Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian and Vegan Survival Guide

Living Among Meat Eaters is a survival guide for vegans and vegetarians, newly updated (2023) with a new preface, a new chapter addressing living among meat eaters online, many new recipes, and revisions throughout to reflect the changes in society since the book was first published in 2001, making this much-loved guide more relevant than ever. Learn more about it from my publisher here.

New vegans, and even experienced vegetarians and vegans, often respond with earnestness to questions like “how did you decide to stop eating meat?” or “Even dairy?” We do so because we think we are being asked a question that the listener wants an answer to.

But, we are often wrong. I myself got it wrong for the first twenty years of being a vegetarian. Becoming a vegan helped to clarify what was going on. In this second edition, I offer real-life advice that vegetarians and vegans can use to defuse any situation where their food choices come under attack. I suggest viewing non-vegans as being blocked vegans. In their responses to vegans and vegetarians, they tell us what keeps them from changing. My book provides strategies for conversations, insights into hostile behavior, and tips for dining out and entertaining at home among meat eaters.

Here’s the great secret: people are perfectly happy eating vegan food as long as they don't know that is what they are doing. We can use that to our advantage.

Living Among Meat Eaters provides suggestions for talking, eating, living with and cooking for people who respond defensively to your willingness to change your life.

I have heard from many vegans that this is a book they read every year, to remind them about not getting sucked into non-vegans’ dramas. As one writer said, "I keep saying ‘yes, yes, yes' as I read it. You put into words what so many of us have felt."

Praise for the first edition of Living Among Meat Eaters:

Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat), a writer and lecturer on vegetarianism, offers advice to practicing vegetarians about eating with omnivores. She covers everything from how to answer the question, ‘Are you a vegetarian?" to tips for dining out and handling meals in a business setting. She also includes a selection of favorite recipes, adapted from classic vegetarian cookbooks. Adams argues that vegetarians today have it rough: "we see death in [meat eaters'] meals, they see it in ours. Attempts will be made to disempower your viewpoint. Your diet is the issue, but you become the target.' Point well made. – Publishers' Weekly

Vegetarians often get defensive and feel under siege when coworkers, parents, siblings, and friends challenge their selective eating practices. For them, Carol J. Adams' Living Among Meat Eaters may prove a real gift.

Adams shows how using humor, being patient, and accepting the fact that general society values eating meat can deflect pointless arguing and begin to raise consciousness of others. She should know–she lives in Texas, where identity is inextricably linked with steaks and chili con carne. Some may argue with Adams' generalization that meat eaters are simply ‘blocked' vegetarians. Nevertheless, her advice also brings comfort to anyone not omnivorous, including meat eaters who eschew pork or seafood or anyone keeping a strict Kosher diet.

– Booklist

No Meat? No problem. Being a vegetarian in a meat-eaters' world isn't easy and Carol J. Adams knows it. She has written Living Among Meat Eaters, a common-sense guide to help vegetarians navigate sticky situations.

– Chicago Sun-Times

To new vegetarians, Living Among Meat Eaters offers hope: it is possible to live by your principles without saying good-bye to family, friends, and job.

To every vegetarian who lives, works, and eats with carnivores, it offers peace of mind, as well as the prospect of opening the meat eaters in our lives to vegetarianism. It should be read by everyone who encounters the Dilemma [of interacting with defensive meat-eaters] on even an occasional basis. – Satya

A theme woven through the entire text is that staying out of arguments–even with the most argumentative of meat eaters, modeling peace, and very importantly having excellent vegan food at hand, are important ways to alleviate or avoid friction.

Rather than bursting out of the starting line with this simple but profound advice, she leads readers to the bottom line by way of a multitude of colorful passages that you won't want to miss. Be sure to check out the Meat Eaters' Classification of Vegetarians (the Ascetic, the Puritan, the Bambi Vegetarian, the Freak, the Holier-Than-Thou-Vegetarian, and the Phobic) and the Classification of Saboteurs (Adams explains that meat eaters engage in sabotage in order to block the painful process of bring the truth about animal products to their consciousness, and some of the types profiled are the Caring Saboteur, the Dominance and Control Saboteur, and the Hostile Saboteur).

Adams also spends ample time in the practical realm, too, offering dynamite advise on fielding comments.

– Vegetarian Voice

Never Too Late To Go Vegan

According to popular folklore, wisdom comes with age. What could be wiser than choosing compassion, vibrant health, and a vast, delicious cuisine to be the guiding principles in our life?

I wrote Never Too Late to Go Vegan with Patti Breitman and Virginia Messina to introduce you to a lifestyle that brings all of those things plus a new sense of purpose, and a new experience of power to affect change. That’s what it has done for us and for countless others who choose a vegan way of life.

Imagine if reaching retirement age was just as exciting as entering high school or getting accepted to college. Imagine that this milestone is, like those, an opportunity to widen our perspective on the world, encounter new, interesting people and ideas, develop new skills, and share what we learn to help others. Veganism offers all of this, and it is yours for the taking whether you are still working or long into retirement.

And in veganism, there is something that ties together many of the aspects of positive aging. If aging makes people feel they have less influence and power in the world, veganism offers a strong rebuttal to that feeling. We love the amazing health benefits that come with plant-based diets. We love that our choices do not hurt animals. We love that the food we eat reduces the methane production that is a major contributor to global climate change.

Praise for Never Too Late to Go Vegan:

Never Too Late to Go Vegan is, somewhat amazingly to me, the first-ever guide for everyone over 50 who wants to or already does eat and live vegan.

It’s a book I’d been looking to publish for a number of years, and then a proposal by Carol, Patti, and Ginny materialized in my inbox earlier this year. These three authors make a superlative case for the benefits of plant-based eating and living when one is over 50. And they provide a handbook to vegan living that goes well beyond diet tips. Here is a thoughtful and wide- ranging consideration of the benefits, and the consequences, of a plant-based diet—for oneself, one’s loved ones, animals, and the planet. It’s an all-in-one resource that I believe arrives at an ideal moment, as more and more people – including over-50s – are embracing plant-based eating and living.

– Matthew Lore, publisher of The Experiment

Check out all the positive comments about Never Too Late To Go Vegan on Goodreads.

How to Eat Like a Vegetarian Even If You Never Want to Be One

(note: this book is out of print and we are trying to figure out next steps, but I really love this book and wanted you to know about).

Don't have time to cook? Don't like to follow recipes? Cutting back on meat but don't know what to serve? Want an easy way to eat healthfully? This is the book for you.

Filled with more than 250 kitchen shortcuts, strategies and simple solutions, the book is intended for people who want to eat well, but who:

• Think it takes too much time to prepare meals at home;

• Are cutting back on meat and don't know what to serve;

• Do not like following recipes.

Dozens of lists, charts, and hints in How to Eat Like a Vegetarian provide meals, snacks, and surprises that are as easy to make as they are delicious. And whether they become a way of life for the reader of just an occasional experiment, these strategies will help anyone become more at home in the kitchen and more comfortable preparing scrumptious, delightful, health promoting food.

Contents include:

• Two Hundred (and More!) Ways to Eat Like A Vegetarian

• How to Cook Like a Vegetarian

• Vegetarian Cooking without Recipes

• Everything In Its Season

• Thinking and Feeling Like a Vegetarian, If You Want To...

• Appendix I: Resources for Eating, Thinking, and Feeling Like a Vegetarian

• Appendix II: Guide to Ingredients

Praise for How to Eat Like a Vegetarian:

Adams and Breitman prove that we don't need a lot of time or even recipes to create delicious, satisfying vegetarian meals.

– Neal Barnard, M.D., President, Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine

Do you sometimes feel that it's difficult to eat healthfully?

This book is the answer. It's quick, very to the point, and right on target. Read it, use it, and there will be two results. You will know a new level of vitality and health. And your body will thank you for the rest of your life.

– John Robbins, author, Diet for a New America, The Food Revolution, and Healthy at 100

The Ethics of Diet

I worked with University of Illinois Press to bring Howard Williams’ classic history of vegetarianism back into press. Ethical vegetarianism is no recent development, as this unrivaled historical anthology dramatizes.