Paul Lindholdt: Instead of feeling threatened by vegetarians, try practicing tolerance

One day you’re likely to find a vegetarian on your porch; it might be a sibling, daughter, grandson, parent, friend or would-be lover.

You might complain the diet is a pretense and a sham, a selfish rebellion, a mockery of practices the rest of you hold dear. You might try to starve the rebel, humiliate or coerce her to compliance.

Consider these alternatives instead.

Preparing to host a vegetarian doesn’t mean you need to clean your freezer of meat. Don’t scurry to conceal that brace of rooster pheasants you shot and mounted for display in 1983. No one will be searching with a headlamp after midnight through your garbage can for bones.

Let common sense guide you in arranging your table. Don’t make the main dish meat. A turkey, chicken or ham may turn the head and stomach of your vegetarian friend. Traditional Catholics abstain from flesh each Friday as a sacrifice and a testament of their faith. Would you do anything less for a loved one?

Even carnivores have a gag reflex. In our culture, we no longer see piglets roasted whole with ears and snouts and clouded eyes. “Disgusting,” most Americans would say. Same with whole-head poultry plucked and hung in Asian marts. We WASPs like our flesh in Styrofoam and cellophane, never featuring the face.

Did your food once have a face? If so, the vegetarians in your life will not be apt to ask for a taste. Understand them to mean precisely what they say. Don’t try to compromise by replacing pork chops with fish, or chuck steak with fowl. Meat is meat. Meat is murder, some of your brethren believe.

Besides the kindness quotient, methane gas in cow flatulence may be trashing the ozone layer. Those feedlot cattle, lining up to await their fate, get hives and irritable bowels. They break some mighty wind to pass the time and ease their minds. Offer to give up beef for Lent if your veggie friend will give up beans.

There is a quaint human tradition of eating creatures live – ideally while they’re writhing in pain. Study the Marquis de Sade. Read the “Macabre Meals” chapter in “A Natural History of the Senses” by Diane Ackerman. Pain, some believe, enhances the taste. Or does the taste of flesh enhance the thrill of inflicting pain?

Exercise the same tolerance you would toward folks of diverse religious beliefs. Hindus do not eat cows. Jews and Muslims won’t touch pork. Jains tread with watchful step to keep from crushing bugs. Will you scoff and mock holy granolas for their faith? Songs of devotion have many strains.

Finally, friends, don’t argue or coerce. Place no conditions on your camaraderie or love. Don’t threaten disinheritance. Don’t bully, browbeat or belittle. Avoid calling names – Earth mama, zealot, fanatic, fruitcake, freak.

Why should someone’s diet threaten you? If you find vegetarianism such an affront, I know a highly respected therapist who’d be glad to take you into session.

So open your doors, expand the pantries of your mind. Slice ripe mangos and dress them with sugar, white wine and the blood of the humble lime.

Paul Lindholdt is a professor of English at Eastern Washington University and the winner of a Washington State Book Award.