Rhetorical Analysis Of Vegetarian By Laura Fraser

The author of this passage is Laura Fraser, a "vegetarian" of 15 years. The occasion of her writing is to provide a satirical explanation for her decision to go vegetarian. The audience of this passage is the general public, any individual can read this because of its satirical spin on a plain topic. The purpose of her writing is to provide a comical piece against vegetarianism. The tone of her piece is shaped by the lighthearted humor that she uses to portray her argument against being a vegetarian. Fraser discusses health, animal rights, and the environment as reasons to be vegetarian, however, she later takes apart each argument in a way that is comical and pleasant for everyone, who isn’t a vegetarian, to enjoy.

Her first reason regarding why she became a vegetarian was health. She then rebuts her argument by stating, that to make up for the lack of meat, she ate cheese. Which in large amounts, is much more

unhealthy than meat. Her second argument is regarding animal rights. To counter this, she states that she does not include fish, nor did she include pancetta, not to mention her “don't ask don't tell policy” on chicken broth. Which shows that her "care for animals" is not as deep as she made it seem. Finally, she states that being a vegetarian is good for the environment, but she stated the problem was not animals and eating meat, but overeating, overgrazing , and over indulging.
Her strongest argument for eating meat is the fact that she enjoys eating meat. As a vegetarian, one must deny themselves something that they truly enjoy. Not only is it painful for the vegetarian, but it makes everyone else uncomfortable as well. People must make accommodations surrounding the vegetarian, or vegan diet, which makes social gatherings uncomfortable because others have to sacrifice their meal to accommodate one person. This relates to her thesis because it shows how wrong she was and how much she missed out on while being vegetarian.
The purpose here is to show that being a vegetarian may have many arguments, but many arguments have holes in them. She wants to show that one must be sure about their decision to become a vegetarian because they must fully understand why they're doing it and how it will affect the people around them. Als, a conclusion that she made on being a vegetarian is to practice moderation, not elimination. I believe this is her purpose because that is how she concluded, and her entire essay was her reasons against being a vegetarian.
She uses her personal experience in her writing to appeal to the reader.

If she was not speaking from personal experience and was only speaking generally, then it would be more difficult for her to make this piece so satirical. Her personal experience helps make this such an entertaining piece. Also, this piece is based on her personal reasons for becoming a vegetarian, and also her loose interpretation of being a vegetarian. Not all vegetarians have the same reasoning behind their diet, so this only works with her personal experience.

Her tone in this essay was satirical. This made her argument more appealing to a wider audience due to the presence of comedy. She uses her humor to convey an important message to the reader.

In paragraph two the point that Fraser is trying to make is, she's very lenient in being a vegetarian. She calls herself a vegetarian, yet she ate fish, dairy and pancetta; which are all animal products. This shows that her reasoning behind being a vegetarian is very loosely interpreted due to her consumption of animal

products.
The reason that she calls herself a cheesetarian is because as a vegetarian she consumed large amounts cheese. Vegetarians got their name from the large amounts of vegetables they needed to sustain them which is what their diet should mainly consist of. With Fraser, this is not the case. What she means is, it was dairy and large amounts are worse than meat so it just took away from her argument for health. While vegetarians normally are quite healthy the amounts of cheese that she consumed was most likely in fact the opposite.
When she states that she was inoculated it meant as if she was protected. So when the doctor said that she needed to wait she insisted that there was no reason for this because she had already achieved a lower cholesterol level. The word recycle in paragraph 15 is used comically because it implies being helpful to the environment, maybe reusing but I'll she's doing is buying leather that somebody has not had a chance to buy yet.