I look at is as:

Every step up the foodchain maintains only 10% (ish) of the energy.  Meat requires 10x more vegetables to make.
Eating vegetables makes you healthier

That said, am I a vegetarian?  No.
But I eat a lot of vegetables.

Snobbery is certainly always behavior that should be condemned.  Those snobs who affect to be social or political liberals are really just Lumpen-liberals.  And it is not reverse-snobbery to call them that, seeing that so many true liberals are hard-working, sincere and good-hearted, and do not deserve to be mocked and mischaracterized.

On the other hand, the regular audience of "King of Queens" (a show I have never seen) perhaps is already thoughtlessly disposed to accept that a delight in intellectual pleasures, and vegetarianism, amount to unacceptable and un-American snobbery, pure and simple.

That would be a pity.  Can people really be so uncritically stupid?

By the way, do "liberal" husbands really force their wives to wear shapeless dresses made from hemp?  I have no experience of that whatsoever.  Sounds like a reference to the "dirty hippie" bogey-man.

At least drinking fine wine and listening to chamber music was not included in Doug's decadence.

And one wonders if, during his brief vegetarian/intellectual/liberal enlightenment, he could have managed such a clue as, "seven-letter word for Ukrainian river."  I think there is something fetching, actually, that Doug's intellectualism only got as far as "Volga."

So anyway, what happened to the chicken whom Doug rescued and befriended?  Don't tell me that Doug returned it to the Chinese restaurant?!

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Thanks, Sven, for directing me to that excellent website, which I had not known about.

You are right, Dawn's description of the episode is much more encouraging than Sarah's.  I am delighted to know that the chicken ended up in decent circumstances.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

I have long been interested in sitcoms as both generators and reflectors of important social memes. Can we imagine the civil rights movement without "All In The Family"? I've seen this show from time to time though not this hparticular episode, so I have to rely on Sara's and Dawn's descriptions for the unpacking. My general impression has been that Doug's character is built around just this style of taking random obsessions to comic extremes. Doug presents a generally obnoxious personality with just enough endearing qualities to make his relationships with the other characters (marginally) plausible, so that those relationships have the dramatic value of being comfortingly stable at the same time as they are constantly under the gun. This of course is a stock-in-trade of sitcom scenarios - Frazier, Seinfeld, Old Christine, Hank Hill ....

The takeaway from this particular vignette would seem to be not "don't be a vegan" but rather "don't be jerk". At the same time some serious points appear to have been made concerning unpleasant truths about our animal-based diet and the frailty of our ethical convictions when we run up against the juggernaut of commercial advertising. For this I'm prepared to be quite appreciative.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I happen to be vegetarian and some would probably take this article to offense but I don't.  I thought it was funny actually.

Treat others as you would want to be treated.  Although I could very well be good at being a jerk towards meat eaters, I am not because I don't want people to judge me for what I eat so I try not to judge others for eating meat.  In fact, you would be surprised at some of the "jerky" comments I get from the meat eaters.

Just something to think about.

I am a vegetarian but speak very little of it on my job.  Sadly, there is a negative stigma attached to it that seems to generate very strong opinions in people, most of them negative.