The man who loves oysters - let's call him Mr Lo (“loves oysters”) - is warm and friendly.

He is also loud, probably because he grew up in Hongkong and then migrated to the United States, where he must have felt he needed to talk even louder in order to be heard.

I met Mr Lo on the internet and later visited him in the US, with a view of doing business with him. He treated me as an old friend although this was the first time we met.

At dinner time, he took me to what he considered to be the best restaurant in town. It was a Chinese buffet restaurant where, for a mere US$8, you could eat all you want.

Cheap and good!

The highlight of this restaurant, Mr Lo tells me, is the oysters. If you eat that alone, you will get your money's worth.

For a while, it seemed like Mr Lo was going to do just that. He piled his plate high with oysters. When he finished, he went for second helpings and piled his plate high again. And again a third time.

Mr Lo must have eaten 40 to 50 oysters that evening. This was in America where everything - including oysters - was extra large. The flesh of each oyster was about the size of the shell of the oysters we normally get in Singapore.

Next, Mr Lo went for the shrimps. Again, he piled his plate high. Again, he went for seconds. He rounded off his meal with roast beef - two thick slices.

I had never seen a man eat so greedily before. He gobbled. He sweated. He used both hands to eat, his legs rushed him to the buffet table whenever fresh supplies of oysters were brought out.

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Carnivore

What amazed me even further was that he did not eat anything else. No rice, noodles or bread. No vegetables, no fruit, no dessert.

I know of many people who eat vast amounts of meat and seafood. I, too, had grown up on a high meat diet. Until I was 30 years old, my meals consisted mainly of rice with pork, chicken, eggs, fish and seafood, with only occasional servings of vegetables.

Still, I had eaten rice. Never before had I shared a meal with someone who ate only meat and seafood, with nothing else. This man was a carnivore. He tells me that he normally eats this way.

In contrast, I had by then become inclined towards vegetarianism, eating very little meat or fish.

Can a near-vegetarian do business with a heavy meat-eater? I had serious doubts. In the end, I concluded that the answer was "No". I decided not to work with Mr Lo.

Most people would consider my decision to be irrational, even prejudiced. How can we choose our business associates based on diet preferences?

Well, my studies in natural health tell me that diet affects us in every way, including the way we think. Two people who eat very different diets will therefore think very differently.

Moreover, humans who eat lots of meat tend to behave more like carnivorous animals - fierce, aggressive and self-centred. Notice how lions and tigers pull their prey to eat alone or with their immediate family, whereas giraffes would nibble the leaves off the same tree.

I had also just witnessed a spectacular display of Mr Lo’s greed. Or was it just his hunger? In any case, I was afraid of how that would manifest in his business dealings.

I did not regret my decision not to work with Mr Lo. Three years after that oyster meal, I still meet him at trade shows and I am glad I am not working with him.

But there is an ironic twist, unrelated to business, in the story of my meeting with the man who loves oysters.

At the time, I was having some abdominal upset and was passing out embarrassingly foul-smelling gases.

Such odours are supposed to be the result of heavy meat-eating, produced by the decomposition of animal protein in our long intestines. Meat-eating animals don’t have this problem because they have a very short digestive tract about 3 times the length of the body. Ours is 12 times the body length.

I had met a total meat eater. Yet I, a health-conscious near vegetarian, was the one emitting evil odours.

Where had I gone wrong?