Vegetarian Thread

[Amandil]

Even doctors now say that most meat is bad for you.

What about the rest of the meat (i.e., doctors don't say that all meat is bad for you). Honestly, I'm not sure I'd bother trusting the doctors on this point, and here's why: a hundred years ago doctors were proscribing morphine for toothaches, and to date they still haven't decided if margerine is better than butter. As handy as doctors are for cutting of limbs, giving you drugs, and telling you to wash your hands, they've got a lot of work to do yet if they're going to make it believable that the human species was being unhealthy for 30-odd thousand years as it busied itself eating meat. You might as well say that it's not healthy for bears to eat fish. Let me end this wee post with a few colloquial quotations (from a reputable source, I believe) regarding the nutritional value of a vegetable-only diet:

Nutritionally, energy increase is no substitute for protein quality, nor adipose fats for the structural fats necessary for growth and repair, nor calories over immune system needs, or over the proportion of vitamins and essential minerals found in animal tissues.

On this, I'd say it sounds pretty sensible to eat a bit of meat now and again...

[Vegitarians] become slaves to protein hunger by striving to get eight of the twenty amino acids that their own bodies cannot make and that meat contains in optimum amounts. The search leads to cereals and legumes, the first are low in lysine, the second in methionine. Humans with little or no meat must get combinations of legumes and grain (lentils and rice, rice and beans, corn and beans), and they must locate a substitute source for vitamin B-12, which comes from meat.

Sure, you can go "hunting" for all the things your body needs in non-animal sources, but it seems a tad ridiculous to do so when meat is there staring you in the face, saying "pick me, pick me!" Protein hunger is your body's way of telling you that you should eat meat to get what you need. That's why chicken wings smell so good to vegitarians. For some reason, I don't have much hope for a "superior intelligence" that has to continually supress bodily urges because it thinks that neither my body, nor the bodies of my species over the eons, really knows (knew) what's good for it (them). I'm just waiting for some smarty to say "hey, we have superior intelligence, so why do we need to have sex to have babies? Why don't we just grow them in tubes, or clone them? (Maybe some day we won't even need to use organic material at all!) That way we won't have to have sex anymore, even though our bodies really want us to. Sex is messy, after all." Whoopee, hooray for superior intelligence!

[Vegitarianism] simply ignores human omnivory, signified not only in food preferences but physiologically in the passage time of food in the gut (longer in herbivores because of the slow digestion of cellulose-rich and fibrous foods, shorter in carnivores). In humans it is half-length between gorillas and lions. ...S. Boyd Eaton and Marjorie Shostak, and M.D. and an anthropologist, comment: "The difference between our diet and that of our hunter-gatherer forebears may hold keys to many of our current health problems.... If there is a diet natural to our human makeup, one to which our genes are still best suited, this is it."

Keep in mind that these points do not simply support any old sort of "hamburger-and-steak" diet you like. How we get our meat is as important as getting it, period. But there's no excuse for not eating meat because the meat at (insert your local supermarket here) is crap. Support a hormone-free or organic or ethical butcher. Take a drive into the country, see if you can find a farmer or rancher somewhere who still hasn't sold out to an agribusiness. You might actually find a regular guy who treats his animals well, who doesn't necessarily feed them their dead relatives, and who doesn't pump them up on steriods. Or, heaven forbid, you could grab the nearest weapon (or just sharpen your fingernails) and head out of the city and kill yourself some wild food. I do.

[BeardofPants]

In summation: everything in moderation. The fact of the matter is, that our bodies don't need meat every day. And there are protein replacements.

Anyway, I believe you asked earlier why I don't eat meat? Well, it's the usual reasons. I don't like the taste of it, or the texture, or the methods of killing, or the commericialism, etc, etc. Take your pick.

[azalea]

Ditto. (except what do you mean by commercialization?)
I don't enjoy eating dead flesh. It is unappealing to me. I always hated the fat on bacon, the grisle and veins in chicken, the toughness and fatty stuff in steak. I prefer to eat fake meat because I think it tastes as good as the real thing (in most cases, better) and I'm not eating something that once was a living animal. I am fortunate that I live in a time and place where I have that luxury. Why not eat fake pepperoni (which is much healthier) if the choice is available? Of course, I would eat meat before starving to death, but that is hardly likely at this time in the country where I live. It isn't necessary to eat meat, and so I don't. If you want to, that's fine with me. I'm no PETA militant or anything.

[Legolas_Frodo_Aragorn]

yea, we dissected a chicken wing in science class..and it was cool. but gross when you think about it being cooked. Im glad i dont eat it anymore..

[Yapaluna]

Perhaps

someone has said this before

but I did not want to read over 20 pages of replies.

What do you think is the plants´ point of view to this discussion? Can you hear them scream EAT ME!!! I WANT TO BE KILLED BY VEGETARIANS!!!

[Legolas_Frodo_Aragorn]

plants dont think..and i think someone said earlier that they dont have a central nervous system..do that they cant feel pain

[Yapaluna]

I am totally convicted that there is no need for a central nervous system to think or feel pain. And there is no need for something like a brain or even conscience to show intelligence.

Plants are definitely not just dead matter. Ask the Ents if you want to know more. Plants are so extremely different beings, we will never understand the things they do (if they do things) or what they feel.

We are born as heterotrophe animals, accept it or starve! And don´t eat me!

[Amandil]

Re: central nervous systems: yup plants don't have them (and neither do a bunch of animals). By all indications, you need a central nervous system to feel "pain" -- i.e., c-fibres firing (if you haven't got any c-fibres to fire, then you can't feel them firing!). It's not even clear that all animals that do have a central nervous system, actually feel pain in the same way that humans do. Some of them might not even remember their pain, which makes things a lot less annoying for them. If I couldn't remember being in pain, then it wouldn't be as bad now, would it? But really, that's beside the point. Since when is pain the deciding factor? Pain or no pain, "lettuces, still, in their own way, take a dim view of having to cease being lettuces; as they can, they fight it" (as quoted a page earlier). Plants may not experience the world like we do, but they do interact with their environment in their own specifically plantlike way, and in that plantlike way it would seem as if they don't like getting eaten any more than animals do.

Re: Taste: so am I understanding you all correctly? A bunch of you are vegitarian not because you think it's the right thing to do (morally or nutritionally), but because you think meat-eating ("meating" ) is aesthetically unappealing? (More colloquially, "meat is yucky"?) I find that very interesting! Do you have any idea why you consider meat so distasteful? Do any of you think that your own body is yucky? If you were to look at your skin through a microscope, or inside your guts with a tiny camera (like they sometimes do on the Discovery Channel), would you get grossed out? If so, is this because you really think that there is something genuinely disgusting about your body and it's parts, or is it just because you have uncontrollable reflexes that react negatively to something which is really perfectly fine and good? Would you prefer to have a fake body over against a real one? Another line of curious questioning: are any of you afraid of death? Or do you think that death is an inherently bad thing? How do you feel about your own inevitable mortality? Do you think it would be better if nothing in the universe ever died? If you could "download" your consciousness into another body (maybe a clone of your DNA), or a mechanical device (maybe a super computer), would you do it if it lead to immortality?

Maybe this is all off topic, but I'm curious to see if anyone's negative reaction to the viscerality and mortality implied by meat-eating is due to an anti-body or anti-death bias. (So I guess I'm not that off topic...)

[BeardofPants]

As I said before, I changed to vegetarianism for a variety of reasons. Aesthetic appeal is only one of them. I don't really have time to address your finer points, but I want to point out that your point about meat being "fine and good" is purely subjective. Obviously we don't all feel the same way about it. Anyway, if meat were so jolly good, then why are we being so wasteful with it? Our ancestors used to eat everything, from the marrow, to the liver, to the kidneys. Uncooked. We've come fromt that, to buying pre-packed fillets in a supermarket. A LOT of meat gets thrown away. Do you think if this was "fine and good" that this would happen? Plus, there's that whole thing with hormones, and blah blah blah.

And I don't have a problem with flesh, or the concept of it. Manys a time I've had to muck around with some animals innards at uni. I just don't want to eat it.

[azalea]

Uh, that's an interesting stretch, Amandil...
No, I am not grossed out by my body or my innards. I just don't like eating meat. I know it's natural for humans to eat meat, and that's fine. But it's the same reason I hate brussel sprouts. As I said, grisle, fat, and tendons in my food are unappealing. If I like a healthy veggie burger better than an unhealthy hamburger, why shouldn't I eat it? I also agree w/ BoP on the issue of wastefulness: the animal is not used to it's fullest potential meat-wise.
As to your other line of questioning, no, I don't fear death. Death is a good thing, and I see it as a gift.

[Yapaluna]

Amandil, you are totally on topic!

In my reply I thought of a scene of the Hitchhiker´s guide to the galaxy at Milliway´s when the discussion started if it is okay to eat an animal that wants to be eaten and Zaphod (?) mentioned the lettuce-point-of-view.

I think that meat should not be as cheap as it is today and should be "produced" without torturing the animals only to save money. Meat twice a week would be enough.

[Amandil]

Amandil, you are totally on topic!

Good!

In my reply I thought of a scene of the Hitchhiker´s guide to the galaxy at Milliway´s when the discussion started if it is okay to eat an animal that wants to be eaten and Zaphod (?) mentioned the lettuce-point-of-view.

Wow, good memory. All I recall of that beloved trilogy in four parts is a whore with three breasts and a spaceship shaped like a running shoe that runs on the unlikely calculations of robotic waiters. I should like to find that quote about lettuces, though, someday. My source for the idea certainly wasn't Zaphod!

As I said before, I changed to vegetarianism for a variety of reasons. Aesthetic appeal is only one of them.

Right, but aesthetic appeal is the only remaining reason under discussion at the moment. I don't know what happened to the rest of those reasons, maybe they were adequately addressed (by me?) or tabled for later (by others?). Anyway, to the points at hand:

I don't really have time to address your finer points, but I want to point out that your point about meat being "fine and good" is purely subjective. Obviously we don't all feel the same way about it.

I hope you don't mean "purely subjective" in a conversation killing way (e.g., it's all purely subjective so we may as well not discuss what we ought to do). You will note that I didn't say above that "meat is fine and good," but rather I was asking if you (plural) thought that your own innards were genuinely repugnant or genuinely fine and good inspite of your squeamishness. Squeamishness is certainly subjective--only subjects such as us humans are squeamish (actually, I wonder if only human subjects are squeamish...they probably are)--but the value of what we are squeamish about is not necessarily purely subjective. It is quite possible to be squeamish about things that we (objectively) ought not to be squeamish about. For example, if a lover is squeamish about the genitalia of the beloved, then the lover's squeamishness is unfortunate at best. But anyway: what I'm interested in is if humans ought to be so squeamish about eating dead animals that they end up not eating dead animals (and the question "ought" can be asked, and "oughts" are not purely subjective). Methinks it's unfortunate when this is so, seeing how (as I mentioned some posts back) that "Mother Nature made us" to eat animals.

Uh, that's an interesting stretch, Amandil...

Indeed, and I'm glad it was a stretch for you. Had you just answered "naturally, I find meat disgusting because I find embodiment disgusting and death a crying shame" I would have been very sad indeed. The reason I asked, though, is because this sort of "world-hatred" is often at the root of ethical vegitarianisms (etc.). Philosophically speaking, ethical vegitarians (etc.) and/or animal-rights theorists have a very hard time affirming the goodness of animal carniverosity (thankfully, though, you folk don't). Religiously speaking, Manichaean Gnostics (only one example) were vegitarians because they believed that the body was a prison for the soul, that death was a state of affairs that NEVER should have come to be, but now that it is around, it will be the eventual freeing of the true identity. Thus they avoided animal death, and ate "light" vegitable matter and released the souls of the plants trapped in the vegitable matter through flatulence (I'm not kidding). I didn't expect any of you to be card-carrying Manicheans, but I wanted to see your reaction to the suggestion that you might be sympathetic in theory.

[Amandil]

No, I am not grossed out by my body or my innards. I just don't like eating meat. I know it's natural for humans to eat meat, and that's fine. But it's the same reason I hate brussel sprouts. As I said, grisle, fat, and tendons in my food are unappealing. If I like a healthy veggie burger better than an unhealthy hamburger, why shouldn't I eat it?
As to your other line of questioning, no, I don't fear death. Death is a good thing, and I see it as a gift.

Tolkien's assertion that death is a gift is astounding, really, given the position of the Christian tradition on the matter (death is a result of human sin only). It's also odd, given the exalted position of the Elves in his myth -- Elves representing all that is good in humanity, while Men representing the humanity we recognize as all too fallen -- and then going and saying that Men have one up on the Elves, they get to die, thank God. Quite astounding, and wonderful, I think.

I don't like chewing on gristle either, and that might be a proper sort of squeamishness: gristle isn't really edible, so it would make natural sense not to like eating it. You're supposed to eat (and therefore naturally supposed to like eating) the meat around the gristle! Same with tendons. Fat, yeah, well, we probably get enough fat as it is when it's mixed in with the meat. Probably too much fat, given our culture's ridiculous dietary habits. But animal fat itself is crucial to survival (note one of my quotes above with all the scientific jargon about lipids etc.). Fat was the prized delicacy when eating an animal, back in the day, because fat was their long-term energy source. I hope that the modern squeamishness towards fat is due to the fact that we eat too much of it, not because we really think that animal fat is flat out bad to eat no matter what. Thankfully, as I've said, this doesn't seem to be the case with particular interlocutors of mine on this thread.

But I am a bit surprised. Despite the reasons given earlier on, and perhaps due to my responses to them, it seems that you guys' vegitarianism (or whatever it is) really boils down to your idiosyncratic appreciation of flavour and texture. I'm trying to sort this all out. Did you always have this taste? Did this taste develop after you decided it was morally wrong or unhealthy to eat meat, but your taste remained even after a realization that it was actually natural (and thus morally good and healthy) to eat meat? I'm having trouble figuring this out. Can anybody satisfy my curiosity (that's a giant existential question, if there ever was one!)? I just find it amazing that one's taste can unabashedly be for the admittedly unnatural...hum de hum de hum...pardon me, I'm having trouble putting this into words...

Anyway, if meat were so jolly good, then why are we being so wasteful with it? Our ancestors used to eat everything, from the marrow, to the liver, to the kidneys. Uncooked. We've come from that, to buying pre-packed fillets in a supermarket. A LOT of meat gets thrown away. Do you think if this was "fine and good" that this would happen? Plus, there's that whole thing with hormones, and blah blah blah.

Your're quite right regarding the badness of wastefullness and plastic wrap and hormones. The reason for wastefullness, I think, is not that meat isn't jolly good, but that we're not jolly good (a lot of the time, when it comes to food--of all sorts!). Bad people are wasteful with meat products (or pump 'em full of hormones), but that doesn't make meat products bad in themselves! The very fact that wastefullness (and steroid abuse) is bad implies that what is wasted (and abused) is good prior to such badness. The way to appropriately react to such atrocity, is to return to that which was prior to the badness.

And plastic wrapped meat mined from freezer beds is just one more way to further remove ourselves from the facts of life inherent in animal consumption. It's bad not to have the fact that your meat is a dead animal slap you in the face when you prepare it and eat it. We should, at the very least, be cognizant of the sacrifice of the animal and be thankful for that sacrifice every time we eat anything, and that's harder to do the further we are removed from the origin of our food. And frozen and packaged foods are pretty fricking far away from those foods' origins.

[Amandil]

A word about cooking though. Our ancestors that ate their meat raw were the ancestors who physiologically could not speak, etc. They were not only our ancestors, but a common ancestor of various other hominids. The reason these raw-meaters could not speak was that their jaws were too heavy and their teeth were to prominent to do so. Their jaws and teeth were this way precisely because they ate raw meat. The hominids that eventually learned to use fire were the ones that evolved into speaking folk, because fire allows for meat to be properly chewed and digested without giant jaws and teeth. These ancestors substituted fire for powerful jaws and teeth, which allowed for meat eating and speech (including a virtuosity of facial expression). So by the time you find the ancestors of ours who are the self-same species as us (with the identical genome), they didn't have any choice about cooking. Their jaws evolved alongside fire, so that had they not cooked their food, they would have gone extinct. All this to say, is that there's nothing shameful or unnatural about cooking your meat (or your grains, or whatever). (Not to say that you must have implied this by your lonesome word "Uncooked," either.) Our species has always cooked, it couldn't have evolved otherwise. So be proud that you cook!

I'm trying to be a good, non-wasteful person, anyway, by using bones and skins and organs too in my animal consumption. Course this is easier to do if you're a hunter, but it's not impossible if you aren't. I make my own soup stock out of bones, and buy leather whenever I have the chance. Too bad I don't know if the sausage casings at my hormone-free butcher are real intestines or just plastic (a case where real would be better than fake). Headcheese (and haggis? I don't know exactly what's in haggis, but only that haggis is in a stomach) is a good way to not-waste internal organs. But while this is not wasteful, it still is parasitic often enough on the machinery of mass agriculture, which is bad enough. Which, I submit again, calls us to non-mass organic agriculture (at least), not forsaking animal consumption altogether.

When I hunt, though, I'm quite resourceful with the animals I take. All the skins are tanned locally by some Hutterite colony down the road, all the meat is butchered locally by another guy down the road. The heart and liver are saved for my dear grandmother, who savours them as delicacies. The antlers (if any) are turned into objects of aesthetic appreciation, like jewelry (earings) made by my dad, pens made by my uncle, or even a trophy made by a taxidermist. The tanned hides are later custom sewn into gloves (usually), coats and leggings (less usually), which I wear religiously and we often give away as gifts. What I don't use is the brains for tanning the hides (I have no idea how to do that, but if I did imagine how cool that would be), or the stomach for a waterbag, or the intestines for sausage casings, or the sinew for thread, or the lungs for goodness knows what, etc. What is somewhat redeeming about these remaining few items that I waste (you don't use everything of your vegetables, do you? I imagine you toss some of the stalks, and peel some of them...) is that the leftovers are left over for other carnivores to make short work of. Nature's a natural recycler: what's left of the gut pile the day after we take an animal is nothing but a pink smear on the grass, thanks to our friends the coyotes. My dog enjoys a bone or two, as well. I'm thinking that in my case, anyway, (and I think this option is open to a whole lot of people, too) I make very good use of the potential of the animals I consume, particularly the one's I get whilst hunting.

I also agree w/ BoP on the issue of wastefulness: the animal is not used to it's fullest potential meat-wise.

Is there some other fuller potential of animal use that I'm missing here? It's quite possible that I'm missing out on quite a lot, but I'm probably too slow to catch it.

I think that meat should not be as cheap as it is today and should be "produced" without torturing the animals only to save money. Meat twice a week would be enough.

And with such wise words, let me end this very long three-part post. Gasp!

[BeardofPants]

Actually Amandil, there is no compelling evidence to suggest that the australopithecines didn't have some form of verbal communication. And their teeth and jaw adaptations came from eating heavy grains, and nuts, not raw meat. With the event of the genus Homo came more gracile creatures. These were the creatures that were probably utilising predatorial kills by scavenging for marrow NOT the australopithecines (I base this on strontium ratios.) By this time, the Australopithecines had died out. (They had co-existed with erectus for quite some time, though.) So I'm not really too sure where you get this idea that we were forced to eat cooked meat from.

Fire is usually associated with Homo erectus. Who had long since lost that robust, highly muscled jaw. There is also some confusion over erectus' ability to speak, which I won't go into here.

[Amandil]

Fascinating! I'm no anthropologist (obviously), so I love it when I get more data to ruminate about.

However, I don't see how anything you said, BoP, challenges significantly what I said. Assuming that my "common ancestor of various other hominids" corresponds to the australopithecenes, my main claim regarding them was that their jaws and teeth were too heavy to allow for speech. But I'm not clear (yet, I'm sure you'll help me, BoP) that australopithecenes are a common ancestor of various other hominids. If they co-existed with homo erectus, I would think that at best the aussies were the ancestor of just the erectiles (and us, via erectus), but not any other hominids (or did all the other ones die out a long time before, but australopithecene survived on?).

At any rate, even if the heaviness of the australopithecene mantible and dentition was not due to eating raw meat, had they so desired the heaviness of their mantibles and dentition would have quite readily facilitated raw meat-ing (although a few canines would have come in handy, too). But my point still remains: the heaviness of their mandibles and dentition would not have facilitated "speech," any more than a lion's mouth does. Of course, I wasn't clear that my use of the word "speech" referred to our sort of verbal (and facially expressive) communication as opposed to grunting like a pig, or barking like a dog, which also qualifies as "some form of verbal communication." I'd expect that all sorts of animals, australopithecenes and people included, have some sort of verbal communication. Just that heavy mandibles and dentition like the australopithecenes' (which may have evolved due to milling grains in one's own mouth, but are also well suited for chawing down on raw animal flesh--more so than our own, at least!) are not well suited for the quality and nuance of homo sapiens' form of communication. If our hominid ancestors had retained these jaws and teeth, we would have been fine eating raw meat and would not be speaking as we do now. But this is not the case. Cooking meat with fire (and softening grains into porridges and breads) allows for our wussy jaws and teeth which allows for our particular sort of communication. That's where I got my idea that "we were forced to eat cooked meat."

And our dear friends, homo erectus, bear this out. I say "The hominids that eventually learned to use fire were the ones that evolved into speaking folk, because fire allows for meat to be properly chewed and digested without giant jaws and teeth. These ancestors substituted fire for powerful jaws and teeth, which allowed for meat eating and speech...." As you say, fire is associated with homo erectus, and they don't have the same heavy jaw as australopithecene -- but their jaw is heavier than ours, though (any relation to the confusion over homo erectus' ability to "speak"?)? At any rate, funny how the use of fire coincides with daintier chewing apparatus. That was my point, after all. Thanks to our generic forbears who invented fire and started down the weak jaw/teeth path, we now stand firmly in the "jaws-and-teeth-too-weak-to-eat-raw-meat-thanks-to-cooking-with-fire" position. My homo sapiens ancestors, I therefore postulate, used to eat everything, from the marrow, to the liver, to the kidneys. Cooked.

Actually, come to think of it, so do my grandparents.

[L@ur@y Elven Warrior]

My mum use to be a vegetarian but she started to eat meat when she got a new job and because she was trying to show me that it is bad being a vegetarian but I'm still one.

[Amandil]

Well, you know, since when did we ever listen to our mothers?

...ahhh, mum!...

[L@ur@y Elven Warrior]

I never listen to my mum and dad because they think they now me but they think i'm like my twin but i'm not1

[Legolaslvr!]

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