Vegetarianism Essay

Vegetarianism as a Form of Positive Deviance

A young American girl becomes vegetarian when, during dinner, she makes the connection between the very cute lamb she just saw at the petting zoo and the lamb chop that now rests on her plate. She declares she will stop eating meat to her family, and in a series of tumultuous events, including her family dancing and chanting, “you don’t make friends with salad,” her sabotage of her father’s neighborhood barbecue, and her sudden desperation to fit in again as she runs to the local convenience store to eat a hot dog, she realizes becoming a vegetarian is quite the challenge in American culture. As the premise for a Simpsons episode, an animated sitcom known for its comical social commentary on the

A normativist perspective provides a similar view to that of The Simpsons: if the norm is to eat meat, then vegetarianism is considered deviant. The inverse is also true: if eating meat is not the norm, vegetarianism is not considered deviant. But under other perspectives, norm violation does not necessarily imply deviance. The relativist would say vegetarianism is deviant only if the vegetarian is labeled as vegetarian. As soon as Lisa, the young girl in The Simpsons, goes public with her decision to become a vegetarian, her family and her friends begin to label her as such, and by this label she has become deviant. A reactionist would go further to say it is not just the label, but that vegetarianism is only deviant if the vegetarian encounters people who react to the vegetarianism in a way that defines that person as deviant. In the case of Lisa, a reactionist would say her vegetarianism is deviant because of how her family and her friends react to it: they make fun of her for being

As it began in these two different cultures, vegetarianism was deviant because it had never been considered before. In the religious context of Buddhism, which has a history of an ascetic practice, that is, a practice of abstaining from all pleasures, including those of meat, vegetarianism could be considered a form of positive deviance in that it was seen as a path to enlightenment and self-fulfillment (2). But in Greece, and to some extent in American culture now and in the 70s especially, vegetarianism has been not so much a religious practice, but a rejection of authority and the typical ways of thinking about killing and eating animals (1, 2). Thus vegetarianism in this context would be considered positively deviant because it is seen as a sign of intellectual growth and a rebellion against old