Vegetarian?

[trife]

i turned those annoyances off in settings > general > keyboard

not sure if touch has same options, I'd imagine it would lol.

on my 2nd iphone (on my 3rd now.. my apple store hates me, free replacements every 70 days) it would randomly auto correct into German spelling. it was rather confusing.

 

[Razare]

Would you care to elaborate on that?

Most vegetarians I have encountered where young girls who have been sold on how it is cool to be one. Then they don't eat meat for a week or two and call themselves vegetarians before offhandedly deciding they want a cheese burger. If you're going to assume a moral cause, assume a better one than vegetarianism, that's just pathetic. If you don't like meat and rather eat vegetables, great, I don't have a problem with that. If you think you're doing the world a favor by not eating meat you are mistaken, and obviously delusional about the significance of your own actions.

I agree that you shouldn't eat meat if you consider it immoral for whatever reason, but then you should be pretty serious about it if you do consider it immoral.

The thing is, if you're a vegetarian who considers it immoral to eat meat, by your standards most of the human race is committing an immoral act. That is arrogance on your part. Personal preference is one thing, defining it as a moral issue is another entirely.

I am also entirely nihilistic about environmentalism, so if that is your reason, it's a flawed reason. It's like knowing a river is going to flood 20 ft, and building a 5 ft levee. It's a piss-poor effort that wont have much of a result in the grand scheme of things. I made a post about my view on environmentalism in the world affairs section. People either stopped arguing with me about it, or conceded that I was correct. On some level effort is important even if it achieves nothing but I am quick to abandon such causes.

 

[Carnap]

It's not always moral. It can be biological and social.

We use 90% of the grains we grow to feed livestock that we kill in horrific ways (if you don't give a shit about them, that's fine, but just realize that it's messy and you will never get high quality meat unless you buy local Islamic meat or organic farming meat). Cows' natural food is not even primarily grain, it is grass.

Well, do a little research, because there is more to it than 'compassion'.

I like the taste of meat. But I don't eat it anymore. My digestion is better without. I wouldn't be surprised if some day I tried a little raw fish, but I'm not ready yet.

 

[Razare]

The economy will determine when it is no longer feasible to grow meat in vast quantities. Then transitioning to a more vegetarian diet will take place. Individual citizens trying to speed up this transition with their own effort is kinda silly. If it is a biological / social issue, then vegetarians should work to implement their policy in government. The thing is, I'd rather have the free market make decisions about food production allocations rather than the government.

I live in the country on farmland. I know what it's like to kill animals for food. I've shot a deer, cut its belly open, gutted it out, butchered the entire thing and ate it. We've raised various animals some of which we slaughtered ourselves. Domestic animals exist to feed us because we domesticated them for that purpose and others. It's not fair, it's not moral or immoral, it's a fact of existence. If humans existed as some other animal's prey, that'd just be how it is, we'd try not to die but we would. It's not sad or wrong, it's life.

I do believe in government policies that restrict completely inhumane treatment of domestic animals raised for food, however. Though, if a government does not implement such policies, I am not going to boycott meat products.

 

[Carnap]

I think lobbyists have more say than the governement.

small farming is so much different than big meat industries (killing on conveyor belts).

 

[sagewolf]

The thing is, if you're a vegetarian who considers it immoral to eat meat, by your standards most of the human race is committing an immoral act. That is arrogance on your part. Personal preference is one thing, defining it as a moral issue is another entirely.

Personally defining something as a moral issue and living by the moral standard that you believe in is not arrogance. Rubbing it in others' faces, or attempting to force your standard on them, is arrogance, and I don't doubt that that is indeed the agenda of some vegetarians. The decision to attempt to affect the world by your own actions is not arrogance either, unless you lecture others on their "moral responsibility" to do the same.

I'm not vegetarian, partially because I know I don't have the commitment to manage to have a healthy diet without meat, and partially as a courtesy to my parents: my brother and sister are already on separate special diets, so adding vegetarianism to the list would effectively reduce the scope for family dinners to ratatouille and nothing else. If I had the time to cook my own dinners, I might try vegetarianism, but I don't, so I won't inconvenience the family even more that it already is. I generally don't like fish, though. I thought I liked tuna, but I really just like brine. I would be perfectly happy on a no-fish diet. I might try a vegetarian diet next year (once I move out), to see if I notice any health benefits (also because meat is expensive, and I'll be paying the bills...).

...I will not eat bugs. I'm sorry, but no. Squick.

 

[Carnap]

Well, sagewolf, it is best if you do not like fish because most of it is very contaminated with mercury. Unless you buy farm fed, which are given huge amounts of anti-biotics (not good).

 

[Omnisu]

You can get most if not all of the benefit of fish from Omega3 supplements. Or by eating beets.

Unfortunately, and I feel very sorry for the cows, but they are delicious. If they don't want to be eaten, they are going to have to do something about that.

 

[Hawkeye]

If Abattoirs had glass walls, we'd all be vegetarian.

 

[Thaklaar]

If abattoirs had glass walls we'd achieve needed reform of the meat packing industry. There'd be less meat eating, perhaps. Prices would have to go up. But I think a populace that knows where their meat comes from would be a good thing. Take us back to when everyone knew where their meat came from. 'Cause they'd killed it themselves.

 

[del]

Well, sagewolf, it is best if you do not like fish because most of it is very contaminated with mercury. Unless you buy farm fed, which are given huge amounts of anti-biotics (not good).

Oh yes, I forgot to mention this when I said I ate seafood.

You must be VERY careful about what kind of fish your eating and where they're coming from.

The level of methylmercury is dependent on species, age of the fish, season, and the location they were caught in. Some are relatively safe due to short life cycles and a safe habitat. For instance, Northern Pacific Salmon are pretty safe since they not only have short life cycles, but the way the ocean currents move around Alaska helps keep their habitat well insolated from pollution.

Others should NEVER be eaten. Sharks, for example, have long lives so they have more time to metabolize mercury into methylmercury, and the range of their habitat is enormous. You couldn't pay me to eat shark meat, no matter where it was from.

But regardless, even with safe seafood you don't need more than a small portion once every week or two (that's what I do). You can get the nutrients fish have from other places, but it's impossible to find everything all in one place, in an easily digestable package like that. Also, certain arthropods are pretty much always safe.

One of the things people also don't talk about is the dyes. Pretty much all of them have demonstrably negative efects towards health, and most of them that are permitted in the US are either banned or heavily restricted in Europe. Most of them consist of benzene groups, which are usually shady in reaction mechanism pathways and can cause some collateral damage (benzene freaks me out, lol). And you'd be suprised how much dye is in food -- even when you buy beef at the store, it's not supposed to be that nice red color: a steak or ground beef should really look kind of greyish at that point. The meat packers dye it red so people will think it's fresh and buy it.

Not only this, but you have to be aware of all the other crap they put in food. My organic chemistry teacher was talking about his experience of working for the FDA, and apparently they figured out that ethylene dibromide was carcinogenic at the time. The problem was that ethylene dibromide was widely used as a insecticide in argriculture to keep beetles from eating potatos and such (and had been for the past 30 years), but it bound so tightly to starch that it was almost impossible to detect how much the farming industry had been putting in the stocks of food.

So yeah. Take organic chemistry and you'll never eat again, lol.

 

[echoplex]

I am convinced that it is impossible to eat a sufficient diet that isn't either bad for you or cruel in some way. There is something "wrong" with every type of diet I've ever heard of or read about. There is probably nothing more frustrating than reading about food and diet, because pretty much everything sucks in a big way.

And yet, I'm hungry.

 

[Thaklaar]

I am convinced that it is impossible to eat a sufficient diet that isn't either bad for you or cruel in some way. There is something "wrong" with every type of diet I've ever heard of or read about. There is probably nothing more frustrating than reading about food and diet, because pretty much everything sucks in a big way.

And yet, I'm hungry.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

 

[Razare]

With fish, del, is right. I used to fish a lot and we got warnings in our manuals about how contaminated certain species are. Here's the thing with fish, the least contaminated ones are in upriver wilderness rivers and lakes. The more down river you go, and the more populated the lake, the worse the contamination. Yet if you're eating a species like salmon as an adult male, you'll be fine. They don't live more than a few years before they spawn and die. Something like lake trout, on the other hand, you have to be careful with.