Comments on: What to Tell Vegetarians Who Say Eating Meat is Immoral

By: George Simmonds

George Simmonds — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 02:37:31 +0000

Perhaps you’ve killed the animal yourself, but by no means have you hunted it fairy, as a wolf would. The animals you have killed to uphold your ‘optimum health’ (I’ll get to that later) had no chance of escape – no way of using their natural means of survival. You’re not a wolf, you’re a cowardly prison guard who has no qualms about killing the weak.

Optimum health? I see no proof for this. No diet is perfect – but vegetarians and vegans always come out on top of the health-hierarchy. Enjoy your high-blood-sugar, cholesterol and heart issues, obesity and various cancers.

By: Kimberly Hartke

Kimberly Hartke — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:01:48 +0000

Ryan, I know any number of vegetarians who are not thriving on such a diet. I think your history of human eating habits is revisionist and a little bit misleading.

Meat tastes good to humans, because it is good for us.

Once upon a time, I was a vegetarian. I am glad I keep researching, instead of getting stuck in a doctrine of deprivation. I take the same dim view of raw foodism. Yes raw food can be good for you, just like vegetables. But, not at the exclusion of all cooked food.

Variety is the spice of life. Exclude whole food groups to your peril. Many long term vegetarians suffer terribly from damage caused by nutrient deficiencies. I only hope you are not one of them.

Please see the vegetarian tour on the Weston A. Price website:

http://www.westonaprice.org/take-a-guided-tour/vegetarians.html

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:23:59 +0000

The healthiest human cultures on the face of the planet eat very little meat if any. Chimpanzees, who share 99% identical DNA to Human Beings, are vegetarians. They are also 5 – 10 times stronger than human beings, yet they eat low protein, plant based diets.

If you want to know what the Human body is designed to eat, one has to look no further than to the Chimps. Ancient Human beings would have looked and ate just like them. In fact, the only reason our ancestors began eating animals at all was because they left the tropical climates of Africa and migrated to colder, less hospitable lands (Asia & Europe), most likely due to overcrowding/increased competition for resources. To make matters worse for these unfortunate nomads, the Earth fell into one of the most devastating Ice ages ever known to planet Earth. When fruits and other edible vegetation became almost non-existent in these frigid northern climates, ancient humans began eating whatever they could find to keep from starving; mammoths and other slow moving, grazing animals. Again, this wasn’t because they enjoyed killing and eating animals, it was merely for survival. Keep in mind, these Neanderthals were basically rejects of the Ancient human race, pushed away by the more dominant ancient humans inhabiting the native lands of central Africa. It’s a wonder they survived at all, but it didn’t really matter since they went extinct anyway.

Bottom line, anatomically speaking, Human beings, and all great apes for that matter, are designed to thrive on plant based diets. The consumption of meat leads to nothing positive: heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, gout… bad health in general. Also, meat production is the second leading cause of water and air pollution, surpassed only by the burning of fossil fuels.

I encourage anyone reading this to be conscious of what they decide to eat from now on. I gave up eating red meat back when I was in middle school after reading “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. It changed my life. I have been vegetarian now for over 11 years and have never felt better/cleaner. If you are willing to make a change in your life for the better, you will be rewarded in the long run.

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By: Phillip Gold

Phillip Gold — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:35:43 +0000

Well, I read this blog and wanted to stand up and applaud. There have been countless times where I had been asked or told that eating the meat was immoral. I am kind of tired of being pointed to feeling guilty. It isn't as if we are acting in cruelty. I think it is much more on the level of survival in our somewhat more advanced society. If we were stranded with nothing to eat or if it were desperatation due to scarcity, I wonder how many "don't eat its" would we get. I do not condone cruelty but we must have the right nutrition and eat for health. .-= Phillip Gold´s last blog ..The Beauty of Dollar-Cost-Averaging! =-.

By: Linda

Linda — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:09:26 +0000

This is a great post. I just found the blog & will be reading back posts.

It seems that most readers here aren’t congnicent of the many ways of raising livestock &/ plants. I’ve been a rabid organic gardener (that’s a little the other side of avid) since the last 70′s. I found out how horribly filthy & inhumane the commercial food production (fruit/veggie/meat) system is that I bought a farm in the midwest to combine w/ my 1/2 acre near Los Angeles where I raise our fruits & veggies. I have 17 cattle (bull, cows & calves), sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys & pigs. Each eats just what it would eat if it were ‘wild’. My herbavioues eat plants from the pastures. My poultry & pigs eat whole grains, but NO soy. They are all pastured, eating very little store bought feed. The storebought feed is used to overwinter them, because I overwinter more numbers than could survive the winter.
I don’t allow anything to eat soy. Monsteranto now owns soy. They’ve Contaminated the soy genome to the point that there is no non GMO soy or corn to be found. Nearly all the soy commercially grown is GMO. Corn & Canola aren’t far behind. Over 60% of the supermarket shelves are filled w/ GMO products. (It’s the answer to that commercial on TV that asks, “What’s wrong w/ High Fructose Corn Syrup?”) I do grow corn from Baker Seeds, which is as close as you’ll get to non GMO. Monsteranto has also bought up as many seed companies as they can & are still buying. The seeds you plant in your garden are most likely ordered from a Monsteranto owned company.) Most of the food grown commercially is now GMO & the government has decided that you & I are not smart enough to be able to understand the facts. So, it is illegal (in this country) to label a food product as Non-GMO. Monsteranto decided that they are the same, so the USDA decided that the consumer shouldn’t be given the choice.

It makes me so glad that I raise so much of my own food. I don’t support Monsteranto, CAFOs, feedlots, Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield or any of the other participants of the commercial food chain. They are destroying our world, our ecosystem (Ecology being the study of the ecosystem; not the system itself.)

Someone said that Vegans are environmental activists. I think of environmental activists as people who protest & demand governmental action to force the citizenry to change to do as the activists believe is right. I prefer to think of myself as an active environmentalist. I do what I believe is right. If others see my example & wish to learn…. I enthusiastically teach them. So far, I’d guess I’ve had nearly 100 people ask me to help them learn about various things. I taught them as much as they wished, w/ no strings. Some stuck w/ it, some decided it was too much work & went back to the easy, “throw money at it”, large carbon footprint life that so many lead & steals our children’s future.

I can only be grateful for the help I’ve been able to give the planet my children will inherit, & hope I can be of such service to her in the future. Judging others & feeling morally superior to others because of choices; believing & acting in a morally superior way doesn’t do anything to ingratiate one’s cause to others. We each do as we can, & what we believe we must. A leader leads, the way. You have to be ahead to lead & behind to push, you can’t lead if your pushing.

In addition to Food, Inc.. might I also recommend Fresh, & The Future of Farming. They are great & more movies like them are being made.

Oh, one thing I didn’t see here, welllll two things.
If we did not ‘use’ animals… wouldn’t our selfish species have eradicated them? True, there are cattle wanding wild & sick in India…. eating cardboard in the garbage dumps. But, have you ever wandered why? Many moons ago, the people were eating them all. They were heading toward a point that there would be no animals to plow the fields. So, they were declared off limits. Now, when an Indian farmer needs a animal to plow a field, he simply harnesses up the nearest one. They are ‘used’, if not eaten (and cared for.) If the human race has no use for a large animal, it won’t survive for long.

Second, no one has discussed the horrible end met by those poor creatures who suffer thru the commercial food system. Their wretched lives end in terror. When it comes time to harvest our animals, they go to a spot where they’ve always had a treat. Their end is swift. They get their treat & their last thought is, “Life is so wonde…”. They are killed & field dressed on our farm, so I can ensure that they never know fear. I also supervise the in-plant processing, so I know that my family gets our own meat back & that it’s done the way I want my families meat done.

Thanks for the post & all the great replies.

By: Huh?

Huh? — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:33:10 +0000

Thank you for following up Kimberly but that tour seems to be a very extended way of making the same argument that I was responding to above. For example, it begins with the premise that “[v]egetarianism that includes eggs and raw (unpasteurized) dairy products, organic vegetables and fruits, properly prepared whole grains, legumes, and nuts, and excludes unfermented soy products and processed foods, can be a healthy option for some people. However, some people have difficulty assimilating vitamins, minerals, protein, and other factors from plant foods. . . .” I wasn’t claiming to speak for people with strange nutritional deficiencies, and I didn’t think the blog post above by Mr. Ussery — which I was responding to — was either. His writing above states that he finds it necessary to eat animals for “optimal health,” without explaining that he has any sort of nutritional deficiency that prevents him from absorbing (or processing, etc.) the vitamins and minerals and so forth that he would be consuming on a well-balanced vegetarian diet. That may be the case, or it may not be, I really wouldn’t know, and I doubt most people reading this blog post by him ought to be expected to consider his personal health situation in such great detail. I still maintain that most people, if they have a reasonably developed intellect to the point that they are capable of putting some thought and energy into balancing their diet, can live in reasonably good health (or “optimal health,” if that’s the preferred phrase) without eating animals. And I don’t think it helps your arguments against vegetarianism — at least, not in the tour you linked to — to so frequently target specific vegetarian organizations and publications. I haven’t read the 1999 issue of Vegetarian Times that the tour devotes space to refuting, and if some rather idiotic people tend to forward it to each other in emails rather than seeking out more up-to-date and intellectually or scientifically well-developed publications, there’s no reason to assume that they are or should be the face of the entire vegetarian movement. Likewise, none of the vegetarians I know are devotees of the bizarre and antiquated ideas of people like Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg. To pick those sort of people as your opposition just because some of the dietary principles they believed in are not inconsistent with the type of vegetarian diet that people like me are in favor of (one that includes whole grains, for example) is a little silly. In any case, the tour you linked to provides a ton of very interesting information about nutrition but so much of it comes down to what I see as being very fine points — for example, one of the pages says: “The annual all-cause death rate of vegetarian men is slightly more than that of non-vegetarian men (.93% vs .89%); the annual all-cause death rate of vegetarian women is significantly more than that of non-vegetarian women (.86% vs .54%).” There are many studies showing many things but the bottom line is that none of us are going to get to control our own individual “death rate” unless we opt to check out early intentionally. You have a lot of information you cite as to why you find it necessary to take the lives of animals in order to edge closer and closer to living longer and living healthier but I just don’t see how this heap of data from various studies, a tenth of a percent here and a tenth of a percent there, much of it burdened with shoddy and/or outdated assumptions (e.g., that people who are eating a vegetarian diet are eating margarine instead of butter, and people who are eating a carnivorous diet are eating antibiotic-free grass-fed cows instead of Big Macs), makes the killing of animals for food an imperative duty.

By: Kimberly Hartke

Kimberly Hartke — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:46:50 +0000

RE: Huh?

You might like to take the Vegetarian Tour of the Westonaprice.org site. It will let you know more where Harvey is coming from on this. Here is the link:

http://www.westonaprice.org/Vegetarian-Tour.html

By: Huh?

Huh? — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:17:45 +0000

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that the author’s sole reason for eating meat is: “[b]ased on extensive research on the matter, I believe that animal proteins, and especially high quality fats (and the fat-soluble vitamins they either contain or enhance), are essential for optimal health. Thus ‘kill and eat’ is as imperative for me as for the wolf.” I fail to see the logic behind this for so many reasons that I’m not sure where to begin, but I’ll try to explain my thoughts on why it falls so short in my view. The idea that “optimal health” can be controlled to such a fine point seems arrogant and naive to me. Most of us know people who eat and drink and smoke the most unhealthy things imaginable and live to a very old age with no major problems (such as my grandmother, who smoked 2 packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day right up until just a few weeks before she died at 92), and, likewise, people who live by a relatively strict asceticism and fall ill or drop dead for reasons entirely outside of their control. Now, no one would suggest that people ought to take up a life of cigarettes and beer and cheeseburgers for health, but how can you say that the differences between the health of someone eating a well-thought-out vegetarian diet and someone eating a carnivorous diet are SO stark as to make killing animals “necessary”? In other words, in my view “optimal health” is something that retains an element of imperfection no matter how carefully planned out, and the difference in degrees between a healthy vegetarian and a healthy carnivore (assuming that both avoid processed junk foods, foods with antibiotics, etc.) are not so stark as to make killing animals an ideological imperative. You could spend your whole life eating only the most pristinely-raised animals that you slaughter yourself and still be diagnosed with a lethal cancer or some other fatal condition. The idea that you can get so, so much closer to avoiding that sort of end than a thoughtful vegetarian ever could seems to me to be a very strange and self-serving sort of wishful thinking. Second — and I think this of lesser importance, but since you brought it up — why do you find it relevant to compare yourself to a wolf eating a rabbit? I understand it provides a nice tidy little comparison for intellectually lazy people, but those sort of people aren’t worth addressing at length. Wolves don’t have hands, and, for that and other reasons, are incapable of planning and preparing well-balanced vegetarian meals. We, however, have a wide range of choices available to us. And, since I agree it is important, please understand that I say these things as a vegetarian who does buy most of my food “face to face from producers [I] know personally” — it is a lot easier for me than for others because I happen to live very close to a spectacular farmers’ market, and I can (and do) buy just about everything except things like dried pasta there. I do agree that vegetarians who are smug about living off of canned beans from industrial mega producers haven’t got much to be smug about.

By: Darienne

Darienne — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:24:47 +0000

Wow, the amount of heat in these posts could fry an egg, or grill a steak, or toast some tofu, or…well, you get the drift. I have an idea…what if we all just eat the way we think is right, whatever our reasons, and leave our neighbors alone. How about that?

Stop making food choices a political/moral/environmental issue. This is FOOD we’re talking about, no matter if it has a face or not. We all have to eat and after we eat we all excrete and once that happens there really is no difference. Except some of you excreted all over this site and it sort of stinks.

Happy New Year everybody!