Sharp vegan response to death of controversial meat-lover Joel Ozersky, after local Meatopia event.

On May 18, I posted a video from a Pebble Beach Food & Wine event called Meatopia by Dan Dronsfield.

The post included a note that its organizer and devoted carnivore/food critic Joel Ozersky had died of mysterious causes not long after the event.

Reader Theresa Buccola wrote in.

“Instead of bringing the death to a logical conclusion, that perhaps, just perhaps, his overconsumption of animal products is what caused an early demise,” she emailed, “you stupidly celebrate with more meat events. So stupid, quite frankly, that it hurts.”

An autopsy did not offer any answers about Ozersky’s death.

But Buccola’s point was something some other readers had almost certainly considered.

I know I had.

We asked her to lose the nastier language and submit a commentary.

That is what follows.

She still writes insensitively about the human life lost—but that’s part of her point.

Ozersky himself was, as The New York Times put it, “one of the most forceful food writers in the country…[with a] joyful willingness to be bluntly opinionated.”

He was known for making fun of vegans and vegetarians, and for his wild love of meat.

We feel Buccola’s equally forceful perspective has a place in the ongoing discussion over responsible eating.

We welcome your thoughts below the longer version of what appears in print. 

It would be dangerous, deadly even, to believe that the life of this rabid meat-eater should be celebrated with “a love poem” on your Twitter account when discussing Meatopia.

Indeed, it scoffs in the face of all logic. Did anyone at the paper even bother to ask if it is possible that his consumption of animals is what caused him to die at the ripe old age of 47?

Am I the only one to see that many people, particularly those slicing up that dead pig on the video, are obese? How many are going to live past 60? Do you not care about the health and longevity of your readers?

It does take courage to ask the hard questions rather than ignore evidence that is written all over those enormous bellies and on one that now lies in a casket.

Let me shock everybody back to reality for a moment; this is no longer the Paleolithic era.

We no longer make heroes out of men when they fell wild beasts and risk death for the sustenance of their tribes. Just because you lie in wait in an elevated hunting shack clutching a 40 oz., dressed in camo and sticking a high-powered rifle through a slot it does not get you back in touch with your inner-mythic hero.

Neither does shutting off your computer, hopping in your SUV and driving to an event that will serve the corpses of animals that have been killed with advanced technological precision.

Face it, we are in the era of the factory farm.

Nauseating places where billions of animals are tortured and slaughtered every year.

But oh wait, did I forget about how kind Mr. Local Farmer is to his pigs or that we have grass-fed, humanely-raised, free-range, consciously caught, no rBGH, blah, blah, blah… No, I did not.

This is called doublespeak—and these terms fall under that umbrella because they have been invented to quell our conscience from doing those things we know, on a deep compassionate level, we should no longer be doing.

If you can have such a disregard for their lives, their beauty, the love they hold for their children, if you can laugh at the excruciating pain they endure for nothing, there will be consequences. And they will be merciless.

With each bite of fear that Ozersky rammed into his gut, with every malevolent word he spread through his writings, taunting us to spill more blood, Ozersky wound up digging his own grave with a butcher’s knife and a fork.

You will leave in your wake broken-hearted friends and family members as Josh Ozersky has done.

In contrast, I suggest you take a trip to the salad bar at Earthbound Farm and feast on the bounty Mother Nature offers to us in her plants.

Then turn around and fill your arms with the oranges, the apples and the bananas. Go ahead. Eat as much as you want.

You'll never get fat on that food. Instead, you'll be able to ride your bike hundreds of miles a week, climb Robinson Canyon twice in one day and look in the mirror and see lean and beautiful. Your blood and digestive tract will flow freely.

And you will greatly increase your chances of seeing 100 years old come to pass in radiant health.

In honor of your beloved founder, who was no doubt transported in a tiny gestation crate directly to the place where all karmic debts become due, I suggest you refer to the event not as "Meatopia" but as "Deathtopia."

So we can put an end to the propaganda, and call it what it is.