why I stopped being a vegetarian

[Persia]

To be vegetarian is to be a pacifist, avoiding the fight against animal cruelty. Eat meat from sustainable farms, and we will win

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2011/jan/19/vegetarian-animal-cruelty-meat

[sjlennon]

To be vegetarian is to be a pacifist, avoiding the fight against animal cruelty. Eat meat from sustainable farms, and we will win

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2011/jan/19/vegetarian-animal-cruelty-meat

i can see your point about eating meat from sustainable farms. i like meat and have no plans to stop eating it. i have nothing against someone being a vegetarian. if you want me to respect your right to be a vegetarian, you need to respect my right to be a meateater.

[xYlvax]

I also stopped being vegetarian for two years about a year ago. But, it wasn't before i got my parents into recycling, buying food products from companies that treat their animals well, and getting them into buying things better electricity-wise. They've been eating healthier too.

[Wickian]

I always thought most people stopped being vegetarians because animals taste so good.

[Guest]

I always thought most people stopped being vegetarians because animals taste so good.

Wrong.

Br Cornelius

[Funky Poacher]

I always thought most people stopped being vegetarians because animals taste so good.

Wow. That's... stupid. Some people go beyond themselves and simple pleasures such as taste.

[Wickian]

I guess that wasn't a very clear joke/sarcastic post.

[drew123]

I never have really understood the whole vegan thing. I know, I know, one of the issues is that raising vast herds of cattle can have an adverse effect on the environment. But we are omnivores, part of our diet is meat! To not eat meat can be very unhealthy. For a vegan to have a healthy diet they must use supplements.

I think a lot of it is a PC thing. It's become kind of unpopular to say "yeah I eat red meat, what of it?"

I kind of equate it to the push nowadays from the scientific community that chimps don't eat meat or at the very least they don't eat anything other than bugs or somehting. Really? So what are those huge canines for? They eat meat. They eat small, furry, little cute things. Period. Why deny it?

And I suspect very strongly the same is true with gorrillas, don't have any evidence to back it up but once again look at the canines. Nature doesn't endow you with stuctures like those for no reason.

But back to the subject. I would hate to think I could never eat cow again, or a nice juicy pig. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

Edited January 20, 2011 by drew123

[Guest]

I have been a vegi now for about 25yrs and have never felt the urge to eat beef - though I did miss sausages.

In terms of world health it would be far better for the planet if people ate less meat, and this would be far better for the individual. Yes we are omnivours, but what that actually means is that we are built to digest small amounts of meat - probably less than 10% of the overall diet.

I think a good goal for both human health and planetary health would be to reduce our meat consumption back to this optimum 10% or so, and in so doing we would stop feeding grain, beans and fish to raise beef and such. We could raising our residual meat on marginal grazing land - producing healthier meat, and freeing up good arable land for grain and pulses for human consumption.

Our diet is currently grossly unhealthy and reducing the meat content could only help.

Br Cornelius

[Torgo]

For a good 6 months now I have limited myself to eating meat at most one meal per day. We do seem to be at our healthiest when we get some, but definitely not most, of our calories from it.

In an industrial agriculture setting, eating meat is EXTREMELY destructive. It requires feeding huge populations of animals in close quarters grain that could feed humans, while dosing them with antibiotics so they dont die of horrible infections spread by the overcrowded conditions. This is also known to degrade the nutritional value of at least beef - making it significantly fattier. And let's not even think about the phosphate fertilizers used to grow that huge amount of grain that wash into rivers, or the huge piles of dung that are produced all in one spot and poison the water downstream.

At a smaller scale (that one could call 'sustainable') eating some meat is a GOOD thing. It lets you capture energy flows from the biosphere that you couldn't previously. Cows eating grass that we can't eat from ground that couldn't be farmed for crops. Chickens foraging bugs for protein, or eating food waste. And so on. Not to mention the nutritional benefits of some meat in the diet - since it IS an animal, it contains a lot of what we need to keep ourselves going, as animals, even if only eating it is not the best for you. We are what we are, and have been hunter gatherers for quite some time before we invented agriculture - and we have absorbed these animals into our pattern of civilization.

One could make a case, I suppose, for being vegetarian when embedded in industrial society, as then you do not contribute as much to the wasteful and destructive factory farming that is the standard in this civilization...

[DONTEATUS]

Prays that E.T is a Vegan !!

[redhen]

I kind of equate it to the push nowadays from the scientific community that chimps don't eat meat or at the very least they don't eat anything other than bugs or somehting. Really? So what are those huge canines for? They eat meat. They eat small, furry, little cute things. Period. Why deny it?

And I suspect very strongly the same is true with gorrillas, don't have any evidence to back it up but once again look at the canines. Nature doesn't endow you with stuctures like those for no reason.

Two problems with this logic;

1) Nature show us all kind of structures/behaviours that are redundant, in humans, for example, we have several vestigial organs, coccyx/tailbone, appendix (for digesting leaves) and goosebumps (does your hair standing upright really make you warmer?)

As for primates having canines, I suggest organisms have the ability to adapt (one of the hallmarks of evolution). For large vegetarian mammals that also have large canines I submit Exhibit A: The Giant Panda.

2) Naturalistic Fallacy: whatever behaviour we see in nature must be morally good.

[Torgo]

The huge canines are also for aggression between the males - they are much smaller in the females.

Chimps CAN and DO eat meat - usually lesser primates, such as monkeys.

[supervike]

I guess that wasn't a very clear joke/sarcastic post.

I laughed.

[Ronseal]

I always thought most people stopped being vegetarians because animals taste so good.

Give the animals a chance and we will taste evan better

[ShaunZero]

Food is the one subject I don't care if I contradict myself. I don't like hearing about or seeing someone kill an animal, nor could I do it myself obviously. BUT, I sure as hell will sit down and eat a steak. Besides, I'm into weight training and it's hard to get adequate protein without eating meat.

Edited January 25, 2011 by ShaunZero

[thewild]

I think a lot of it is a PC thing. It's become kind of unpopular to say "yeah I eat red meat, what of it?"

I kind of equate it to the push nowadays from the scientific community that chimps don't eat meat or at the very least they don't eat anything other than bugs or somehting. Really? So what are those huge canines for? They eat meat. They eat small, furry, little cute things. Period. Why deny it?

And I suspect very strongly the same is true with gorrillas, don't have any evidence to back it up but once again look at the canines. Nature doesn't endow you with stuctures like those for no reason.

.

Yup, Chimps and some monkeys DO eat meat. Just helping ya out here, Drew123

http://www.janegoodall.ca/about-chimp-behaviour-hunting.php

[Leah G.]

When I was young I tried being a vegetarian for a couple of years but I kept passing out and got anemic. There was no way my body would let me even taking extra vitamins and nuts, I just couldn't get enough protein. What we really don't need are things like bread and pasta. Meat, veggies and fruit makes the perfect diet.

[Number Fingers]

Personally, I don't believe that being a vegetarian is better for the human body. It was only by becoming meat-eaters that the molars and the mandible both reduced in size, allowing for the larger brainmass that we have now. Without becoming meat-eaters we would have nothing, we'd still be at Australopithecine level. Why evolve back into where we've been?

[Whatsinausername]

If God din't want us to eat animals he wouldn't have made them out of meat....

but we should still treat them humanely..

[redhen]

Personally, I don't believe that being a vegetarian is better for the human body.

That's debatable.

It was only by becoming meat-eaters that the molars and the mandible both reduced in size, allowing for the larger brainmass that we have now.

A quick comparison between archaic hominid skulls and modern humans will show you the evolutionary increase in skull size is due to an enlarged cranium. Human brains are not normally found in the mandible.

Without becoming meat-eaters we would have nothing, we'd still be at Australopithecine level. Why evolve back into where we've been?

The meat-eating = larger cranium theory is only one possible cause for our success. Surely bipedalism was a more important factor. We can see the price we pay for quickly evolving large craniums, namely the most difficult childbirth out of all primates.

As for devolution, nature is all about adaptation. The change from carnivore to herbivore in the Giant Panda is neither good nor bad, it's just an adaptation. Perhaps in 100 years when the human population is 10 billion+ we will no longer have the luxury of devoting so much agricultural resources into grain food for livestock, and instead eat more grains and vegetables directly.

[Guest]

The evolutionary argument is very much misframed. For one thing, our canines are so diminished by evolution that they could no longer forfill the role of actually killing prey. Secondly we evolved on a metabolic level to consume very small amount of meat, and that is what feeds our body to its optimum. The current rate of meat consumption of as much as 50% of our diet is not what our digestion was designed to cope with. We need very small amounts of protein and overeating meat leads to huge stress on our body systems - a high meat diet is literally killing people.

The honest answer to this is that some people eat large quantities of meat because they have been habituated to it, and cannot conceive of living without it. As Redhen has pointed out - this is probably a luxury mankind will not be able to afford into the future. Unfortunately the current food market is geared to supplying what rich people want to eat, and not what is good for them or sustainable for a growing world population. It is a classic example of where absolute freedom of choice leads to some very bad outcomes for the majority of the human populations - including the rich ones.

It maybe conceivable that in the future we will be able to take factory farming to a new level and artificially grow meat in incubators. However it has to be asked - would that be healthy, desirable or the right thing to do. Surely we need to actually conform to what our bodies require from food - rather than what we image it does.

Br Cornelius

Edited January 26, 2011 by Guest

[Carrie White]

I was a vegan for years. I got sick from it and fat. I gained weight and got all kind of hormonal problems. I started eating meat again and the weight just dropped off and I feel a lot better. I'm not saying everyone who is a vegan will get sick, just that it's not for everyone. We are all different and our bodies require different balances.

[Carrie White]

When I was young I tried being a vegetarian for a couple of years but I kept passing out and got anemic. There was no way my body would let me even taking extra vitamins and nuts, I just couldn't get enough protein. What we really don't need are things like bread and pasta. Meat, veggies and fruit makes the perfect diet.

Exactly! As a vegan I ate carbs all day long. Now I eat a balance of carbs and protein, and try to get most of my carbs from fruits and veggies instead of pasta and bread. I gained so much weight when I went vegan it made my feet hurt. And I thought I was being healthy eating low fat grains, no dairy or meat. I guess some people do well on a diet like that, but I am not one of them. I guess I'd rather be unethical, but healthy.

[Farmerboy]

I keep hearing about all this factory farming but people have to be willing to pay the full price for meat. In countries like Ireland most farms are relatively small and family run. Because people want cheap meat, low quality grain fed factory farmed meats are imported in making it harder for the local farmers who give their animals an excellent quality of life and produce a superior product to survive.

All thats needed is to pay a wee bit more the the farmers can afford to keep less animals, reduce environmental destruction, focus on crops. If people aare paying more theyd probably eat less meat and be healthier in the long run.