PODCAST: Happy Thanksgiving from Alicia Silverstone: Don't eat meat!

It would be hard to imagine a pair of books about vegetarianism that are quite so different as Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals (which we brought you earlier this month on the podcast) and ALICIA SILVERSTONE's The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet. And yet it's hard not to notice the similarities of their all-important conversion stories, the heart of any veggie treatise. Like Foer, Silverstone came to vegetarianism through the traumatic teenage realization -- horrors! -- that eating animals means killing animals. Like Foer, she didn't immediately give up everything, instead lapsing and re-engaging until early adulthood. 

That's about where the comparisons end, but hey -- someone had to write a difficult moral argument . . . and then someone else had to write a bright, bubbly, functional guide that promises vegetarianism will bestow magical transformative effects, from glowing skin to regular bowels. The world needs both, probably. 

So on this day given over to the massacre of fowl and the gluttony of man, we bring you what may be the ditziest argument ever produced in favor of giving up meat. Download the podcast version to hear the full session, in which Silverstone takes questions from TV Diner's Billy Costa, gives too much information about her friends' pooping habits, and tells how she convinced her husband to convert because "he didn't want to hurt the piggies, either." And don't miss the video if you're the kind of TMZ-obsessing celebustalker who'll enjoy watching Silverstone pick a lav mic out of her crack.  

DOWNLOAD: Alicia Silverstone: Sexiest Vegetarian Alive (Boston Book Festival 2009) [mp3]

Recorded live at the Boston Public Library during the 2009 Boston Book Festival. To subscribe to this podcast, paste this RSS feed into your feed-reader of choice, or bookmark http://thephoenix.com/podcast.