"Skinny Bitches" glamorize meat free decision

Salad is out and red meat is in on the first date says the New York Times in an
August article.

Fortifying yourself with food before a date like our moms did so you can order light and appear ladylike--until the date drops you off and you can pig out like the comic strip character, Cathy--is passe.

Ordering salad today doesn't mean you have a dainty appetite, it means you're "wimpy, insipid, childish" says Michelle Heller. Chicken doesn't mean you're demure; it means you're "finicky" echoes Sloane Crosley.

No, real woman are favoring the butchered column of the menu writes Allen Salkin--conveying to their dates they are down to earth and have no food or weight issues.

But tell it to Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin whose Skinny Bitch has camped out on the New York Times bestseller list all summer immortalized by reported endorsements by Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice) and Lindsay Lohan.

Not only does meat make you fat they say--you're a "gluttonous pig" if you think you can "eat cheeseburgers all day long and lose weight"--you also are what you eat and "no matter how you slice it, it's still a putrefying corpse."

Nor do the authors have good words for dairy which they write treats unwitting consumers to prolactin, somatostatin, melatonin, oxytocin, growth hormone, luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone, thyrotropin-releasing hormone, thyroid-stimulating hormone and fourteen other unwanted hormones in addition to fat, calories, cholesterol and antibiotics.

No wonder you're fat and bloated say the authors whose writing leans toward Drill Instructor; First Week.

And it's not just b-girls either; skinny bastards are writing about diet too like Daily Mail reporter Edward Batha who lost five pounds and reduced his cholesterol by 23 percent after a one month vegan diet he didn't even want to try.

("'I'm a vegan,' I said pathetically as if announcing botulism," he remembers).

He also slept better, "lost that desperate urge for dairy produce," and achieved
greater regularity. (Many phrases are coined for this phenomenon in a Skinny Bitch chapter called Pooping. What are they trying to say?)

There are even skinny pastors like Rev. George Malkmus of Shelby, N.C. whose The Hallelujah Diet which includes no red meat, high-fat foods or "food with a face" was listed No. 1 on Amazon.com just weeks after its release last year. Malkmus adopted a vegan diet thirty years ago after being diagnosed with colon cancer and expects to die of old age.

Not only do animal products cause "90 percent of problems we have today...heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, you name it," he tells the Ledger-Enquirer, "The food that God designed did not have all these chemicals and growth hormones."

But you don't need knowledge of the scriptures to benefit from The Hallelujah Diet Rev. Malkmus assures. "We have had a number of people without faith apply the principles to get well. The Christian body is no different than any other."

Still, what if you're not worried about losing weight or going to Heaven? And, like Batha, "very happily complicit in being removed from the knowledge of how my meat gets to be on my plate?"

There's another reason to consider the V-word.

Vegansexuals--a group of mostly young and attractive vegans in New Zealand--are refusing sexual contact with meat eaters!

"I would not want to be intimate with somebody whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance," says one
Vegansexual on Stuff.co.nz

"It would disgust me to see my boy tucking into a chicken," says another adding that she "struggles" with bodily fluids, especially "sexually."

Even kissing presents ethical and aesthetic problems for another Vegansexual who is turned off at the thought of "lips that allow dead animals to pass between them."

And while some New Zealand meat eaters say Vegansexuals will breed themselves out of existence and that their ideas are ill conceived--"animals were put on this earth for human USE!" writes commentator Ann Lowenstein. "They do NOT have 'jobs,' they don't 'bowl' and they are NOT being 'exploited'"--others might start to give second thoughts to what they eat when they see an attractive, potential mate.

Especially on first dates.

Martha Rosenberg
Staff Cartoonist
Evanston Roundtable, IL

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