Let's Go Vegetarian

[stephofthenight]

May I ask a question? For those of you who are vegiterains...

Why are you vegetarins? What made you decide this...Personaly I just dont like meat its all stringy and not to mention revolting. as for the bigmac and cheeseburger thing...let me go find some cardboard put it under a heat lamp for 6 hours and melt some cheese on it...yum... I eat meat at least once a month. becuase It is a good source of essiental vitamans and such. so how do vegiterians get these?

[Dirtbag]

May I ask a question? For those of you who are vegiterains...

Why are you vegetarins? What made you decide this...Personaly I just dont like meat its all stringy and not to mention revolting. as for the bigmac and cheeseburger thing...let me go find some cardboard put it under a heat lamp for 6 hours and melt some cheese on it...yum... I eat meat at least once a month. becuase It is a good source of essiental vitamans and such. so how do vegiterians get these?

I used to take vitamins made for vegetarians. I eat meat now...

[Lads of E3]

May I ask a question? For those of you who are vegiterains...

Why are you vegetarins? What made you decide this...Personaly I just dont like meat its all stringy and not to mention revolting. as for the bigmac and cheeseburger thing...let me go find some cardboard put it under a heat lamp for 6 hours and melt some cheese on it...yum... I eat meat at least once a month. becuase It is a good source of essiental vitamans and such. so how do vegiterians get these?

I love bigmacs, and so do millions of others.

[stephofthenight]

to each his own, personaly i will take the cardboard

[billl]

I eat meat at least once a month. becuase It is a good source of essiental vitamans and such. so how do vegiterians get these?

I never thought of meat as being an important source of vitamins, but it turns out that there is one very important vitamin that comes primarily from things that vegans don't eat: Vitamin B-12. The rest of the vitamins and minerals seem to be coming from other things just fine, no need to eat meat for them.

I eat a TON of cheese, so I get plenty of B-12. (Eggs work, too). But my brief internet research has encountered a pretty serious warning to vegans (vegetarians who don't even eat eggs, cheese, milk, etc.) that they need to watch out for this B-12 thing, and the answer is probably to take a vitamin supplement or some fortified cereal or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin...ources_of_B-12

I have also heard that vegans should be careful to get enough calcium (again, people who eat plenty of cheese should be fine in regards to calcium).

Basically, I'm no doctor or nutritionist, but I think B-12 and calcium are the only big concerns, and that is mainly just for vegans.

[stephofthenight]

Thanks Bill. intersting to know. Isn't b-12 an energy thing. ?

[Lads of E3]

Realistically, if you eat meat once a month anyway, I don’t think you would.

[stephofthenight]

Lads...I don't do fast food. I confess to never having a true bigmac before, but i did have a few bites of cheeseburger before being sick. I simply cant handle the though of putting that much fat in my body for something I dont even like the taste of...

[Lads of E3]

Hmm i suppose its a shame your missing out then.

[stephofthenight]

Having worked fast food, and seen the disgusting things. I dont feel the least like im missing out... I'll take salad or icecream any day over that.

[Lads of E3]

I don't know how much seeing "disgusting things" has to do with it. If it tastes nice and you exersize I don't see a problem. I just enjoy eating meat and I dislike the sense the vegetarians are conveying on this thread that it is wrong to do so and should restricted from doing so when the majority of the population enjoy it when, in my opinion, we have every right.

[Red-Headed]

Plants have no nervous system, it is hardly an assumption. Let alone bacteria which don't even have organelles. o.O

It still doesn't mean that they don't respond to being killed. When trees are damaged they can give out chemical compounds which can be detected by other plants or trees. This could be viewed as being distressing to a tree. I think that you are being 'nervous system chauvinistic' here. This is a philosophical point. It could be stated that a turnip or a bacteria has as much right not to be killed as anything else. Where do you draw the line?

I'm not an advocate of completely stopping animal exploitation. I just think we should acknowledge that there is room for improvement in the current methods of industrial farming, whether for dairy, beef, chicken, pork, etc.

This is all to do with economics.

Arguably it would be better for the environment and more efficient to stop producing meat altogether, but this is an unrealistic expectation.

I'm not sold on this argument at all.

Boycotting meat produced by factory farms is a legitimate form of political expression. However, I think the only way any real change will occur is through legislation and sensible discussion of the issues. I don't think we can trust private industry to do anything except maximize its profits, so as consumers concerned with the ethical treatment of animals and the responsible use of resources we should remain vigilant and critical of the agricultural industry.

Well, I wouldn't argue that the agricultural industry isn't greedy. I am not sure how much of it greed or survival however. The overall population of the planet isn't doing us any favours either.

I don't drink milk because I'm lactose intolerant, but I know the PETA nuts are anti dairy farms these days. My grandfather ran a dairy farm, and I don't think any of his animals were particularly abused. I have significantly less faith in the agricultural industry today as the individual farmer becomes less and less relevant in the face of huge agribusiness.

A lot of my family are farmers. I'm also lactose intolerant, my great-grandmother was Cantonese & lactose intolerance is not uncommon in some Asiatic peoples. I'll have to google who PETA are, I imagine they are a bit like the RSPCA but more militant.

Just what the world needs...more militant nutters!

[Madame X]

Maybe the lack of protein or having a balanced diet contributed to his being a bit, how shall we say, cracked?

meat provides the brain with certain proteins and enzymes that .. without, studies have shown, can lead to bipolar and other mental disorders.

Au contraire! Psychopathic individuals are the ones so-defined by their conspicuous lack of that magical and ever elusive trait the psychological world likes to call ‘empathy’. But that doesn’t make them evil people…just mean and morally suspect.

[Red-Headed]

Au contraire! Psychopathic individuals are the ones so-defined by their conspicuous lack of that magical and ever elusive trait the psychological world likes to call ‘empathy’. But that doesn’t make them evil people…just mean and morally suspect.

Well, I was being a bit humorous. I think it's because he was teetotal. I don't trust people who don't drink alcohol.

[OrphanPip]

It still doesn't mean that they don't respond to being killed. When trees are damaged they can give out chemical compounds which can be detected by other plants or trees. This could be viewed as being distressing to a tree. I think that you are being 'nervous system chauvinistic' here. This is a philosophical point. It could be stated that a turnip or a bacteria has as much right not to be killed as anything else. Where do you draw the line?

Distressing and causing pain are two different things. We know from anesthetics that if you block the nervous system response that you block pain, the stress signals are still going off in the tissue, but there is no pain. It makes no evolutionary sense for plants to have a pain response. Pain is a warning not to continue to do something, or to run away from it. It is a great way to induce behavior in a complex conscious organism. Plants don't have to make decisions whether to move or not, thus any responses to stresses are simply immediate chemical responses.

A preference utilitarian would tell you that only a human with conscious preference not to die has a right not to be killed. Peter Singer supports infanticide up until a few months old, because he considers infants pre-conscious.

The point isn't that animals have a right not to be killed, animals have conscious preferences not to be hurt. If we accept that it is wrong to hurt humans, than it would be speciesist to say that hurting animals is acceptable. The physical process of pain transmission in both humans and animals, especially mammals, is practically identical. We can know for certain that animals feel pain.

If you could prove plants or bacteria feel pain, then maybe it would be wrong to hurt them as well. However, it seems absurd to even consider it. Moreover, we there is the key issue that human beings have the ability to survive without consuming animals, we can't really avoid killing plants and bacteria.

I'd like to clear up that my statements about the environment weren't about global warming, but were about the soil erosion and water use issues.

http://www.peta.org/

I don't know about the RSPCA, but I volunteered with the CSPCA for several years and found them to be a reasonable organization concerned mostly with the immediate issues of animal cruelty and welfare, like providing adoption and health services as well as advocating for more laws against animal cruelty.