I agree with your observations. I think that's why there are so many celebrity vegans--they can afford fancier foods and the domestic help to prepare good vegan meals daily. Also, it's a cog of the "machine" against which these celebs can safely rage. Go too political--like the Dixie Chicks or Charlton Heston--and you risk some kind of fanbase backlash.

Especially after watching the movie, Babel, I'm of a mind that humans simply need some kind of struggle in their lives. If they have none--if they become too content--they create some. The vegan rails against meat eaters. Anorectics one-up all those with too little self-control where eating is concerned. Bottle water snobs hail their own refined tastes while scorning all those who cannot tell the difference.

In Babel, the Mexican families celebrating at the wedding looked happy enough. They weren't destitute, famished, or sickly, yet their simple, sustainable lives were acutely juxtaposed with the promise of an even better life across the border. Evidently, their simple lives were not enough.

In another storyline, the deaf Japanese girl ultimately didn't care that she had friends; that she was well off; that she was athletic and healthy; or that she had an attentive father. Instead, she was fixated on what she didn't have.

The American couple obviously didn't spend their time appreciating their lives' wealth, i.e. each other, their children, their incomes that afforded them a nice home and domestic help. The husband went off and had an affair, and they both went sightseeing in Morocco as a means of repairing their relationship.

The only reason I can figure people create battles where none need be fought is that natural selection drives us to win--to be the fittest. After all, there can be no victors without contest.

If it's about vegans and not vegeterians per se, I agree with you, even though with certain regret that being strictly vegan is so difficult - at least for me. Milk and cheese have a certain kind of fat needed for the optimal functioning of brain cells and glands in the body, and bones, and animal sources of calcium or protein have never worked well for me. But I don't think you have to eat flesh to get them: I have been going strictly without andy meat for 2 years now and I haven't fallen apart because of that! And what would you say about Morrissey, who has been that way almost all his life? He doesn't seem very sick to me... As for third-world societies that don't have the luxury of consuming meat, what they lack is not just animal protein but all other sources of nutrients - like green-leaf vegetables, fruits, nuts and several types of grains. In some types of ancient Boudhist monasteries, monks lived an extremely simple and humble life - not sumptuous or glamourous at all - and would feed off of only non-animal foods. The problem with Hollywood is that the smallest and simplest gesture resembling that of a charitable or affectionate human one is taken to iconoclastic proportions and turned into a trend everyone wants to emulate or follow like a social rule: if Angelina Jolie, gets pregnant, all the stars in the Hollywood constellation need to get pregnant, so they can have that maternal image attached to them. If Anglelina Jolie decides to adopt an African boy, then Madonna has to do it to - otherwise, how else will the world keep hearing of her? If some star decides to open schools in less previlegded societies, Oprah has to do the same in South Africa. If Sting sings a song to help preserve the Amazon forest, singers from following generations are very cool to keep the tradition, like those that sing for Live Aid or something like that. It is sickening, but maybe these artists are in fact having some degree of awarness of the fact that their attitudes affect the world, and they use these trends to do something genuinely good. This is strange America: a counrty that does things because it's conventional and trendy, but because it feels a certain degree of responsibility towards a world they use to keep their abundant living standards.

However, the last time I heard stories on Hollywood diet, it is based on high protein and low carbs. Hillary Swank and Rene Szwelleger (sorry, I can't really spell these names, I almost never watch TV or modern American movies) eat a lot of lean meats, drink non-fat milk and eat a few veggies!