Vegetarianism

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Originally Posted by Petronius

We're not in so much of a disagreement, though I still have some concerns about wether or not there would be resources for a fully vegetarian world population... According to wiki, vegetarians make up for about 11% of the world's population; add what random fruit and vegetables the rest of the people eat, and you'd get about 25% of the human population consuming the fruits and vegetables that are produced today. And that's as a whole. We would need a diverse diet, so a little bit of all, and I'm sure rates are much lower for habitat-specific plants.
The top producers in the fruit department are tropical countries, with India in clear lead. It's still them who would have to supply the bulk of the increase, as temperate countries can only produce fresh vegetables for one, maybe two seasons. China, Russia, Europe and North America would have to import for the winter. Many arid African country would import too. Are you still seeing these countries doubling, maybe tripling their production without cutting even deeper into their rainforests?

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There's no simple answer to all this. Thank god we don't have to actually work it out. BUT remember that all the meat production you'd be getting rid of consumes vast acreages of crop production already. That and only that is the simple equation I've been hammering since the start of this discussion.

Here are figures to give you some idea

No of people whose food energy needs can be met by food produced on 2.5 acres/land:
If the land is producing rice: 19
If the land is producing corn: 17
If the land is producing wheat: 15
If the land is producing chicken: 2
If the land is producing beef: 1 person

Got this from comments below a Times of London article. Source credited: The Food Revolution, which I presume is a book. Another commenter there says:

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Just stop eating beef and our food problems will be gone. It's that simple. The amount of energy & land resources used to feed cattle is astounding. Our bodies were made to live on a diet of Carbs and some protein and fat. A balanced Vegetarian diet more then adequately supplies that balance.

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It does occur to me to wonder what we'd feed our cats on, though. Dogs can survive on a vegetarian diet.

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Originally Posted by Petronius

Then we have to think that of those 11%, more than half (70% percent by the wiki) are lacto-ovo, so there would still exist a strong milk and egg producing industry, only now it would be more wasteful because no one would want the meat from the poor beasts.

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Not sure you can really say that's more wasteful. You'd have to compare how much nutrition you got from letting a chicken live out its natural life laying eggs and slaughtering it when it was, say, a year old, for food.

Best source for lacto is probably sheep and goats, for several reasons: they can survive on hillsides where it's difficult to farm anything else, their digestive systems are less different from ours than those of cows, so their milk is much easier for humans to digest and they don't release the massive amounts of methan that cows do, so they don't contribute to global warming.

I guess, realistically, if you wanted to keep eating meat and didn't mind the killing aspect, it might be OK to eat sheep and goats. And the odd chicken.

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Sure, with carefully planned investments and economical string-pulls, we could set an infrastructure for mass-production agriculture in poor african countries, and build vast greenhouses to supply winter veggies for temperate regions, but it would involve costs, time and effort beside people just switching diets, and I still say it's not worth it - it's not sustainable and strain on supply would encourage agricultural methods that may sabotage the healthyness of the products.

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I dunno, P. This suggests that people are eating meat instead of veg, when, at the moment, they eat both. I actually don't think most veggies replace their meat with extra fruits and veg. Recommended amounts are in the region of 5 to 9 portions of these a day whether you're a vegetarian or not. It's more like, the rest is made up with extra consumption of grains or grain derivatives like bread and pasta - exactly the kind of thing vacated grazing land could be used to farm - and also the kind of stuff that constitutes the staple diet in the areas most likely to suffer famine.

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Originally Posted by Petronius

I feel for the poor, I'm not a fascist as you may think, but I think some people don't realize how bloody many of us there are and how circumstantial the resources we use. And I don't see how saying that is an attack against the poor. About three quarters of the world's population now comes from countries with first or second rank HDI.
Do you think it would be bad if people started having fewer children and is it really of no concern that we jumped up nearly 5 billion in the last century?

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Don't worry, I don't think you're a fascist! ;) And I didn't think you were attacking the poor. I was just trying to point out that Monbiot's article wasn't just pandering to hatred of the rich.

I do think it would be good if people started having less children in areas of overpopulation. But that's Monbiot's point: where people are educated about family planning, populations decrease.

Some good posts on this thread! I just wanted to say from my POV, (as a vegetarian for 11 years) that I don't want to convert anyone to it; I want to make people think and make wiser choices. An overhaul of the meat industry wouldn't hurt anyone, either. In my corner of the world, lots of people were concerned about getting sick from tainted meat. This wouldn't be happening if there were more conscientious ways of conducting said business. Again, I do not try to convert anyone. Whenever people learn I am a vegetarian, they kind of roll their eyes and expect a lecture, or ask if I am offended if they eat meat. I am not. The world would have a lot more problems if everyone switched from being omnivores to herbivores. A LOT MORE. I just know it was the right choice for me...

I see what you mean, blp, but as far as I know meat-eaters still eat a lot of grain products. Replacing fried chicken with a fruit salad, pork chops with spinach and bolognese meat balls with broccoli was more what I had in mind. In my country at least, regular meat eaters also rarely eat fresh fruits and vegetables, and that's the problem. I'm not sure you'll convince them to just eat more grains, or if that's even healthy - the risk of becoming overweight is still serious.

The problem with grain products is that refined grain isn't healthy - it has less nutrients than whole grain and the ones it has are added artificially, might as well eat pills - but is also more profitable. Most bread & pasta you get today are made from refined grain, and it's a safe bet it'll be the same or worse if demand increased.

Egg&diary industry - you need a certain ammount of live animals at any given time to supply it, and the animals need to be fed. It doesn't really matter if their life cycle is long or short as if their numbers remain constant. Also, you can't really control their sex; the males would have to be killed because they don't produce anything, and that is wasteful if nobody eats their meat. The best thing you'd achieve is cut the costs of meat-processing industry, but you still need vast areas to supply the beasts' food.

Of course, there is the idea that chicken will still lay eggs if they're skinny. :D

As far as sheep and goats go, and that's just some dim memory from ecology classes so I may be wrong, they are more harmful to the land they graze in because they cut grass from the root instead of just the tips like cows do; also, their dropping are not good fertilizer, so they will depleat an area a lot faster and make it unusuable for a longer time. They produce less milk, too. Not sure about it but may be less productive than a cow.

Well, P, you've fought your case long and hard and I am actually being won around to the idea that we can't do without animal husbandry. And that this is going to involve some killing of animals.

Cards on the table: I'm an ex-veggie. A friend and I reneged on our vegetarianism together one day at a barbecue and gratefully tucked into some really succulent jerk chicken. Not sure the author of this particular dish realised what a seismic effect she'd had on the diets of two of the guests. For a while, like a lot of sudden converts, I went for the new thing tooth and nail. But a few years down the line, I've sort of reverted to my old veggie ways, just without being absolutely strict about it, and it's because it really does feel like a preponderance of veg is the right diet for humans. For a while I actually thought maybe the lack of meat in my diet had been unhealthy and I was making up for it, but gradually it's become quite clear to me that where, say, a stew of lightly cooked veg and lentils will give me a noticeable boost, a comparable amount of meat will make me feel sluggish and even, at times, a little toxic. It's often hard to avoid saying to myself after a meat meal, 'I didn't need that' (and hence the animal died in vain), whereas with veg I frequently find myself wolfing the food as if my body's desperate for it.

You're right about refined flours. A bane. Never mind what they do to any other aspect of people's health - the trouble it gives them on the toilet is enough to damn them to hell. I'm constantly astounded at the difficulty of getting wholewheat snacks when out and about. At home I have brown rice, millet, which is superbly cheap, easy to cook and tasty (and always seems quite posh), and wholewheat bread and pasta.

Don't know what country you're from - America? The situation with a lot of meat eaters is the same here in the UK. They've been seen a lot on TV food programmes here lately. A presenter called Gillian McKeith goes to see morbidly obese people, gets them to keep food diaries, then lays out their diets of predominantly beige and brown food in a horrific, almost scatological table tableaux, at which the subjects often cry, especially if they've also been feeding this stuff to their children. Then they're shown a similar sized table, but covered in lovely fruit and veg and told this is what they should be eating, cuing a lot of doubtful looks and frequent childish remarks such as, 'It looks like rabbit food' and 'I'll try anything, but I'm not touching avocado.' The fear of avocado, in particular, is very great. Over the following weeks, as their skin clears up and their flatulence dissipates, they come to see the light. Or at least, so TV would have us believe. There was another of these sad people on toff chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's show recently and his diet consisted of no veg at all except 'chips' (that's 'fries' to you US folk). Hugh was desperate to get him to eat at least one piece of some other kind of veg and eventually got him to eat a piece of roasted parsnip, which the subject grudgingly admitted was 'Not bad. Quite like a chip.'

Realistically, our plan for a global veggie revolution is a long way off even if it's practicable.

Still think there are massive problems with farming beef and it should basically be hugely curtailed. There's actually some talk of reducing it as an environmental measure here in the UK. You may be right about goats. I don't think you're right about sheep. There are tons of them all over the English countryside and it never looks as if they're scorching the earth. May be partly that they're shifted between fields quite a bit by the farmers, but, anyway, don't think they're doing much damage. I'm sure you're right about cows giving more milk and that's probably why we get virtually all of ours from them, but the fact remains, it's designed for a drastically different metabolism from ours and, specifically, to help infant cows grow at an extraordinary rate, far greater than that of humans. An ex-girlfriend of mine who'd had a serious spinal problem as a teenager believed, having looked into it, that it could well have been caused by drinking milk.

No offense to anyone, but how is the vegan or not-vegan an issue of philosophical literature? I realize:

1. That this sub-forum is a bit vague

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2. Many of the threads which offer no authorial citations lead to debates like this one, but how we eat, and the way we eat it is a geopolitical, economic, maybe occasionally moral or religious issue. One modern philosopher whose work has some bearing on this in his comments on the necessary pressures of industrial farming, is Peter Singer, the controversial Aussie who brought disability activists to protest at the citadel of Princeton University.

Personally, I think it is a non-issue, and that being an American vegan is chic, and a fake salve to a conscience of those who don't want to fight progressive battles, but this has precious little to do with a philosophical literature, at least as a category.

Fair point, Jozanny, but, to try to take this into the realm of dialectics, I'll respond that

1. I think Nikolai feels it's part of his philosophical outlook on life

2. Possibly the only citation of an author who might (loosely) be described as philosophical was mine, of Karen Armstrong, in response to your only other post in this thread. I do think there's the potential here to have a philosophical discussion about our (humans') fundamentally conflicted relationship to cruelty.

Here's some relevant philosophy to, ah, chew on:

'A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.' - Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

Okay blp. I am not really sure I understand Niko's argument; plants may not have an organ like a brain to serve as a CPU, but they no more like dying than mammals or insects. Mammals are simply more graphic about being extinguished. Again, respect for life itself does not mean all life is equal. Sorry, but primates, in comparison to sheep, are an engineering marvel. We have hands, and the hand is no small evolutionary feat; we are bipedal--and for a crip like me that is miracle enough to gawk at. Now, the sheep has talents, I am sure, and it has an evolutionary niche too, and I am civilized enough to be nice to the sheep even when it stupidly butts my wheelchair and scares me, and I would not torture the creature anymore than necessary if I needed its wool and its meat, but I would so kill it for that if I needed it. I have seen wolves kill coyotes--not particularly nice--I've seen lions murder each other and their cubs, and chimpanzees make you close your eyes and think of how remarkable it is that humans haven't wiped each other out--so I have no problem being an omnivore. I do not like American farming practices, but that is a separate issue, and not eating meat will not change the unhappy fate of force-fed cows. The issue is a balanced diet, and the healthest one possible, but we are not herbivores.

I'm not sure I understand Niko's argument either, jozanny. Or, if I do, I think it's something to do with simply trying to live without harming other creatures.

You say the issue is a balanced diet and we are not herbivores. I'm more interested now in your question of whether we can have a philosophical discussion about this, so I'm going to try not to get sucked in by dietary questions except to reiterate: it does seem to be quite possible for humans to live without eating meat and even that there are significant health benefits. But we've kind of been over that.

On the question of cruelty, it was certainly my hope as a vegetarian that a certain amount of cruelty would be decreased by my choice and that might be part of a literally progressive movement, i.e. we would progress to a situation in which less and less people ate meat. I won't go as far as to admit that this was just vanity on my part, but I did come to see that there were, perhaps, more pressing issues as I became older. Still, I can't resist pointing out that many vegetarians, fully aware of how easy it is to get by without meat, also devote themselves to other, more immediate political and social causes. I visited an environmentalist camp last summer, pitched in protest at the building of a third runway at Heathrow. The food was entirely vegan and entirely satisfying and delicious.

The problem here, and the place where we might start to feel philosophy has a role, is in a sort of balance of cruelty. A lot of vegetarians, starting from the basic, simplistic position of being opposed to all cruelty, rapidly discover that, in having given up meat, they are still collusive in animal slaughter, whether because of the shoes they wear, the glue they use, the animal rennet used in the cheese they eat or, most unsettlingly of all, the slaughtered male calves that are a bi-product of milk production. They are faced starkly with a question that may actually be insidiously relevant to all of us: since we apparently can't oppose all cruelty, how much should we allow? And to what extent should we be cruel to ourselves in order to avoid cruelty to others? So far I don't know of any vegetarians who walk along brushing the ground in front of them in order to avoid treading on insects, as some buddhist sages are said to have done or perhaps still do, but there might be one or two who, like certain old English mystics, would rather allow infestations of vermin than participate in any form of killing.

You seem to have your own moral position all worked out and to want to be able to say it's all pretty simple. No need for any conversation, philosophical otherwise. My reference to Armstrong, earlier, was intended to allude to the fact that, for a lot of us, the realisation that cruelty is unavoidable cuts deep. For me, it hit particularly hard when a partner I hadn't been with for very long got pregnant and had an early term abortion, an act which I supported. I'd never imagined something like this would affect me as much as it did. An anti-abortionist would have said we shouldn't have done it. I say, we no more denied this foetus the right to life than if we hadn't conceived it in the first place and it made no difference. But my parental instincts still kicked in and the irrational part of me still felt terrible for this 'kid' of mine that never got a chance.

Armstrong cites abortion specifically, along with meat eating, as one of the painful quandaries about killing that may be at the root of religious ritual, specifically blood sacrifice.

Well, I think one of the points I was trying to make was, even if you take homo sapiens out of the picture, the drama of life and death is still what it is. Biologists speculate that felines are actually designed to take pleasure in killing, and it seems they've hit on something there. I have actually seen Joey kill a mouse, and eat it too, even though I spend a small fortune keeping him fed, and he seems to see it as his job to make sure the rodent doesn't move anymore, so obviously Hinduism doesn't operate on the trickle down theory--when the mice do get in though, it is my reaction that is interesting. I roll as far away as possible until I have to clean things up, as if it isn't my place to interfere. I don't know many walking pet owners who do either, not when it comes to your regular mouse--but even consumation of plants involves manipulation which is harmful to natural habitat, which is why I think vegan is a bit faux pas--not that I do not respect good dietary choices--for me though, and it might be due to bouts of colitis as a secondary symptom of aging with cerebral palsy--too much fiber makes me sick. I try, however, to eat a decent salad without too much fat, twice a week, and until my power chair died, cut down on beef, not eliminate, but cut down, and try not to eat bacon anymore.

That said, I am stout, pallid, and will either stroke or have an acute heart incident--heart disease runs deep on my full Italian side. As to pregnancy termination--it is a complicated issue, even for me with my anti-exceptionalism views.

I think the problem with us humans is that we've evolved too fast in the last millenia, and much of the environments we reacted to while doing so were of our own making, artificial constructs, thus distorted. We are so far up on the food chain that we're practically unassailable in our social habitats. Since we had the ability to consolidate our defences against systematic loss of human life, we have come to believe abhoring it is the only possible right way, much like a spoiled child who genuinely feels that his parents must, at all times, provide for him.
There still exist, though, areas such as the Sunderbans, where locals are still in danger of being killed by tigers (about 50-250 deaths per year, according to wiki) - partially because the area is a tiger reserve and people are not allowed to hunt down the animals unless they are positively identified as man-eaters. As shown on television, their reaction is one of respect, reverence, or acceptance towards the big cats, but I wonder... I also wonder if these people feel it's wrong to kill a boar in order to survive.

The culture and media in developed countries aggravates our... lack of realism I'd call it. Think of the principles fed to us as children, and the great lengths parents go through to make us feel the world is a safe and wonderful place where everything is possible if you truly believe. I think I can separate a pattern in a wide number of entertainment media, such as movies or books: a hero descovering something truly valuable to him, reveling to sky-high extremes in the stupefaction of experienced emotions, almost losing that special something (very sad), then from the brink of disaster comes the epiphany of salvation and the gratification of a happy finale. We have become overly sensitized to generic, superficial yet very acute views of love, family, security, life, etc.
This I believe distorts in many cases the priorities and reactions of human beings. Our social web and its symbols are percieved stronger than the gritty truths of an existence we are perilously levitating over. The realisation that we, as a whole, are destructive is becoming more and more evident, but, like the niche animals we also are, we deal with it through the lenses of our own empirical habits... like now, we seek to make it a philosophical matter, or a literary one, since these are the colours the subforum dictates - and of course, Jozanny was right in pointing out we had strayed too far, but Nikolai in his assertions, not so much.

We pitty the animals we kill because we ourselves seek to evade natural balance; to live off of an ecosystem, yet allow nothing back - just get this silly feeding over with and carry on with our artificial lives. It's how we choose to separate ourselves from nature, without exercising any self-restraint, that is wrong, and not the killing. We have grown into parasites who can't destroy their host because there's only one around.



Hope this is more to the point... As far as nutrition goes, since blp adressed it earlier, I think it's not so much what we eat, but the connection between our diet and the way in which we use the aquired energy. Carnivores need a lot of it because there's a lot of intense physical activity involved in their lives; they may also have to go on for long periods of time without feeding, so they need some form of caloric energy that can be stored. It's this last part that veggies don't have, their energy gets burened pretty fast - that's why herbivores need to spend a lot of time eating, and why you feel like wolfing your green food.

And I'm from Romania, actually. Very bad eating habits are part of the tradition here. :D

I don't think Herbivore is the right term, Jozanny, because we eat fruit and dairy products as well. You said you weren't sure about my position -- part of what I was saying was in response to several who said things along the lines of, like you said, that plants don't wish to die either. But these people are saying this to recommend meat-eating. So-- because plants don't wish to die, we ought to eat meat just as well? And I just don't want to be the only one this makes no sense to. Now what you have said about it is fine. You think we ought to eat meat for various reasons such as health or simply that you don't think it's wrong. While I don't agree with you, I respect this.

Blp you are correct there are many cruelties in today's world. But we have to start somewhere. Basically my reason for vegetarianism is that I don't want to partake in killing every time I eat food. I don't want it to be necessary to kill animals for me to eat. I'm aware that the whole system and government and country and everything also causes suffering, but again, we can only do one at a time. Someone said on this forum a while back they thought nothing could be helped, could be improved. This doesn't sway me at all. I think we should try to improve things.

Jozanny, what is philosophical about it? Well it's very philosophical. I don't mean about diet and nutrition, nutrition is sort of a side-issue. It's philosophical becuase it has to do with the value of life. Is it right for us to kill other animals? Very philosophical. Why would we think it is right to kill animals? I can't think of a good reason excpet that it's inertia and we seek to justify it. If you take a full step away from it, it seems quite clear that it's wrong to kill. But then if you enter into our society (and I live in America, actually, Kansas City, Missouri to give you an idea) then you are surrounded by it. 97% of people eat meat. Restaurants serve almost only meat. And so it goes on by inertia, peer pressure (that is, association) all of these things. Nobody questions what everybody does. Then add onto it you get such a wide range of reasons for the action; ranging from rational ones (such as yours) to irrational ones or even angry ones.. (they belong on my plate) and you have a complicated issue. One of the quotes at the beginning, the opening post, by Thomas More was from a book, it was "The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable." When I saw this I thought it was an interesting parallel to what some religious people say. There are four prohibitions for Vaisnavas, no eating meat, no illicit sex, no gambling, and no intoxication. The most important one of these is not eating meat, because it leads to a loss of compassion. So the main reason for not eating meat is compassion for the animals. Yes there are other ways in which we are complicit in the suffering of others. But because they exist does not mean we should not be vegetarian!

I think the only way to overcome the culture of ours (again, speaking of one who lives within an American culture), where meat-eating is accepted, justified, and encouraged, is to escape the influence enough to not be controled by it; and second, to connect the action with what happened to make it possible -- to connect eating meat with the pain and suffering caused when the animal lost its life. And then to realize that it's not necessary at all for this to happen. If one can put oneself in the place of the animal, if one can understand the suffering of the animal (That is, to connect that suffering to oneself; to one's own pain or the feeling of losing one's life, or another's,) then one will not say something like meat tastes too good to give up.

I am not saying we are karma-free after giving up meat; that's a whole other story, but it's an important step...

I've been a pesco-ovo-lacto vegetarian all my life (I'd give up fish if sushi wasn't my favorite food). I find that vegetarianism makes so much sense, and that the most intelligent and inspiring people support/supported it (Einstein, DaVinci, Gandhi, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Plato, Newton, Edison...the list goes on). That quote you listed by Thoreau, one of my favorite authors, is truly great. How delightfully ironic the whole situation is :D

By the way, is that quote from Walden?

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

I do not like American farming practices, but that is a separate issue, and not eating meat will not change the unhappy fate of force-fed cows.

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It has been said that a vegetarian saves the lives of over 100 animals per year. I believe that makes a huge difference. Besides, becoming a vegetarian can't hurt. I think it's foolish to think that one cannot change the fate of another... and buying meat only supports those cruel and inhumane industries.

Well, those livestock industries are not sustainable, and that is not really what my objection is about. My objection rests on the fairly proven fact that living things have to die so that other living things have the energy to succeed in procreating and maintaining a viable species. It may be inconvenient to acknowledge this, Niko, but that is the way it works. One cannot remove suffering from the equation; it is impossible, whether that suffering stems from human action or other sources. Watch a colony of army ants kill a huge animal sometime. The ant isn't evil; the colony is performing a necessary function as a super-predator.

I won't get into the debate about humans being quasi-supernatural, or extraordinary. I don't believe it, but in this forum one fights a losing battle against the divine calling thing--but, even with that argument aside, life is a dynamic contest and struggle, and some win that struggle, but all living things eventually lose, and get consumed, regardless of the attractions of non-violence.

When you say, girlygirl, that 100 animals per year are *saved*, saved from what? Domesticated cattle are not returned to the wild. In the US they are force-fed corn; if they were not slaughtered they would die, in agony, from being pressured to eat a grain they were not evolved to eat. In the UK, they are fed ground meal which includes animal by-products, hence mad cow disease. You aren't saving them from pens barely large enough to stand in; 10 billion people put arable land under a great deal of pressure.

Utopian visions may be precious, but they just don't jive with the cost of having modern, industrialized, market-based civilizations. Good luck with that.

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

Well, those livestock industries are not sustainable, and that is not really what my objection is about. My objection rests on the fairly proven fact that living things have to die so that other living things have the energy to succeed in procreating and maintaining a viable species. It may be inconvenient to acknowledge this, Niko, but that is the way it works. One cannot remove suffering from the equation; it is impossible, whether that suffering stems from human action or other sources. Watch a colony of army ants kill a huge animal sometime. The ant isn't evil; the colony is performing a necessary function as a super-predator.

I won't get into the debate about humans being quasi-supernatural, or extraordinary. I don't believe it, but in this forum one fights a losing battle against the divine calling thing--but, even with that argument aside, life is a dynamic contest and struggle, and some win that struggle, but all living things eventually lose, and get consumed, regardless of the attractions of non-violence.

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No, I am aware of this and I have been some time. There is a verse in a scripture I am studying, Srimad Bhagavatam, which states exactly this (1.13.47):

phalgūni tatra mahatāḿ
jīvo jīvasya jīvanam

"The weak are the subsistence of the strong, and the general rule holds that one living being is food for another."

I'm aware you don't believe in a supreme will, and I wasn't planning to speak of it either.

Srila Prabhupada, in his purport of this verse, writes

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The living being is the source of subsistence for other, stronger living beings. No one should be very anxious for his subsistence in any circumstances because there are living beings everywhere, and no living being starves for want of food at any place.

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An elephant is much larger than we are, but it is provided for... basically, there are suitable foods which can be made from fruits, nuts, beans, vegetables, and milk, and it is not necessary to eat animals.

Prabhupada also writes:

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Exploitation of the weaker living being by the stronger is the natural law of existence; there is always an attempt to devour the weak in different kingdoms of living beings. There is no possibility of checking this tendency by any artificial means under material conditions; it can be checked only by awakening the spiritual sense of the human being by practice of spiritual regulations. The spiritual regulative principles, however, do not allow a man to slaughter weaker animals on one side and teach others peaceful coexistence. If man does not allow the animals peaceful coexistence, how can he expect peaceful existence in human society?

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I will write more later. I understand you do not put authority in any scriptures, but as you asked for philosophy, there it is, a vegetarian philosophy. :D

How is your believe system going to change the reality of a global market society?

A quick note on diet, jozanny. I'll risk telling you something you already know, just because you mentioned a salad without too much fat: there's a diametric difference between meat/dairy derived fat, which is harmful to humans because it raises cholesterol, and the kind of fats you'd generally eat in a salad: vegetable oil such a sunflower oil or olive oil. Your body needs these and they help maintain a healthy heart. Other sources include nuts and fish. It's still fat and so, in theory, can make you fat if you eat enough, but you actually really have to eat quite a lot of it for that to happen, whereas meat fat, butter and cheese are comparatively quick routes to obesity and heart disease - with no real upside since the nutrients you get from eating these things can all be got from other sources.

I take your point about fiber making you, in particular, sick though. Can't really argue with that.

To try, try to keep this on a philosophical bent, still in answer to you, jozanny, it's one thing to say, roughly rightly as you do, that

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Originally Posted by jozanny

life is a dynamic contest and struggle, and some win that struggle, but all living things eventually lose, and get consumed, regardless of the attractions of non-violence

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But it's not a simple matter to extrapolate from that that we should eat meat or that it is ethical to do so or even that it doesn't matter if we do so. For one thing, I don't think you have to have an exaggeratedly rosey view of things, let alone a religious one (I'm an atheist), to see that the struggle and selfishness you talk about frequently coexist with kindness and selflessness, that, for instance, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it, human beings are, frequently, spontaneously moral. (That said, Zizek himself, in the documentary Zizek!, when he finds out his interviewers and film crew are all vegetarian responds, only partially with his tongue in his cheek, 'Degenerates! You will turn into monkeys.')

To elevate the decidedly quasi-Darwinian observation of a struggle for existence to a principle is to run the very serious risk of putting the ethical cart before the horse, doing harm for the sake of a principle and not, in fact, out of the expediency from which the principle is derived. ****, there's got to be a simpler way of saying that. What I mean is, yes, it seems to be almost impossible to avoid doing some harm, but that it's a serious (moral) error to turn that into an argument for doing harm when it's not necessary. An error, I would add as an aside, that I think a lot of parents make all the time in the raising of their children. Yes, the world is a harsh place. That should be an argument for avoiding harshness when we can, not being harsh all the time. The harshness of life can more than take care of itself without us adding to it gratuitously.

This is what I meant, earlier, about working out our balance of cruelty. A relatively simple way of looking at it is to ask how much harm we can avoid doing to others without doing harm to ourselves. However, the much more interesting angle on this is that, very often, what's good for the goose and gander is good for us too. Meat eating seems to be an example of this. The animals don't want to be eaten and, in the main, human metabolisms seem to be in agreement. A well-balanced veggie meal is a kindness to the animals and a kindness to the consumer of it. (And if you can say that about meat, you can say the same ten-fold about paté. Just ask the goose and the gander.)

OK, so some vegetables had to die for the vegetarian meal and that's cruelty too; but let's be as clear as we can about our taxonomy here. This is necessary. We have to eat something. Even if we eat meat, the nutritionists universally agree, we need our 5, 6, 7, 8 or so portions of fruit and veg each day.

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Originally Posted by jozanny

How is your believe system going to change the reality of a global market society?

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This is called 'capitulation'. You might as well say the same thing or similar to William Wilberforce or Emmeline Pankhurst. Didn't your mother ever tell you, just because everybody else is doing something doesn't make it right?

However, I would add, that the overwhelming, sublime fact of the global market place does probably change something in our examination of a balance of cruelty - by which I mean, to put it perhaps too simply, some of this stuff, without tying ourselves up in absolute knots of austerity, we're probably stuck with, at least for the moment.

You say you don't want to get into the unsustainability of the meat industry, but then you use the facts of it (corn-feeding etc.) to argue against the notion that animals are 'saved' by vegetarianism. I really don't know if you can separate the industry and its decidedly bad practices from the rest of this topic. As you yourself show, the cruelty of the meat industry is not just in the final slaughter of the animals, it's the inhumane conditions in which they are kept - all of which is only sustained by the enormous global demand for meat. These kinds of things can change, sometimes quite quickly given the right circumstances.

Fair enough blp, since you and I are at least having a discussion which is adjusting itself to various parameters. You know, I changed my diet in about 03 to eat healthier, and my ex-fiance insisted that was why I was getting *sick*, and I dismissed this. My power chair died over Thanksgiving, and though I now can make limited excursions in the piece of junk I am sitting in now (getting a new chair takes a process) I have indulged some in rich processed food because I cannot drive to grocery as conveniently, and I seem much more stable, which makes not a lick of sense. I suppose internal medicine will look at their batty cripple askance when I ask them what is going on... (sigh); all I have is the colitis theory, which is difficult to confirm, but associated with cerebral palsy in some instances.

Maybe I should have been a biologist. However, it is not that I do not appreciate nobel sentiments, but I do insist on looking at what is real, even in the aspiration of the possible. Public radio this morning had a mildly alarming segment on species loss due to human activity, and they said it might be too late for X number of species--and I am not sure how putting 10 billion people on a diet of rice, greens, and roots, even if it could be done, changes that our extraordinary success has done almost incalculable harm.

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Originally Posted by Petronius

Hope this is more to the point... As far as nutrition goes, since blp adressed it earlier, I think it's not so much what we eat, but the connection between our diet and the way in which we use the aquired energy. Carnivores need a lot of it because there's a lot of intense physical activity involved in their lives; they may also have to go on for long periods of time without feeding, so they need some form of caloric energy that can be stored. It's this last part that veggies don't have, their energy gets burened pretty fast - that's why herbivores need to spend a lot of time eating, and why you feel like wolfing your green food.

And I'm from Romania, actually. Very bad eating habits are part of the tradition here. :D

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No time to respond to all your points about unreality and such just now, but perhaps they relate to this question of specific dietary needs dependent on lifestyle. I believe athletes do eat quantities of fat that would be considered deeply unhealthy for ordinary people and, perhaps in former times, a huntsman's diet had a certain neatly symmetrical aptness to his lifestyle (i.e. he needed a lot of slow-burn energy to go after his prey). To keep eating like a huntsman when we're spending most of our day sitting in front of a computer might be said to constitute a certain failure to engage with reality.

This is my last post on this topic, but I wanted to clarify: Vegetarians who view lifestyles choices with complacency, are, to my mind, fooling themselves. Civilization has a price, and Western New Age guilt conciousness isn't going to undo the damage that over 200 years of colonial, and the creation of consumer economies, has wrought on global eco-systems. Like any other species, we are a self-interested one, and the only way to undo our damage to the planet is to go against our self-interest, and that is a very difficult thing to do. Even the Indian government, Niko, shoots tigers, these endangered and beautiful beasts, who develop a taste for Indian flesh. It might be nice, before quoting Buddhists teachings as a superior moral stance, if you visited some sites like Greenpeace, and looked up the Japanese whaling industry, and saw how many hundreds of dolphins they slaughter, and consider the magnitude of that over your lettuce. The problem is much larger and more intractable than the new American chic.

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

This is my last post on this topic, but I wanted to clarify: Vegetarians who view lifestyles choices with complacency, are, to my mind, fooling themselves. Civilization has a price, and Western New Age guilt conciousness isn't going to undo the damage that over 200 years of colonial, and the creation of consumer economies, has wrought on global eco-systems. Like any other species, we are a self-interested one, and the only way to undo our damage to the planet is to go against our self-interest, and that is a very difficult thing to do. Even the Indian government, Niko, shoots tigers, these endangered and beautiful beasts, who develop a taste for Indian flesh. It might be nice, before quoting Buddhists teachings as a superior moral stance, if you visited some sites like Greenpeace, and looked up the Japanese whaling industry, and saw how many hundreds of dolphins they slaughter, and consider the magnitude of that over your lettuce. The problem is much larger and more intractable than the new American chic.

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Ok, I'm sorry you feel that way.

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Originally Posted by NikolaiI

Ok, I'm sorry you feel that way.

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I am not trying to make anyone sorry Niko--just trying to bring age, and experience to bear, and maybe I fail, in bringing that age and experience to the young, as a challenge to think.

This is off-topic, but I use it as an analogy: After years of being carted around by my parents from one hospital after another, and other institutional environments of interest, I was courted by Disabled In Action, and they did me some good, sued my school district, and even gave me a career. I became something of a True Believer in the movement (sound familiar?) and then I got burned, and I am still getting burned by this ideology even though I'd like to flee from it as far and as fast as I could.

Nothing to do with vegan as lifestyle--but, it does point to what I'm trying to convey: Changing the world is hard, and that goes for the sincerely religious faithful, the serious activist, advocate, and those who are serious about scaling back on what they need in their social environment. What are you willing to give up to conserve the planet? Meat? That is easy. Greenpeace risks the lives of its members to save whales from our modern killing technology, but those who are really invested in raping the sea could care less. It is something to think about.

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

I am not trying to make anyone sorry Niko--just trying to bring age, and experience to bear, and maybe I fail, in bringing that age and experience to the young, as a challenge to think.

This is off-topic, but I use it as an analogy: After years of being carted around by my parents from one hospital after another, and other institutional environments of interest, I was courted by Disabled In Action, and they did me some good, sued my school district, and even gave me a career. I became something of a True Believer in the movement (sound familiar?) and then I got burned, and I am still getting burned by this ideology even though I'd like to flee from it as far and as fast as I could.

Nothing to do with vegan as lifestyle--but, it does point to what I'm trying to convey: Changing the world is hard, and that goes for the sincerely religious faithful, the serious activist, advocate, and those who are serious about scaling back on what they need in their social environment. What are you willing to give up to conserve the planet? Meat? That is easy. Greenpeace risks the lives of its members to save whales from our modern killing technology, but those who are really invested in raping the sea could care less. It is something to think about.

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You are not trying to make people feel sorry-- great. I am not trying to make them feel guilty. Nor am I trying to get them into anything New Age or American chic. I brought this up to discuss- vegetarianism. That is all, nothing more or less. It was not a Buddhist I quoted, but I quoted it because you mentioned that one living entity is the food of another, and I thought you might find this verse in scripture interesting, since it was saying the same thing. It was Prabhupada's purport to this verse I quoted. The main idea here is that there is suitable food we can make from nuts, fruit, beans, grains, and milk, and it is not necessary or good to kill animals as well.

Please understand this is all I am trying to say, and I am not saying that if you become a vegetarian the rest of the world will as well, or that nobody will ever suffer again. If someone thought that because they were vegetarian, they were going to solve everything; this would be an instance of them fooling theirself-- but the choice of not eating meat does not carry with it implicitly some kind of self-delusion, which is what I understood you to imply. Please respond or not as you wish.

Also I would say that the discussion of what would happen if the entire world became vegetarian is not very relevant or helpful, for one because it is pure speculation, and secondly it is 100% unlikely to happen. I agree very much with Petronius about world-population (which by the way is about 6.7 billion, not 10). He makes a good point that we have increased in 5 billion in the last century. This should alert us or make us try to be careful and aware of what is going on. The absolute best thing for humanity would be to stop, or slow down... I mean in a general sense... slow down society, stop racing around, and try to find some peace. We need to do this collectively. Aren't the older, wise people of our society always telling the young ones to calm down, that things will be alright, to slow down? If this is the wisdom of our elders, then why isn't society following their advice?

Okay, finally there should be nothing wrong with a calm discussion of vegetarianism. We are all mature enough to discuss like this. All I want people to do is think, not to change their views without thinking or if it goes against what they believe in. I quoted nothing to try to gain some kind of moral superiority. As I said in the opening post, my reason for my approach is that I was not a vegetarian for every meal of my life, and so I am not judging harshly those who, by a span of time, are doing nothing I didn't do. That's why I am forced not to be judgemental. :) At the same time, I will defend the right to be vegetarian or to speak of it. William Blake is quoted to have said "When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do." Therefore part of this is to present vegetarianism and to encourage people to always consider thoughtfully their actions, and the other part is to assure you that vegetarians are not fooling themselves, as the only thing they (as vegetarians) have in common as a group is that they do not eat meat.

If there's some reason you don't wish to discuss vegetarianism, you don't have to alert us to your last post, just don't post anymore. We will see that you quit the discussion. At the same time, you are more than welcome as far as I am concerned.

I was a vegetarian for some time, but it seemed like a ready made philosophy. The motives behind my actions, although the involved the same dietary practice, was not the same. PLants live too and a strict consumption of them is excessive. I am interested in a balance, but am also interested in playing on an equal playing field. I only eat wild animals that I hunt myself, which is how animals obtain their food. I don't eat the domesticated.

Pythagoras believed it was indecent for men to eat the flesh of animals, fattening the one on the destruction of another, especially since nature provided all that man needs to live and thrive in the fruits of the soil. This is perhaps the most convincing argument I have encountered in favor of vegitarianism. It still falls short of the mark, I think.

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To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.
Mahatma Gandhi

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This statement seems to me to be in dire need of proof. If a building were on fire, and a child and a lamb were inside, and the Mahatma could save only one of them, are we seriously to believe that he would not have immediately chosen to save the child?

I am very fond of animals. I consider my 2 cats practically family-- practically! But there really are such things as higher and lower animals. My cats are very intelligent-- considering they have brains the size of a brussels sprout-- and they are higher creatures than a fly or a bacterium. But I am still more intelligent, for unlike them I have the ability to think abstractly and the foresight not to bite into electrical cords or chase rabid squirrels. I am a higher animal than a chicken or a cow or a lobster.

It does bother me (a little) that chickens and cows die so that I may have a nice meal. I hope that they are killed as painlessly as possible, and raised in a humane manner. (Lobsters, being basically giant bugs, I care less about.) Gratuitous or selfish cruelty is, I believe, unquestionably wrong.

Beyond a certain point, I believe, compassion for animals becomes essentially irrational. There is nothing wrong with this: my fondness for my cats is mostly irrational. But because it is irrational, I don't think it's possible to formulate a philosophical argument in favor of vegetarianism.

To be honest, for me the whole debate is settled when I think of the hippie from Futurama saying "We taught a lion to eat tofu!"

To my mind, man is, to quote (though perhaps misuse) Aristotle, a 'political animal', but an animal nonetheless. If it is acceptable for animals to eat meat, I see no reason why people shouldn't.

I mean, for example, as a vegitarian, would you buy cat food for your cat? Dog food for your dog? Is that any worse than buying meat?

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Originally Posted by curlyqlink

I am very fond of animals. I consider my 2 cats practically family-- practically! But there really are such things as higher and lower animals. My cats are very intelligent-- considering they have brains the size of a brussels sprout-- and they are higher creatures than a fly or a bacterium. But I am still more intelligent, for unlike them I have the ability to think abstractly and the foresight not to bite into electrical cords or chase rabid squirrels. I am a higher animal than a chicken or a cow or a lobster.

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So you wouldn't mind taking a bite out of an autistic person or a comatose patient with little or no brain activity. If the importance of a creatures life is based on their intellect then those who are pro-life on the issue of abortion and PVS are completely irrational. A similar hierarchy where one believed that they were superior to another group and there for their life was not as significant can be seen in Nazi Germany.

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Originally Posted by NEEMAN

To be honest, for me the whole debate is settled when I think of the hippie from Futurama saying "We taught a lion to eat tofu!"

To my mind, man is, to quote (though perhaps misuse) Aristotle, a 'political animal', but an animal nonetheless. If it is acceptable for animals to eat meat, I see no reason why people shouldn't.

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I don't think that animals, non-human, have acquired the capabilities for agriculture. It makes sense for animals, who can be related to our nomadic ancestors, to hunt for food; eating what is needed and moving on. We are settled in modern society and have the luxury of supplements. We are not on equal grounds with animals. We eat animals that have grown defenseless because of domestication, and the killing of these animals is slaughter. Their meat goes bad in stores, in our homes and with throw unwanted portion into the garbage. Aristotle had a theory on virtue also with excess on one side and deficiency on the other.

There are various health issues connected with vegetarianism. For instance, Vegans and vegetarians often have stunted growths, and other growth related problems because of their lack of meat in their diet. Perhaps they can be supplemented, but in truth, meat seems to be quite healthy, especially meats like venison.

On moral grounds - that is all relative. If not eating meat is, as Jozanny pointed out, used as a new age load of crap to pretend to oneself that they are saving the world, then I am all against it. If someone doesn't like the taste of meat, and doesn't eat it on those grounds, I can see that, but in terms of morality, in the long run it makes no difference, as less cows will be brought into this world if less people are eating them.

That is the strange thing - cows are bred - and therefore, they are calculated in terms of amount to fill the demand of the market. If people stop eating, cows will stop being bred, and generally the herd size will diminish significantly.

It costs money to have a cow, unless you are using it for milk. You need a field for it to graze on, and other things to sustain it. If there is no profit involved, the cow simply will not be brought into life.

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Originally Posted by JBI

There are various health issues connected with vegetarianism.

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Deficiency.

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Originally Posted by JBI

There are various health issues connected with vegetarianism. For instance, Vegans and vegetarians often have stunted growths, and other growth related problems because of their lack of meat in their diet. Perhaps they can be supplemented, but in truth, meat seems to be quite healthy, especially meats like venison.

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This requires rather a lot of substantiation. Actually, I suspect it's just not true. I've known many many vegetarians and none of them had stunted growths, including those who'd been raised vegetarian from birth and never eaten meat in their lives. There are also areas of the world such as Southern India where meat just isn't eaten at all, without apparent detriment to the population's health. As my previous remarks about China's changing diet indicate, meat is, in fact, a luxury for many people and is eaten either rarely or not at all among many of the world's poorer people.

I'd be surprised if you could name a single vital nutrient you can get from meat that you can't get from other sources. As far as I know, pulses - beans and lentils - are the most healthy staples you can eat and contain the protein, iron and B vitamins frequently obtained from meat. There are many other sources of iron too, including dried fruits such as raisins and prunes and certain green leafy vegetables such as spinach.

A recent study found that the most nutritious foods, at least in the English diet, by which they meant the foods with the highest concentrations of the widest possible variety of vital nutrients were broccoli and runner beans.

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Originally Posted by JBI

On moral grounds - that is all relative. If not eating meat is, as Jozanny pointed out, used as a new age load of crap to pretend to oneself that they are saving the world, then I am all against it. If someone doesn't like the taste of meat, and doesn't eat it on those grounds, I can see that, but in terms of morality, in the long run it makes no difference, as less cows will be brought into this world if less people are eating them.

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I refer you to my numerous remarks elsewhere in this thread about the environmental damage caused by cattle farming. It would be a far far better thing if 'less cows [were] brought into the world...'

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Originally Posted by JBI

That is the strange thing - cows are bred - and therefore, they are calculated in terms of amount to fill the demand of the market. If people stop eating, cows will stop being bred, and generally the herd size will diminish significantly.

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Sound both plausible and desirable for the greatest good for the greatest number.

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

Fair enough blp, since you and I are at least having a discussion which is adjusting itself to various parameters. You know, I changed my diet in about 03 to eat healthier, and my ex-fiance insisted that was why I was getting *sick*, and I dismissed this. My power chair died over Thanksgiving, and though I now can make limited excursions in the piece of junk I am sitting in now (getting a new chair takes a process) I have indulged some in rich processed food because I cannot drive to grocery as conveniently, and I seem much more stable, which makes not a lick of sense. I suppose internal medicine will look at their batty cripple askance when I ask them what is going on... (sigh); all I have is the colitis theory, which is difficult to confirm, but associated with cerebral palsy in some instances.

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I'm all for adjusting parameters and I sympathise with this in particular, having been physiologically self-sabotaged a few years ago in my attempt to go vegan by the fact that I suddenly couldn't digest pulses. I won't go into disgusting detail, but horrible times were spent in toilet cubicles. No doctor treated the problem seriously. ****ing doctors, I swear, sometimes... Even supermarket bread brought it on to my bafflement and distress. I eventually realised it was probably because it all contained soya flour. Eventually, I solved the problem - don't ask me how I worked this out, it just suddenly made sense - by scarfing down large quantities of citrus fruits. But I'm also aware that, for a lot of people with more serious health problems such as yours, diet's no simple matter. A friend of mine was diagnosed diabetic a few years ago and it's still an ongoing source of anxiety to him trying to figure out what he can and can't eat to feel OK.

What did your healthier diet consist of? If you don't mind my asking.

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Originally Posted by jozanny

Maybe I should have been a biologist. However, it is not that I do not appreciate nobel sentiments, but I do insist on looking at what is real, even in the aspiration of the possible. Public radio this morning had a mildly alarming segment on species loss due to human activity, and they said it might be too late for X number of species--and I am not sure how putting 10 billion people on a diet of rice, greens, and roots, even if it could be done, changes that our extraordinary success has done almost incalculable harm.

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But I've spent a lot of this thread arguing that vegetarianism is more than possible for most people. You're not sure how 10 billion people could be put on a vegetarian diet, but I've spent a lot of this thread explaining that it's cheaper and easier to produce this food than to farm livestock (while conceding that some animal husbandry would probably have to continue). Still, I'm not sure we've quite worked out whether the possibility of a 'global vegetarian diet' needs to be a predicate for every individual decision on this matter. Are we saying, uh oh, if everyone did this, it might cause a lot of damage? Is it likely that everyone is going to do this? Are we trying to subject vegetarianism to some version of Kant's categorical imperative?

Look, I'm getting tired of repeating myself, but, seriously, curtail beef farming and and you free up vast quantities of land for things like soya and wheat and feed about twenty times more people thereby. I posted a more exact figure and a source elsewhere in this thread.

You still seem to be saying, jozanny, that the fact that we can't solve all the problems caused by our evolutionary success, we shouldn't even try to solve any of them - no matter how much bloody sense it makes or how easy it is. Anyway, I'm getting blue in the face making all this sense and I'm about ready to quit. Any veggies who want to fight the tide of arguments I've already refuted, feel free repost my comments. Ciao kids.

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Originally Posted by blp

I refer you to my numerous remarks elsewhere in this thread about the environmental damage caused by cattle farming. It would be a far far better thing if 'less cows [were] brought into the world...'

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I was going to mention that but I wasn't sure of its validity.

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So you wouldn't mind taking a bite out of an autistic person or a comatose patient with little or no brain activity. If the importance of a creatures life is based on their intellect then those who are pro-life on the issue of abortion and PVS are completely irrational. A similar hierarchy where one believed that they were superior to another group and there for their life was not as significant can be seen in Nazi Germany.

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I don't think anything in my post suggested that I am pro-cannibalism. Or a Nazi.

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Originally Posted by curlyqlink

I don't think anything in my post suggested that I am pro-cannibalism. Or a Nazi.

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I didn't say you were either, but your argument was based on the hierarchy of intelligence and superiority. You can have said that you have a biased as a human to value human life and left it at that instead of an attempt at objective reasoning.

Following excerpts are from Dennis Leary's no cure for cancer. I thought they were controversial and interesting enough to post...you could extract some truths through it...its satire

Red meat, white meat, blue meat, meat-o-****ing-rama. You will eat it. Because not eating meat is a decision. Eating meat is an instinct! Yeah! And I know what it's about. "I don't want to eat the meat because I love the animals. I love the animals." Hey, I love the animals too. I love my doggy. He's so cute. My fluffy little dog.. He's so cute- There's the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don't we? Yeah. Why don't we just have animal auditions. Line 'em up one by one and interview them individually. "What are you?" "I'm an otter." "And what do you do?" "I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands." "You're free to go." "And what are you?" "I'm a cow." "Get in the f***ing truck, ok pal!" "But I'm an animal." "You're a baseball glove! Get on that truck!" "I'm an animal, I have rights!" "Yeah, here's yer f***ing cousin, get on the f***ing truck, pal!" We kill the cows to make jackets out of them and then we kill each other for the jackets we made out of the cows.

You will eat the meat folks, because this country was founded on two things. Meat, and war. You eat enough f***ing meat, you wanna kill somebody. That's the way it works. That was the ultimate American dream. During that Persian Gulf War, I was sitting in my living room, naked, with a can of Budweiser and a three inch stake watching the war, live, on TV. I had a six foot "expletive" with a giant cheese burger on the end of it. I ate so much meat during the war that by the time the war was over three weeks later, I was like, "No no no. We need to keep fighting."

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Originally Posted by PierreGringoire

"You will eat the meat folks, because this country was founded on two things. Meat, and war."

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Yeah. Don't even get me started on the arms industry. ;)

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Originally Posted by curlyqlink

Pythagoras believed it was indecent for men to eat the flesh of animals, fattening the one on the destruction of another, especially since nature provided all that man needs to live and thrive in the fruits of the soil. This is perhaps the most convincing argument I have encountered in favor of vegitarianism. It still falls short of the mark, I think.


This statement seems to me to be in dire need of proof. If a building were on fire, and a child and a lamb were inside, and the Mahatma could save only one of them, are we seriously to believe that he would not have immediately chosen to save the child?

I am very fond of animals. I consider my 2 cats practically family-- practically! But there really are such things as higher and lower animals. My cats are very intelligent-- considering they have brains the size of a brussels sprout-- and they are higher creatures than a fly or a bacterium. But I am still more intelligent, for unlike them I have the ability to think abstractly and the foresight not to bite into electrical cords or chase rabid squirrels. I am a higher animal than a chicken or a cow or a lobster.

It does bother me (a little) that chickens and cows die so that I may have a nice meal. I hope that they are killed as painlessly as possible, and raised in a humane manner. (Lobsters, being basically giant bugs, I care less about.) Gratuitous or selfish cruelty is, I believe, unquestionably wrong.

Beyond a certain point, I believe, compassion for animals becomes essentially irrational. There is nothing wrong with this: my fondness for my cats is mostly irrational. But because it is irrational, I don't think it's possible to formulate a philosophical argument in favor of vegetarianism.

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Not the point. Gandhi's argument lies more in the belief that the murder of an animal should be as severe as that of a human. Animals have the same capacity for love and pain as humans (animal psychology and brain wave studies prove this! Anyone who has had a pet should confirm this). Of course anyone would save the life of a human over an animal if they had to, but to be able to torture millions of animals daily and call it a legal industry is ludicrous.

The thing is, all meat you purchase in the grocery store has been crammed in tiny trucks in either scorching hot or freezing cold weather with hundreds of other panicked animals, driven for hundreds of miles without break, beaten and tortured into movement, and in the end stunned (if lucky) and slaughtered. Whether they're sick, lame, blind, deaf, old, it makes no difference. THAT is the reality of the meat industry. You can hope and dream that the food on your plate has had a painless death, but by continuing to purchase such products you are funding this legal cruelty.

On a side note, my father has been a vegetarian for about twenty years. He's about 45 now, and is a 3rd dan black belt in karate, and excels in hockey, tennis, snowboarding, and basically any other sport you can name. He's in top shape all around for his age, and he believes a vegetarian diet made a huge difference in his health.

Gladiators were almost all vegetarians. They got their protein from beans and legumes, and obviously had the muscle strength to perform amazing feats of athleticism.

Vegetarianism moralkly, yes that is what I meant. Thank you everyone for your great posts, and for being respectful.

First, let me say that I am asking a question and I am genuinely interested in receiving a response because I have also thought about changing my diet. I am just curious; I am not trying to anger anyone.

But, how do vegetarians, vegans, frugivores, who chose their lifestyles from a moral standpoint, counter the argument about harming plants? And I don't mean about causing suffering or pain: I can reasonably agree that plants sense no pain due to a lack of nervous system. (Even though it is confusing to me that plants develop poisons, thorns, etc.) However, I mean more about the idea of sensation. I would argue that although a plant cannot sense pain, it can still sense SOME things. Yet, if I eat a plant, I have ended its sensation of the world; I have still caused it death, although a harmless, painless death.

These sort of questions have always confused me; I always come to a conclusion that there is no way for me to eat without causing some sort of harm. Are there not minuscule bacteria, etc that are on plants, fruits, etc anyway? Will not these be destroyed as well from consumption? I guess it may come down to the lesser harm: choosing that which does not feel pain.

Or maybe something else. Perhaps viewing the world as a cycle (which I often do), with a lightheartedness (I'd rather die than live too seriously) in which all things interact with each other in a natural, reincarnating cycle? Animals predate on other animals, and to me, the ethical-moral distinction between humans and nonhuman animals seems arguable. Similarly, I have already accepted that I am a part of this cycle; I may be killed and eaten by an animal, or I will definitely be consumed by something once I am dead. I could argue that I'd prefer not to be killed and eaten (as an animal), but also I could argue that I'd prefer not to be eaten even if I could not sense pain either (as a plant).

Well, this may be confusing because I just wrote this quickly. I am just trying to make some sense for myself. I hope to hear from anyone who is interested in responding. Thanks.

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Originally Posted by blp

This requires rather a lot of substantiation. Actually, I suspect it's just not true. I've known many many vegetarians and none of them had stunted growths, including those who'd been raised vegetarian from birth and never eaten meat in their lives. There are also areas of the world such as Southern India where meat just isn't eaten at all, without apparent detriment to the population's health. As my previous remarks about China's changing diet indicate, meat is, in fact, a luxury for many people and is eaten either rarely or not at all among many of the world's poorer people.

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I do have little doubt whether the diet itself is the sole factor. Vegetarians in general have a healtier life, i.e. tend to be non-smokers, have less alcohol intake, and live an active life (excercise, do sports, etc). The socioecnomic factors can not be disregard in this case.
There was an old thread in the General Chat section that discussed the same topic long time ago. And I still have the same point of view now as I had then.

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Originally Posted by Jeremy_PA

But, how do vegetarians, vegans, frugivores, who chose their lifestyles from a moral standpoint, counter the argument about harming plants?

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I became a vegetarian from a moral standpoint, and I remain a vegetarian from a philosophical standpoint. We're just one animal among many, and I think it's pure speciesism to draw a moral distinction between humans and other animals.

I think yours is a fair question, and one I've asked myself. For me, it comes down to balancing the need to live against the need to avoid harming another creature. I don't eat anything that comes from a dead animal, because it's pretty easy to do that without any detriment to my health or quality of life. I tried a vegan diet, but it made me so miserable I starting eating dairy again. I try to avoid leather shoes, but struggle to find a comfortable alternative, so I reluctantly wear leather, although I'm always on the lookout for an alternative. At the very minimum I have to eat plants if I want to survive. I have come to a compromise with myself; it's necessary sometimes to act counter to my principles in order to survive.

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Originally Posted by Jeremy_PA

But, how do vegetarians, vegans, frugivores, who chose their lifestyles from a moral standpoint, counter the argument about harming plants? And I don't mean about causing suffering or pain: I can reasonably agree that plants sense no pain due to a lack of nervous system. (Even though it is confusing to me that plants develop poisons, thorns, etc.) However, I mean more about the idea of sensation. I would argue that although a plant cannot sense pain, it can still sense SOME things. Yet, if I eat a plant, I have ended its sensation of the world; I have still caused it death, although a harmless, painless death.

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Thanks for your question, and sorry I didn't reply sooner. You raise a good piont and I did some research but a lot of it was beyond me! Tsuyoiko gave a satisfactory answer. For me, I think about it like this. Yes, plant life has life. But for me it takes an intellectual step to understand that it does, and that I should not kill it (unnecessarily). I must be in the same place about plants as non-vegetarians are about animals. For me, with animals, over the years, it's become very clear that I should be a vegetarian. Especially since my health is very good. If my health is better or the same without eating meat, then the only reason to eat meat would be to satisfy my tastse. Well for one it doesn't, it repulses me. But if it did, I would refrain the same way I do from indulging in something like cake.

What I'm trying to say originally is that it takes a mental effort to understand the position of plants. It's natural that one life form consumes another, this is the way of nature. But consider the elephant, the rhinocerous, and the ox - they are much stronger than humans, and they are herbivore. Humans can be vegetarian and be strong. There is at least more than one top athelete who is a vegetarian. This is pretty convincing evidence for me. In light of this evidence, the only reason I can see that there are non-vegetarians is simply that it is so immersed in our culture. Less than 3-5% of people do not eat any meat at all. When 95% of people do something, there is a strong pressure to do it as well.

I know I still haven't even answered your question... I guess it takes a mental effort to understand (at least partially), or put oneself in the place of the animal (empathy, the only way to understand their suffering, to connect their suffering to what it would feel like for us to suffer in the same way) - and it takes a greater mental effort to understand plants. But another thing, plant life is nearly infinite. Look at a rain-forest. We of course can't eat randomly the leaves of those trees, but plant life very naturally dies of all kinds of causes. It is abundant and it doesn't suffer pain. Still, as you say, it has some sense of life, so it is sacred too. We shouldn't kill more than we need of anything.

(the statistic I mentioned is about America)