What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question—“What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?â€â€”and that she will then get on her high horse and produce what he and Norma call The Plutarch Response. … The response in question comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.†Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.
J. M. Coetzee