But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.
In "Eating Animals," Jonathan Safran Foer reflects on his journey towards embracing vegetarianism again after becoming a philosophy major. This transition was influenced by his emerging values and a desire for consistency between his beliefs and actions. Foer highlights the discomfort he felt with the contradictions inherent in eating meat, particularly as he engaged in deeper philosophical thinking.
His choice to return to vegetarianism stemmed from a conviction that his life, especially in the realm of ethics, must align with reasoned thought. He acknowledges that this mindset led to a certain pretentiousness within himself, illustrating the tension between rational thought and everyday choices like diet.
