SOUL FOOD:

Name the world’s sexiest vegetarian. Oh, come on. I know you can.

No? Well, let me help. Peta2.com just had its third annual sexiest vegetarian poll and the results are in.

There were 292 men in the running and 85 (scarcely one-third as many) women. Whether that means there are more vegetarian men in the world than there are vegetarian women or whether it means there is simply a dearth of vegetarian women whom Peta2 thinks are hot, I can’t tell you.

I can tell you, though, that Kristen Bell (“Veronica Mars”) and Davey Havok (AFI and Blaqk Audio front man) raked in the most votes. Hot on their heels were Andy Hurley (Fall Out Boy drummer) and rocker Pink.

The message? If you, too, want to get your sexy on, then get and keep the animal flesh off your plate.

You might say it’s a message PETA’s religious about. And with the help of PETA and other champions of animals, the message itself is growing sexier.

It’s a message more and more consumers — sexy or not — are getting religion about. Often quite literally.

And it’s about far more important things than getting your sexy on. It’s about how our food choices are unavoidably interwoven with world hunger, climate change and the compassionate treatment of animals.

Think that last one isn’t a major concern? Think again.

In July, an article on the front page of the business section of the Los Angeles Times reported that when 600 people who had recently eaten out were asked to name their top five social concerns, animal welfare was third on the lists of 58 percent, coming only after health insurance and paying people a living wage.

The story — headlined “Animal welfare issue boiling” — made it sound like breaking news. But as Paul Shapiro, senior director for the Factory Farming Campaign at the Humane Society of the United States, said, it’s more a matter of interest in and commitment to animal welfare having reached “a tipping point.”

The Times story began with a telling tale about Bud Stuart, a Santa Barbara veterinarian with a client who gave him a live lobster as a gift after Stuart saved his dog. Though it did not mention religion, the story framed in stark relief the divide between our treatment of companion and food animals.

Just a month later, the Los Angeles Times ran another story titled “A chance to sample kosher’s diversity.” It told of a $175 per person, 15-course feast at the Prime Grill kosher restaurant in Beverly Hills.

This time, religion was central to the story. Roughly 120 men and women, most of them Orthodox Jews, including a number of rabbis, gathered at the meal to titillate their taste buds with exotic yet still kosher fare.

They dined on sparrow, dove, pigeon, quail and partridge; elk and yak; blue marlin and a rarer fish known as shibuta that is said to taste like pork. This was, according to one organizer, the first time that Himalayan yak had been ritually slaughtered and eaten kosher.

How this was a source of pride instead of a matter of embarrassment I could not fathom. Is our American diet, even a kosher American diet, so lacking in variety that we must now slaughter extraordinary beasts to satisfy our appetites?

The Jewish Vegetarians of North America organized a protest, but the Times chose not to mention it. The organization’s president, Richard H. Schwartz, wrote a letter to the editor about the omission and urged the Jewish community to “seriously consider the many moral issues related to our diets” and to “do more to apply Jewish values” to them.

Schwartz is not alone in seeing this as a religious issue. Nearly every sacred religious text contains its own version of the Jewish tsa’ar ba’alei chayim.

The Koran says, “There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings which is not a community like you and they shall all be gathered to their Lord in the end.”

In the 4th century, St. Basil, Bishop of Casesarea, wrote, “May we realize that [the animals] live not for us alone but for themselves and for Thee and that they, too, love the sweetness of life.”

Basil decried our all-to-common “ruthless cruelty” to animals. He prayed God would “enlarge within us a sense of fellowship with living things” including “our brethren the animals.”

Now the Animal and Religion program of the Human Society of the United States has taken up his cause. Its president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, hopes “bedrock religious principles of compassion and care for all creation” will “persuade religious institutions and individuals to make more humane and sustainable food choices.”

The United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church have official statements that address the welfare of farm animals, as well as other contemporary animal protection issues. The HSUS anticipates other faith communities following suit and, says Christine Gutleben, director of the Animal and Religion program, it aims to support them in their efforts.

And if you are tempted to think you can’t make a difference, don’t be. Right now, Californians for Humane Farms — sponsored by the HSUS, Farm Sanctuary and other animal protection groups, family farmers, veterinarians and public health professionals — are trying to place the California Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act on the 2008 ballot.

At least 650,000 signatures — collected by the end of February, just 18 weeks from now — are needed to do so.

This act would outlaw the confinement of veal calves, egg-laying hens and breeding pigs, phasing out the use of gestation crates for pigs, battery cages for hens and veal crates for males calves.

To learn more about these and other abusive animal farming practices, there are numerous online resources you can peruse, including Californians for Humane Farms (humanecalifornia.org), Humane Kosher (goveg.com/kosher.asp) and the Animal and Religion program (hsus.org/religion).

On Nov. 15, a booklet titled “Living Toward the Peaceable Kingdom: Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation” written by Matthew Halteman, will be available online from the HSUS Animal and Religion program. To volunteer to collect signatures to get the California Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act on the 2008 ballot, visit humanecalifornia.org or e-mail Paul Shapiro at [email protected].

And if you are or your faith community is already taking steps to improve the treatment of industrial farm animals, let me know.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].