portman has an essay in the Huffington Post about how Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book Eating Animals turned her into a vegan.  Portman was a vegetarian for twenty years before Foer turned her into a vegan, so I'm a little surprised to see her trotting out the same confusion you can find at any given liberal arts college's freshman dorm.

First of all, Portman seems to be a little confused on the difference between "vegetarian" and "vegan."  Which again is pretty surprising.  A vegetarian avoids meat, and sometimes also dairy and eggs.  A vegan avoids all animal products.  Aside from meat, dairy, and eggs, this includes animal fibers like wool and down, as well as honey.  

Veganism is a "zero tolerance" policy.  Whereas many vegetarians are okay with taking prescription medicines which are sold in caplets bound with gelatin, a vegan is not.  Many vegetarians are also okay with dairy and eggs as long as they come from humane, sustainable sources.  Vegans are not.  

Here's a great example of the difference: I (a vegetarian) have four pet hens.  In fact, I'm writing this after coming inside from having doled out their daily ration of organic chicken feed, moved their pen onto a fresh patch of grass, and collected their delicious eggs.  Even under these circumstances, a vegan believes that it is wrong to eat those eggs.  Either nutritionally (believing that animal products are bad for you) or morally (believing that it's wrong to keep chickens as pets).  And hey, that's fine!  If that's your belief, then more power to you.  I'm also a knitter, and a lot of really interesting yarns have come out of the vegan knitting movement, which avoids all animal fibers.

Now here's where we get to the confusing part.  Portman lays out her objections in her essay, and it is clear to even the most disinterested observer that what she objects to is the American "factory farming multi-national agribusiness Fast Food Nation" methods of farming.  
Portman objects to the suffering of animals, and I have to say I'm with her there.  But the only argument she makes is an argument in favor of local sustainable humane methods of farming, as Michael Pollan advocates in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.  Which is funny, because Portman specifically slams that book as being the work of an apologist.

And it's here where we get to the really eye-rollingly awful part of this essay.  I'm not actually clear on whether Portman is comparing eating meat to rape, or if Foer makes that comparison and Portman is simply passing it along.  Either way, it is a horrible thing to say, and Portman ought to know better.  She deserves to be publicly roasted over that statement, and all signs are that this is exactly what is going to happen.

Furthermore, that is once again an argument in favor of vegetarianism.  Where is the part where Portman compares wearing a wool sweater to the act of rape?  Because that would be a very different (and far more interesting) article.