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[misko27]

My rule is that I won't eat anything that convinces me I shouldn't eat it. Trite as it sounds, it's the only moral standard that absolutely everyone holds to.

I agree.  But meat is good.

This. If it could convince me otherwise, I will not eat it.

Well there is the main reason why I've been trying to edge towards vegetarianism, it's a big source of cholesterol, and raises your risk of stomach/colon cancer. Not to mention some other possible health concerns with regards to the antibiotics, growth hormones, and just the general chemicals that the animal you're eating has picked up through it's food/water/environment.

There's also the argument that since crops take less land to feed a person than animals eating crops do that you eat more efficiently, but of course there's also concerns that switching to a more crop based diet encourages the whole flooding the ecosystem with nitrogen issue (though this only holds any water if you happen to be eating animals that aren't fed crops, which most farm animals are).

But the argument of "It's bad for you", isn't something that seems to motivate a lot of people to eat less meat... so meh.

What I meant, was that if something can at least gesture and demonstrate and/or argue logically that I should not eat it, I won't.

[PanH]

Red meat builds powerful people. I don't plan on living a sterile, anemic lifestyle of frailty and meekness.

Except that there are vegan bodybuilders.

It's more the other way around : "if you are anemic/similar, you need to eat meat sometimes", than the opposite. For sterile, bs.

[i2amroy]

Red meat builds powerful people. I don't plan on living a sterile, anemic lifestyle of frailty and meekness.

Except that there are vegan bodybuilders.

It's more the other way around : "if you are anemic/similar, you need to eat meat sometimes", than the opposite. For sterile, bs.

It's not so much that meat is a requirement for a healthy diet, it's that it has a much greater concentration of certain things required to build muscles and strengthen your body then most plants do (especially since things like protein are some of the things we need the most of). As such it is much easier to maintain a balanced diet containing everything your body requires with meat then without it. People who get to be anemic/similar and are following a vegetarian diet are becoming that way because they aren't taking the extra effort to ensure that their diet is balanced. It's fully possible to be healthy and muscular on a vegan diet, it's just that the more limitations you put on your options your ability to have a balanced diet becomes that much more restricted.

[kerlc]

I am against battery farming but that is pretty much it. I eat meat, (although in smaller amounts as of late. No moral reason, i just seem to have lost the taste for it, really) and i consume dairy products. If meat weren't sold at stores anymore, it would not really affect me. What would affect me would be a ban of dairy products. I tend to buy free range milk and yoghurt (here, if you have your own bottles, it is just as cheap as the kind they sell in stores) and i buy cheeses that require their milk to originate from a cow that has seen more of the world than just a glimpse through a window or perhaps a slit on a livestock van.

[King DZA]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I usually tend to judge all life based upon its individual actions and intentions, rather than the form it happens to take, and thus generally don't see any entity as inherently more valuable than any other. Because of this, whenever I must fulfill my mortal need for sustenance, I'm pretty much willing to consume whatever is available to me; be it plant, insect, animal, human, or whatever.

That being said, I stand strongly against the unnecessary suffering of any life form, and strive to prevent it from occurring whenever & wherever I am able.

That's a non-sequitur, to be honest. Presumably go going via the least pain-induced, you'd focus on the less intelligent forms of life. It doesn't work in a worth vs value sense, either. If you were guaranteed the same amount of suffering would result from eating a fly or a baby, you would choose the fly. Part of this is because you're human and as such can't be entirely neutral, but i doubt that would be the prime factor.

Actually, if those were my only two options, I'd probably end up eating both of them in short order. As a single fly sure as hell isn't going to do much to stave off my hunger.
In fact, I may even come to the conclusion that the nourishment gained from eating the lone fly would be so insignificant that it wouldn't be worth the suffering brought about by devouring it in the first place, ultimately deciding to disregard the fly as a meal choice altogether.

Cannibalism is a great way to get a prion disease.

Bah, I can potentially contract diseases from a lot of things I partake in. Seeing as I've somehow managed to stay fit and healthy thus far in spite of that, I don't any reason why I wouldn't take my chances with long pork as well.

Perhaps there should be more focus on making human flesh safer for human consumption, though. After all, there's a practically limitless supply of dead people to go around, it would help us to become less dependent on farm animals for meat, and just think of all the space we'd save without the need for those pesky graveyards. It's the perfect solution!

Oh come on. You know what i meant. Shall we say a giant frog of equal size, with either choice being the only meal you'd ever need? With the exact same amount of suffering induced from either death through a carefully arranged butterfly effect.

Unless I had some reason to believe that the abnormal-sized frog was providing more of an overall benefit to myself and the world than the infant ever reasonably could throughout the course of its lifespan, yeah, I'd probably eat the frog.

On the other hand, the frog could be a member of a rare and endangered species of giant amphibian, in which case I would just feel terrible if I were to thin their numbers even further by consuming one of them...

[kerlc]

Caniballism is a perfectly natural occurence that happens quite often in nature. It is all about not letting perfectly good energy go to waste. Whether this makes it moral or not depends mostly on culture.

[Zangi]

Bullshit. Apathy means that you don't go out of your way for it. My point is if you didn't intervene in such an instance, it wouldn't work out well for you in the long run. What did you expect me to say to "it's not my problem"?

Oh, so I did misread your earlier statement, sorry.

[pisskop]

What's interesting is our teeth.  They are designed primarily for grinding plants, but possess the tools to eat an occasional creature.  In the west meat was associated with wealth during the feudal ages, so it could be that meat is our way of feeling important socially; as opposed to superior biologically.

[Bauglir]

Nah, they're not particularly well-designed for eating plants. Very solid omnivore dentition here. You want designed for plants, go look a horse in the mouth.

Also the middle ages are so insanely recent and brief evolutionarily that nothing that happened during them is good evidence for cause of evolution or a particular result of it.

[Xantalos]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I usually tend to judge all life based upon its individual actions and intentions, rather than the form it happens to take, and thus generally don't see any entity as inherently more valuable than any other. Because of this, whenever I must fulfill my mortal need for sustenance, I'm pretty much willing to consume whatever is available to me; be it plant, insect, animal, human, or whatever.

That being said, I stand strongly against the unnecessary suffering of any life form, and strive to prevent it from occurring whenever & wherever I am able.

That's a non-sequitur, to be honest. Presumably go going via the least pain-induced, you'd focus on the less intelligent forms of life. It doesn't work in a worth vs value sense, either. If you were guaranteed the same amount of suffering would result from eating a fly or a baby, you would choose the fly. Part of this is because you're human and as such can't be entirely neutral, but i doubt that would be the prime factor.

Actually, if those were my only two options, I'd probably end up eating both of them in short order. As a single fly sure as hell isn't going to do much to stave off my hunger.
In fact, I may even come to the conclusion that the nourishment gained from eating the lone fly would be so insignificant that it wouldn't be worth the suffering brought about by devouring it in the first place, ultimately deciding to disregard the fly as a meal choice altogether.

Cannibalism is a great way to get a prion disease.

Bah, I can potentially contract diseases from a lot of things I partake in. Seeing as I've somehow managed to stay fit and healthy thus far in spite of that, I don't any reason why I wouldn't take my chances with long pork as well.

Perhaps there should be more focus on making human flesh safer for human consumption, though. After all, there's a practically limitless supply of dead people to go around, it would help us to become less dependent on farm animals for meat, and just think of all the space we'd save without the need for those pesky graveyards. It's the perfect solution!

Oh come on. You know what i meant. Shall we say a giant frog of equal size, with either choice being the only meal you'd ever need? With the exact same amount of suffering induced from either death through a carefully arranged butterfly effect.

Unless I had some reason to believe that the abnormal-sized frog was providing more of an overall benefit to myself and the world than the infant ever reasonably could throughout the course of its lifespan, yeah, I'd probably eat the frog.

On the other hand, the frog could be a member of a rare and endangered species of giant amphibian, in which case I would just feel terrible if I were to thin their numbers even further by consuming one of them...

Think of the millions of frog-children!

[Muz]

Well there is the main reason why I've been trying to edge towards vegetarianism, it's a big source of cholesterol, and raises your risk of stomach/colon cancer. Not to mention some other possible health concerns with regards to the antibiotics, growth hormones, and just the general chemicals that the animal you're eating has picked up through it's food/water/environment.

Cholesterol is not the problem. It's more of a symptom/byproduct, like smoke near a fire. Heck, apparently these days, plain unsaturated fat is fine. Trans fats are often the problem, and trans fats are found plentiful in margarine, fries, cookies, donuts, a whole bunch of plant stuff.

There's a heart institute that my father went to when having heart problems. I noticed that a lot of the people with serious heart issues are vegetarians. Mostly Indians who ate the oily indian breads several times a day.

Also good point about antibiotics and chemicals being possibly dangerous. But there are pesticides/herbicides/chemical fertilizers in crops as well. While some of the chemicals get passed through to livestock, livestock feed tend to be lower quality, less likely to eat the chemicalized crops.

I'm saying that health is a poor reason to stay away from eating meat. Other reasons like ethics, empathy, ok. But I've taken a more meat heavy diet lately after realizing that most of the sickest people I know are hardline vegetarians. There are vegetarian athletes, of course, so this isn't a hard stance, but few athletes actually become vegetarian for health reasons.

[DJ]

And all this time I was saying that cooking on lard is better for you than cooking on vegetable oil people thought I was crazy!

Anyway, as far as vegan bodybuilders etc are concerned, I'd say those are just outliers. I know a 90 year old guy who smokes like a chimney and drinks a shot with his morning coffee, but I wouldn't say his habits are a recipe for longevity.

[gogis]

Where you get this information?  Vegetables was seasonal, fruits was not even remotely that tasty like nowadays (do you ever tried wild apples? bitter as fuck and small as peanuts) and in some regions (take inuits) was nothing else but meat. Ratio was more like 95% animal, 5% - vegeterian.

Agriculture allowed all this boom of population, because it's so easy to settle and feed on crops instead of running down mammots.

Firstly our ancestors were unlikely to have been eating wild apples because of where we are from and not all wild fruit is bad. Besides that I wonder why our ancestors would care more about bitter fruit than other primates?

What you say about the inuit and other northern peoples is true but only because of the limited availability of plant foods. More equatorial peoples tend to get far more of their food from plants (up to 50%). The average hunter gatherer diet today consists of 64–68% animal and 32–36% plant based foods.

Our nearest relative the chimpanzee and ourselves have a functionally very similar digestive tract. They are largely fruit eaters with 95% of their calories coming from plants supplemented by animal based foods. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to diet I see an omnivorous one to be the healthier option most of the time and most clearly what we evolved for. I just disagree that we should only eat "some" vegetables.

As for tying the population boom to agriculture: This is a chicken and egg situation. Did we start farming because an increased population left us no choice or did population increase because we had more food from farming? It certainly appears that early farming peoples were less of stature than neighbouring hunters but there is debate about if it was diet that caused this also. The stature of modern farming peoples is certainly greater than that of modern hunters. If you haven't read it before I strongly suggest Gun Germs and Steel which talks about this in some detail.

Humans and their ancestors will have been eating fruit and other plants long before we started hunting.

Pandas' and pigs' ancestors were purely carnivorous, ancestors of our fruit eating ancestors were eating insects, what's your point?

That line was meant to contrast gogis point about us shifting from hunters into farmers. Mostly it was to highlight the flaw in choosing to mainly eat meat based on our having been mostly hunters for longer than we've been mostly farmers by pointing out that we've gone through long times of mostly eating fruit also.

Our fruit eating ancestors would have likely been eating insects too.

All modern tasty fruits derived from largerly lowsugar wild ancestor. You simply can't gorge on that in past.
About chimps - while being relativly closest to us, they still was developing as a branch for millions years. You can't really compare humans with monkeys anymore with all those findings of ancient human ancestors.
And about chicken egg problem? Real problem is that people delved into diet which was never common for their bodies - grain was never major source of food, it's basically wild planetwise experiment. Not suprisingly, gluten intolerance and other crap.

With that agenda in mind we can now reside to eat japaneese shitburgers because it's so enviromentalistic. I say no way.

[gogis]

Well there is the main reason why I've been trying to edge towards vegetarianism, it's a big source of cholesterol, and raises your risk of stomach/colon cancer. Not to mention some other possible health concerns with regards to the antibiotics, growth hormones, and just the general chemicals that the animal you're eating has picked up through it's food/water/environment.

High cholesterol is matter of o3/o6 fatty acids balance, and surprisingly, you can't control it by vegan diet at all and most plant oils is ridiculously bad sources of fat, compared to animal oils. It's quite easy to have enormous bad cholesterol on a vegan diet. With obvious b12 deficiency, which is another perk.

How can diet be any healthy at all if its require taking supplements? Thats sick brainwashing here

[Ancre]

How balanced would a vegetarian diet be with eggs and dairy products thrown in ? I'm curious. Eggs and dairy don't require you to kill the animals. Also, why don't vegetarians do that ? While there are some egg battery farms, it should be possible to make sure all those products come from happy animals.