: Re: How to balance respecting diversity and avoiding tokenism at the same time My project has an environmental theme. My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and

@Phylliss352

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I'm going to risk not completely answering the question. The fundamental problem here is that your friends - and perhaps your project - have a very US-centric view of what raising animals involves. You're getting preachy about something you and your friends may not really understand that well.

The US carries out a great deal of intensive meat production. Animals are raised indoors, in vast sheds, and feed is transported to the animals. Since feed needs to be transported, this is often in the form of grain, which could equally well be fed to humans (or the land could be used for other purposes). Naturally this leads to complaints about the ecological footprint of meat rearing, and those complaints are perfectly valid.

This is NOT the case worldwide though. In most of the world, animals are allowed to graze - and they graze on land which could never be productively used for agriculture. A classic example would be cattle ranching in the hotter states of the US, in Australia and in much of Africa, where the soil is too poor to support agriculture. Hilly areas of Europe (and other places like New Zealand) where it would be impossible to use agricultural machinery are used for sheep farming. Farming animals for meat allows this land to be used to feed people, which otherwise it never could.

More than that, in many places this has been in place for thousands of years, and the landscape has literally evolved around animal farming. Take the sheep off the South Downs of England, for example, and the grassland environment, home to many specialised species, is overtaken by low scrub and all those species go extinct. Or meat may come from hunting, which does not affect the environment so long as breeding populations are left - but if the locals choose to stop eating meat then they'd have to cut down the forests (where the animals live) to plant crops, and then the topsoil dries up and blows away.

So your first mission in your "environmental theme" is to understand the environment where you're setting this. If the environment looks like the US intensive farming environment, you'd better have ideas where else it can go. And remember that intensive farming comes from a genuine need to feed people. We're used to famines being something that happens elsewhere, but in the 1920s and 1930s, Americans were starving in the Midwest. Intensive farming was how the First World stopped that happening to their people.

For us, it turns out we could support animal farming and arable farming on our current footprint. Perhaps the environment in your book can't? In that case you have a Malthusian problem. Do you make people eat differently - or do you try to have fewer people? If your world is going to mandate (or at least pressure) people into eating for calories and not for enjoyment, how do you avoid your society becoming "Fidipur" from Beauty?

I'm going to say that your best way of stopping your character from being a "token vegetarian" is by clearly and accurately illustrating the world he/she lives in. Not with pages of exposition, but by showing. Give us reasons why they're vegetarian. Some people are vegetarian because of views on animal cruelty - but you're talking about presenting a world where it's based more on Malthusian or at least economic reasons. If that's the case, this isn't going to be something where your character is unique. Whether or not society agrees with them, there will be a wider movement which your character is part of.

What you don't want is what your friends seem to be talking about. They seem to be asking for a Mary Sue to identify with. At this point your character stops being a character, and becomes a caricature. Really don't go down that path.

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