Though celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was a committed vegetarian, upon declining an invitation to a vegetarian gala dinner he once wryly observed that, “the thought of 2,000 people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.” Shaw’s point was not to decry the renowned gastrointestinal benefits of celery but to recoil from the regimented, cult-like celebration of a single ideology, no matter how worthy that ideology happened to be.

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