A word about vegetarian diets

Nutrionists have coined terms for various types of vegetarian diets, for instance:

• Lacto-ovo vegetarians eat meat "by-products," like milk, eggs and honey, but no flesh.

• Vegans eat neither flesh nor any of these meat by-products.

• Pesco vegetarians eat seafood (fish, crustaceans, etc.) but no other flesh.

• Crusto vegetarians eat crustaceans but no other seafood.

• Semi-vegetarians eat relatively small amounts of various kinds of meat.

When you say that you're a vegetarian, people inevitably ask, "Do you eat eggs and dairy products?" "Do you eat chicken?" etc. That's understandable since such a range of vegetarian diets are recognized by nutritionists and since surveys show that many people identify themselves as vegetarians despite the fact that they eat fish and/or small quantities of other meats.

In my own case, I was a careful lacto-ovo vegetarian for about ten years before going vegan for about three years, followed by a return to a laco-ovo vegetarian diet. Then for a while, I freely ate shrimp while still avoiding vertebrates, but now I also eat fish.

Having described my current diet in these specific terms, and how my diet has changed over the years, it's natural for people to ask, "Why do you now eat just those things and not the rest? And why did you change your diet in the ways you did over the years?"

The short answer would be this. While I believe that slaughter of persons and near persons is not justified, I believe that some animals, including fish, are merely sentient and that humane slaughter of them is permissible, while other animals, including shrimp, are not sentient at all.

Of course it's really more complex than that, for many reasons. For one thing, I believe both that most vertebrates, including cattle, are not near persons either, and that it is easier to say what counts as humane slaughter of cattle and to live up to the standard than it is to do these things with fish. So it looks like I should be more willing to eat humanely slaughtered cattle than I am to eat fish, where I often do not know how they were slaughtered. For another, I believe that culling of near persons is sometimes justified and killing persons in self defense and in war are both justified. Then there are the difficulties of defining these terms "person," "near person," and "merely sentient," and of defending all these claims I want to make about them.