the perils of eating (only) your greens

from a NYT review by E.Rothstein of 'The Bloodless Revolution' by Tristram Stuart - Sunday Feb 25th 2007

This is vegatarianism's lure and vegatarianism's trap. Along with its heightened awareness of the value of life, it brings a heightened desire to bring a new world into existence. And the greater the ambition, the higher the cost; the greater the purity, the stronger the purge. Many Nazis, as Stuart asserts, ''were either vegetarian or interested in related issues" because they, like the Stalinists of the same period, believed they were ushering in a new age, answering to a higher law. But in this quest for lost paradise and in the name of superior virtue and high moral feeling, how many doses of deadly mercury have been fervently administered? It's enough to make one take up meat?

It's just amusing in a provocative way that the humble cause of eating exclusively greens, because let's face it we are under little threat from vegitarians, might also be indicative of forces whose other expressions are far from the mundane and innocent.
We micro-manage perhaps as a defense mechanism of some sort, those seemingly harmless attachments to certain habits perhaps contain treacheries, that on at a larger scale, become potentially authoritarian. Foucault and Deleuze sometimes talked of 'micro-fascism', the building blocks that enable larger misuses. What are the progressions that this takes - from minor to major? From the minor and quite often positive to the larger, major and more unwieldly, and therefore potentially dangerous abuses.