It’s really nice to go to a restaurant where I can forget about the issues at the heart of this blog. Luckily, there’s a great local vegan place at whose door we can leave our cares. The V Spot is a lovably scruffy little place on 5th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We’ve been going at least once a week, trying to sample everything on the menu because everything’s been really good.

We always start with the yummy summer rolls — large rice-paper rolls of avocado, carrot, cucumber and mesclun greens, topped with sesame seeds. They come with an amazing Thai peanut sauce dip (which I tried and failed to replicate at home).

Our favorite entrees so far:

• The quinoa veggie wrap, which has a lovely ginger vinaigrette
• The veggie burgers (made of lentils, black beans, veggies, and some secret seasonings)
• Kale in a coconut curry sauce with gingered quinoa (it’s our grain du jour)
• Tofu scramble baked with sauteed tomato, broccoli, bell peppers, and nutritional yeast (I hate tofu, yet I like this dish)

Besides The V Spot, there’s also the excellent Dao Palate on Flatbush near 7th Avenue. I wish there were more places like these two nearby. If such restaurants can’t thrive in Park Slope, then where?

On the heels of the terms vegetarian, vegan, and carnivore, as well as the less familiar locavore, pescatarian, pollotarian and ovo-lacto vegetarian, comes a new coinage for these confused and confusing times: flexitarian.

Flexitarians integrate meatless meals into their diets but aren’t full-time vegetarians; they seek to decrease their meat consumption without totally eliminating it (an alternate term would be semi-vegetarian). There’s even a new crop of flexitarian cookbooks (which seems silly, because what’s the difference between a flexitarian cookbook and a regular cookbook?).

I totally understand some vegetarians and vegans insist that “eating less meat” does not exactly merit a new word. But if the U.S. reduced its overall meat consumption by, say, a quarter, wouldn’t that be a tremendous benefit to millions of animals as well our health and that of the planet? Isn’t it sensible to start with where people are, instead of expecting them to change completely? Certainly it’s unrealistic to imagine that Americans will lose their taste for meat overnight.

The quotable Joel Salatin doesn’t much care for the old saw that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. He proposes an alternative: If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. His idea is to give perfection a rest and simply try to integrate something new into one’s life. I’m not trying to say that flexitarians are doing something badly, but rather that they’re doing something, and that the thing they’re doing is positive.

However, I think the term flexitarian deserves an etymological sibling, so I propose yet another new coinage: humane-itarian. Humane-itarians only eat meat from animals that have been humanely raised and slaughtered. For me, since such meat is so difficult to come by, humane-itarian winds up meaning “95% vegetarian.”

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” has to be one of the most clever memes ever, particularly when combined with the ubiquitous symbol of three green arrows. Now the Humane Society is offering a variation based on animal welfare:

• Reduce our animal consumption.
• Refine our diet by switching to higher welfare animal products (e.g., cage-free).
• Replace animal products with readily available vegetarian options.

These Three R’s were first defined, for a related purpose, by the scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique (1959). Russell and Burch were referring to methods which reduce, refine, or replace animal experimentation (and which are now widely accepted as the basic principles guiding animal use in scientific research). Now the Humane Society has adapted Russell and Burch’s phrase to apply to humane eating practices.

Obviously, both the environmental movement (which sometimes adds a fourth R, “repair”) and the animal welfare movement have piggybacked on the alliterative power of the phrase long used to describe the foundations of a basic skills-oriented school curriculum—”reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.” (There’s even a “new school,” higher-order thinking version of the three R’s—”relating, representing, and reasoning.”)

As an educational writer and literacy specialist, I spend a lot of time developing materials that help kids recognize, decode, and write their letters, with the ultimate goal of preventing reading difficulties and creating lifelong readers. So I fully believe that each letter is crucial to cracking the code and making it one’s own—whether you’re a first grader finally able to sound out the word “rooster” or an adult consumer in a supermarket decoding labels to decide which kind of chicken to buy. In this case, that letter is R. Really.

Michael believes there are four defenses people use to justify their wrongdoings, both to themselves and others. He calls these the Four Horsemen of Justification. He’s a pain in my ass.

Anyway, according to his theory, sometimes a single defense is used; other times, two or more. But everyone everywhere uses the same four defenses. They are:

• Deflect the blame
• Defend your character
• Minimize the wrong
• Attack the accuser

The reference is a tad hyperbolic.

When I violate my own food policies—let’s say I’ve “accidentally” eaten soup made with chicken broth or had a bite of someone’s cheeseburger—here’s how the horsemen gallop across my mind:

• Deflect the blame: “The evil food system in this country created this situation, and I’m powerless against the force of agribusiness.”
• Defend your character. I’m a big fan of this one; it’s quite versatile: “I do plenty of socially/environmentally responsible things,” “It would have been thrown out if I didn’t eat it and I can’t stand to see food go to waste,” “I’m doing the best I can!” “I worked really hard today and I’m tired of thinking about this stuff. Isn’t life hard enough without such restrictions on simple pleasures?”
• Minimize the wrong: “One burger is a drop in the bucket,” “One person can’t change anything anyway,” “If I didn’t actually pay for it, I’m not supporting the system.”
• Attack the accuser: I’m usually my own harshest critic, but if Michael points out a misstep, I might think, “Well, you’re wearing leather shoes, so where do you draw the line?”

Whenever I’m trying to defend myself in one of these ways and Michael rolls out his trusty theory, I always want to shout, pouty-teenager-style, “Fine, here’s a fifth: I know it’s wrong, and I don’t care!” I don’t bother, though, because Michael will just shake his head and say, “You’re minimizing the wrong.”