For the Virtue of Vegetarianism?

~
"O mortals, don't contaminate your bodies
with food procured so sacrilegiously.
For you can gather grain, and there are fruits
that bend the branches with their weight, and grapes
that swell in clusters on the vines, there are
delicious greens that cooking makes still more
inviting, still more tender. You need not
refrain from milk, or honey sweet with scent
of thyme. The earth is kind - and it provides
so much abundance, you are offered feasts
for whch there is no need to slaughter beasts,
to shed their blood. Some animals do feed
on flesh - but yet, not all of them: for sheep
and cattle graze on grass. And those who need
to feed on bloody food are savage beasts:
fierce lions, wolves, and bears, Armenian
tigers. Ah, it's a monstrous crime indeed
to stuff your innards with a living thing's
own innards, to make fat your greedy flesh
by swallowing another body, letting
another die that you may live. Amid
so many things that Earth, the best of mothers,
may offer, must you really choose to chew
with cruel teeth such wretched, slaughtered flesh -
and mime the horrid Cyclops as you eat?
Is your voracious pampered gut appeased
by this alone: your killing living things?"

-- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum

The speaker in this snatch of verse is, of course, Pythagoras. Vegetarianism seems to be the 'in' thing for the cool progressives. Unsurprisingly, Monk never caught that wave. Taking a good bite out of a thick, meaty chicken leg, "How can anything that tastes this good be wrong!?"