Stopping Being A Vegetarian Laura Fraser Summary

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Why I Stopped Being a Vegetarian is Laura Fraser’s story of her becoming and eventually stopping being a vegetarian. Fraser’s essay begins with her explanations for becoming a vegetarian, including the cost of meat. She then goes to discuss reasons she used for justifying being a vegetarian to others. Fraser ends the essay by telling the story of how she stopped being a vegetarian. Fraser bases this essay around creating a personal ethos with her audience, but by the end, she is unlikable. From her weak attempt at humor that isn’t funny and almost offensive at some point, to her lack of logic, Fraser is difficult to like at the end of the essay.
She explains that she was not very strict about her diet. Describing herself as a “pesco-ovo-lacto-pancetta-vegetarian …show more content…

Fraser then goes on to describe why she became a vegetarian. She says that she came up with vague responses such as her “health, the environment, the impracticality and heartlessness of killing animals for food when we can survive perfectly on soy burgers.” After discussing why she became a vegetarian in the first place, Fraser goes on to explain why she stayed a vegetarian for so long. Fraser says that as time went on, she started to believe the arguments for why people should become vegetarians. The first argument being health. She states that “there’s a lot of evidence saying that vegetarians live longer, have lower cholesterol levels and are thinner than meat-eaters.” She follows up this offering a refutation to her own argument by saying for the first few years of being a vegetarian, she basically only ate cheese. Here Fraser increases the ethos in her argument by including moral philosopher Peter Singer’s argument that “if you don’t have to kill animals, and it potentially causes them suffering, you shouldn’t do it. Fraser then goes on to critique her own animal rights philosophy. She states she “excluded fish from her animal kingdom—not only because fish taste delicious grilled with a little butter and garlic, but also because they make it a

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