As an advertiser in The Nation who sells vegetarian meals, the only positive aspect of the silly and frivolous article on vegetarianism by Daniel Lazare is that it proves the magazine does not cater to its advertisers at the expense of its content. Unfortunately, the article is rife with factual errors and personal opinion masquerading as accepted fact, and does not deserve to be in The Nation.

One wonders if Lazare knows any vegetarians personally. I've been vegetarian for 13 years and vegan for 10, and, just like all the other vegetarians and vegans I know, I rarely eat sprouts and tofu is definitely not a staple of my diet - or, at least when I do eat it it is certainly not plain, as Lazare is undoubtedly thinking about it. One wonders if non-vegetarians know how tiresome and insipid the "sprouts and tofu" critique of vegetarianism is.

I am a vegan chef (who cooks overwhelmingly for non-vegetarian clients), and am lucky to witness every day the culinary renaissance in the vegan world. While some PeTA-types still subsist on horribly over processed soyfoods and, yes, perhaps sprouts, most vegetarians eat real, delicious food - just nothing dead.

intelligent -- as histories of vegetarianism such as Stewart's show (and I wonder if Lazare is aware that it is not the only book to cover this ground? He acts as if it is such a groundbreaking topic, that it is so amazing and rather quaint to discuss vegetarianism in an academic way, but I've read two other such books - perhaps he has access to something called "the internet" that he could use for research support in the future?).

4) Lazare states: “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?” “Tellingly?” What? Message from all vegetarians to all non-vegetarians: your elitist little arguments about “sustainably produced meat” really aren’t interesting to us. We don’t eat meat, we don’t want to eat meat. An argument for eating meat simply does not belong in a book about vegetarianism. Lazare’s comment reminds me of all the men who feel the need to constantly turn a discussion about feminism into one about how men are persecuted under feminism. Vegetarianism is not about meat. Books about vegetarianism are not about meat.

Oh, and that phrase “sustainably produced”: please, please, let’s not be babies. If you can eat a dead animal, please have the guts to call it a dead animal. A cow is not produced.”

on my bicycle (wearing my homemade hippie dress and love beads, of course – oh wait! I forgot: according to Lazare, “vegetarianism [has had] a dramatic resurgence in recent years among pierced and tattooed twentysomethings” – so actually I was wearing a black hoodie with big X tattoos on my hands, pink hair, stretched earlobes, and listening to Minor Threat on my ipod) to the library to write this letter. Oops, the tofurky is almost ready, I better get home!

For what it’s worth (not much), I could reduce Lazare to a stereotype as well: perhaps he once felt guilty about eating meat. Then he found Michael Pollan, perhaps the Slow Food movement, and now he just tries to eat “sustainably produced” meat and it’s all good – meat that he doesn’t have to feel guilty about makes him feel so alive, so lusty, so right. He works from home (almost certainly lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, probably grew up either in the Midwest or New England), and is one of those snarky New Yorker-types who wear square glasses and thinks himself superior to everyone he knows (if he really has a superiority complex, his frames will be clear). He’s probably about to have a midlife crisis, in the most clichéd way possible, and, even after the affair and the sports car, will think of himself as unique. He really loves Malcolm Gladwell, and uses the phrase “the tipping point” at least once a day. He secretly thinks his writing is going to save the world.