"I have always been an animal lover. I had a hard time disassociating the animals I cuddled with - dogs and cats, for example - from the animals on my plate, and I never really cared for the taste of meat. I always loved my Brussels sprouts"
About this Quote
Bell’s charm here is how casually she detonates a cultural norm: we’re trained to treat “pet” and “food” as separate categories, even when the emotional math doesn’t add up. She frames her vegetarianism (or near-vegetarian impulse) less as ideology than as a consistency problem. If you can cuddle a dog, how do you not mentally trip over a pork chop? The subtext is moral, but it’s delivered with the low-stakes intimacy of a dinner-table confession, not a manifesto.
The line about “disassociating” is doing heavy lifting. It nods to the psychological trick modern meat-eating often requires: distance, euphemism, packaging. Bell positions herself as someone who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—perform that compartmentalization. That’s not just about animals; it’s about identity. In a celebrity culture that rewards relatability, she’s offering a personal origin story that reads as both ethical and slightly quirky, a gentle rebuttal to the stereotype that plant-based eating is joyless or preachy.
Then she lands the kicker: Brussels sprouts. For a generation raised on jokes about boiled green punishment, “I always loved my Brussels sprouts” is a small act of rebellion and self-branding. It signals that her tastes were out of sync early, that she’s not performing sainthood so much as admitting she never got the memo on what you’re “supposed” to like. It’s disarming, which is precisely why it persuades.
The line about “disassociating” is doing heavy lifting. It nods to the psychological trick modern meat-eating often requires: distance, euphemism, packaging. Bell positions herself as someone who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—perform that compartmentalization. That’s not just about animals; it’s about identity. In a celebrity culture that rewards relatability, she’s offering a personal origin story that reads as both ethical and slightly quirky, a gentle rebuttal to the stereotype that plant-based eating is joyless or preachy.
Then she lands the kicker: Brussels sprouts. For a generation raised on jokes about boiled green punishment, “I always loved my Brussels sprouts” is a small act of rebellion and self-branding. It signals that her tastes were out of sync early, that she’s not performing sainthood so much as admitting she never got the memo on what you’re “supposed” to like. It’s disarming, which is precisely why it persuades.
Quote Details
| Topic | Pet Love |
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