Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be another ‘glass slaughterhouse’ torture-porn piece, and I’m not going to spend reams telling you how one hamburger does as much environmental damage as a fleet of Hummers having a farting contest.

You see, whenever you tell a group of people you don’t eat meat, there’s always some jackass at the back who has to ask questions: ‘What about fish?’; ‘what about your own foot?’; ‘what if you were walking through the woods with a hunting bow you’d made yourself, and you found this deer sprawled on the floor, and as soon as it saw you it tried to stand up but all it could do was hold your shirt in its hooves, and it begged you, with tears in its huge, innocent eyes to put an end to the horrific torment it was in and eat it because that way, only that way, could an end be put to the tortures inflicted on it by a cruel and sadistic God? Would you eat it then?’

Holding a post-graduate degree in jackarsery myself, when I decided to give up meat (glass slaughterhouses and farting Hummers) I found the smartarse in the mirror kept throwing this stupid questions at me. So, a lot of thinking, arguments and flame wars later, I came up with an answer.
Have you ever thought about your body? All those organs and fluids and processes all going on... Take five minutes. Close your eyes. Focus on the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe. Focus on the beat of your heart, and follow the pulse around your body. Feel the tingling in your toes and your fingers. The flesh over your limbs. Bring your attention to your guts, the movement and noises they’re making.

Okay, try it now you’ve stopped reading. Probably easier that way...

Now, isn’t the human body an amazing thing? All those millions of different processes and functions doing their own thing, and somehow working together to keep us alive and well?

It’s taken millions of years to make it all work together like that, and we’ve evolved from nut and seed eaters to meat eaters. If we didn’t need to cook meat, we wouldn’t have invested so much time and effort in fire. If we weren’t hunters, we wouldn’t have put so much imagination into our tools, and our eyes wouldn’t be where they are. Eating meat got us where we are today.

But we can survive perfectly well without it, biologically and socially. It’s not driving our evolution as a species any more. So... why do it?
Training wheels helped us to learn to ride and nappies helped us to learn to use a toilet. School helped us to learn to read and write and our parents helped to teach us to look after ourselves. Then we grow past these support structures, and use what they taught us to learn new things and explore the world.
Meat eating has helped us get where we are today, but we don’t need it any more. It’s time to let it go. If we’re going to grow and explore the world, we have to take the training wheels off the bike and stop defecating in our pants. Wallowing in our infancy is unflattering at best, and displays a worrying degree of narcissism and selfishness at worse. If you’re never prepared to let go of mother’s apron strings, then you’re always going to be a two-year-old.

As Mr. Dylan said, it’s only my opinion and I may be right or wrong. It just seems to me that the same patterns and life-cycles get repeated again and again in the universe: Societies evolve to fill specific environmental niches the same way species do; children learn from their parents, learn to despise their parents and then embrace them the say way cultural or intellectual movements do; we’re born from our parents, live, die, and become part of the next generation the same way stars do. Understanding the basic underlying rules of a system and then applying that knowledge to new situations is one of the biases of scientific progress. Surely it’s a reasonable belief that our growth as a species will mirror our growth as individuals..? Am I wrong?

Even when I do get people to admit that, for whatever reason, eating meat maybe isn’t such a great idea, I tend to get two responses:
1)I like meat;
2)Vegetarian food is horrible and I wouldn’t pollute my body with it.

Now, number 1) I don’t have a problem with. You like meat, you know what you’re doing, you know how it gets to your table and you’re okay with that, then I’m okay with you. Do it honestly and with your eyes open, and why should there be a problem?

I have a problem with number 2). Normally because these people have never actually tried the food in question. Try Quorn--in a bolognaise or pie, you can’t tell the difference. Try a vegetable stew. Try a vegetable stir-fry. Go on. Spend a week living on vegetables and meat replacements. Take the time to cook them properly and give them a fair chance. I’ve fed people who have an avowed hatred of meat replacements with meat replacements, and they haven’t noticed. It was only after they said, ‘oh, wait, you’re vegetarian aren’t you? How come you ate that stew?’ They’d forgotten that I don’t eat meat, and forgotten that they weren’t.

Above anything and everything else, think about what you’re eating. Think about all that environmental damage, all those factory farms and glass slaughterhouses. Think about that when you put that cheap turkey roll in your sandwich, or when you pick up a sausage roll. Think about the amazing human journey we’re on when you pick up a chicken wrap or a bag of chewy sweats (you’d be surprised where boiled-up cow gets). Close your eyes and let your mind rest with the journey that piece of meat you’re about to eat has taken.
Now, when there are perfectly good alternatives and ways of eating which don’t raise so many questions, why are you supporting that system? You don’t have to be a zealot about it, but cutting meat out of your diet when and where you can will make an amazing difference. Have a cheese and pickle sandwich instead of chicken. Have vegetarian instant noodles instead of a sausage roll. It’s not about doing everything. It’s about doing what you can.

This isn’t meant to be a polemic or a lecture, it’s just what I’ve come to believe. Fire tests gold, so feel free to tell me how wrong you think I am. Or how right

I fall under the "I like meat" catagory, but I have tasted some vegetarian meat alternatives that are just nasty. Granted, some are quite nice, but when you try one that tastes like cardboard it puts you off looking for the edible stuff. I find myself much more likely to try eating meatless when it comes to ethnic foods where meat is not used, because they know what they are doing and have been using ingredients successfully for a very long time. Also, many things marketed as Vegetarian or Vegan have a hefty price tag due to the yuppies in my area following the fad without doing the research on what actually is good for you and the environment and what is cashing in on hopful ignorance.

I also have found that my personal health is easier to balance when I consume a modest amount of meat. Its easier to come by as a good source of protien and other nutrients, and with my schedule it is difficult to carry all the food I need for one day with me.

I have a nearly unrelated rhetorical question that is buzzing in my mind at the moment.
If you do not cook meat properly, you can end up becoming infected with parasites that will breed and grow in your body(some along your digestive track) and manipulate the chemical responses in your brain. Given this rather disgusting fact, is it not a decent argument for being a vegetarian/vegan?

I have to confess, when I cut meat out my diet I didn't have any problems. I was aware of the possible drop in protein consumption and problems that could cause, but they passed me by. I'm not sure if it's me and my body being more resilient than I gave it credit for.

I will say that not eating meat is a real pain when travelling or when I need to grab a quick snack. If you go to the pre-prepared food counter, you're lucky if you can find a cheese and onion pasty or sandwich among all the chicken wraps and bacon and sausage rolls. So much of Western cuisine is focused on meat. The upside of not eating meat is finding other cuisines from, as you say, cultures which don't eat meat... Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Middle-Eastern... I would never have tried some of these things I now like if I hadn't been forced away from my roast dinners and steak and kidney pies.

The meat preparation argument certainly has merit. You have to be so careful storing and preparing meat, and it has such a short usable life. (Which, as a side note, leads to an awful lot of needless waste). If something is so inherently unstable, is it a good thing to be putting in our bodies?

I am actually writing a novella on this subject entitled Aberrant.

Well I must admit to falling into the unabashed omnivore category. I eat meat, I enjoy eating meat; I just eat less at one sitting than is now considered "normal" but what is actually considered a healthy serving size. I prefer getting the proteins and other nutrients that way. Human digestion is designed for a balanced diet IMHO, however I can see your side of it, and as you have found good substitutes in the vegetable kingdom and enjoy them you obviously aren't doing your health any damage.

My entire problem with vegetarianism lies in my taste buds. Many of the things that are necessary in a vegetarian diet just "taste bad" to me. Not "odd," or "tasteless," but out-and-out "nasty." I've never figured out why, but that's just the way I'm put together I guess.

So for me, meat protein is an essential part of my diet.

Now, with regards to the argument on how perishable meat is. Early man was a lot more resourceful at preserving such perishable resources than most people give them credit for. There was drying, smoking, salting and even the resourceful use of "aged meat" in several recipes (one person I know swears duck tastes best if - after plucking and cleaning, you hang the fowl by its neck until the meat has aged enough for the body and neck to separate under its own weight). Another way your northern tribes would preserve food, was to weight it and submerge it in a cold pond. The meat acquires a "sour" smell, but is edible and stays edible for months on end.

Its also worth noting that, if properly and thoroughly cooked, the microflora and fauna are all killed as are other parasites. My parents brought me up that way and I've never been one for rare meat or raw meat to this day.

I grew up on "English/German farm cooking" so potato's or noodles at virtually every meal not to mention home canned veggies (corn/green beans/tomatoes) that we put up. As I've gotten older I have developed a taste for raw greens other vegetables that weren't common at my childhood table and my own cooking style runs more to stir fry's and stews with a variety of vegetables in them (adding squash or pumpkin to my stews was the only way to get my children to eat them). So I'm perhaps a more balanced omnivore than I was, but still an omnivore.

Cael, to be completely honest, I am not a vegetarian. And you are correct in your comment about older times(well, almost).

My point is more so about mass production to big cities in which there are people that have other areas that they concentrate in and are not as intelligent when it comes to preparing food.

I was stating that the danger is there and that people need to be careful. No doom and gloom speech-just a point for defence for a vegan/vegetarian diet.

What about refridgeration? Our need to keep meat from perishing lead to the development of and investigation into refridgeration technique. That research has lead to new understandings of gas behavior and energy exchange. It's also allowed investigation of and the use of chemical reactions which only take place at low temperatures. And then there's all the 'higher' scientific work made possible, like investigations of absolute zero, preparations for arctic and space exploration, testing materials designed to be used in outer space or ocean beds...

Damn you Foxie, you can be really annoying sometimes. Western industrialized farming is still cruel and unsustainable, but... damn it, I'm going to need to do some more thinking.

And, of course, understanding how meat breaks down in cooking or decomposition is incredibly useful for medical research. We are, after all, just flesh, like a steak or roasting joint.

You can be quiet now.

That's okay, my work here is done.

This certainly has been the most interesting discussion over the logistics of meat preparation I have ever taken part in.

Waaaal Shucks Ma'am! Y'all get us redneck steamers talkin' 'bout vittles an th' good lord knows what twists an turns th' talk will take!

Now if you wish to get a thread created for the proper preparation of food, I'll be right there; probably wiping the drool from my screen but right there!

Drool!
I was not aware anyone found the idea of parasites making a home out of their bodies appetizing.
To each their own, I guess.

Ah! but I think you misunderstood us my post, or I yours. I did after all mention the "proper" preparation of food. When I do that recipe's spring to mind more readily than parasites.

Recipes do not need to involved the mention of parasites in any way, shape, or form, unless the parasite in question is sauteed/fried/poached or otherwise has some nutritional value.

That tends to leave out most animal parasites at least in American and Northern European cooking (Grubs (larvae) were never really to my taste anyway although I had an uncle who thought such things when properly fried and either honey dipped or chocolate coated were delicious!). Some types of parasitic bracket fungi are supposed to be delicious when prepared properly, however I have a rather severe mushroom allergy and can no longer confirm such things (when much younger I used to enjoy sauteed mushrooms despite the need for benedryl at such times, however I got more sensitive after repeated exposure and eventually came to a point where such guilty pleasures became hazardous to my health).

Granted my comment was at something of a tangent to the original conversation but its also my fault for resorting to my grandfathers dialect

Anyway, if you do feel like discussing the preparation food (vegetarian or otherwise) for consumption (recipes) Please start a thread, (possibly in hot air). I'll read with interest and probably even participate.

You can also get ill from eating eating vegetables incorrectly. Misidentified, or even insufficiently washed vegetables and fungi can kill you faster than rancid meat, which will simply exit quickly. I can remember in the last couple years a scare for both tomatoes and spinach, where restaurants and grocery stores would not sell said produce for about a week.

Which is why you must be informed about what you are eating and the correct preparation methods, whatever you tend towards.

I like meat, but it isn't a necessity in any way. Ill eat it if its there, or Ill eat something else entirely. As in a year I hope to be a poor starving college student, I can't really be picky about what I eat. As for the health issue, I don't really concern myself with the nutritional aspects of what I eat, Ill eat tortellini soup I cooked one night, then some ramen the next.

But let it be known that not even I can be brought to eat fast food more than once every couple months, if that.

Foxie and I are going to be doing an experiment next month - feeding our bodies the absolute minimum that they need to survive and be healthy and seeing what happens. A lot of charities which provide aid to the developing world, for example, will hand out emergency rations for people to survive on when they have nothing else. There's a science that goes into calculating what goes into these rations, but it basically boils down to a combination of rice, pulses, nuts and the odd piece of fruit for vitamins and minerals. That gives you everything that you need to survive comfortably and without deficiency, and no more.

A lot of the time these days, we are absolutely inundated with choices we are demanded to make about what we eat. Which brands to buy, where to buy them, how much packaging things should have, what they should look like. Told to choose between two indistinguishable brands of bread, butter, fruit juice, etc etc. It's a by-product of the commercialised world that we exist in, as are the huge amounts of meat that people consume these days. Thirty years ago, a chicken was a treat that a family would have for a special Sunday lunch, now they are pumped full of water and hormones and sold for less than the price of a glossy magazine.

Regardless of whether we eat meat or not, we find our heads getting filled with so many choices, and so much that we 'need' that it becomes a part of the way we live our lives. With all the advertising and imposed choice people have placed on them, it's little wonder that childhood obesity is becoming a huge problem and the population is slowly becoming more and more unhealthy.

Everything is crammed with so many flavours and colours and additives to make it more and more and more appealing to us until we are saturated by flavour, and the simple things on which humanity existed for thousands of years (plain rice, or fruit, or vegetable broths) become bland and tasteless to us.

So, the idea is to cut all of that out. To choose not to choose, and to see what it's like to live in an imitation of how people in impoverished countries are forced to - having little to no choice at all about how they choose to sustain themselves.

It'll be an interesting project, and, if it works out, we may even decide to continue with it after the end of August.

And thus, Allegra condenses a month's worth of ranting into a few succinct paragraphs. She'd make a good editor

When you strip things down to basics, I reckon you've got three basic meals: meals you eat to enjoy the art and skill of the preparation; meals you eat as part of social interaction; and meals you eat to simply sustain your body. The vast, vast majority of things people eat fall into the last category. When you're mindlessly shoving food into your face while watching TV or surfing the 'net (very guilty on both counts) or doing something else which has the majority of your attention--or, in fact, even just staring into space and letting your mind wander--you might as well be eating anything. And, as Allegra points out so well, those with a vested interested--supermarkets, TV chefs, magazines--take this one tiny insignificent decision and blow it out of all proportion. We're indocturnated with this idea that what we eat matters. Like the monomania some parts of society have about sex, it's just a bodily function. And it's because someone has something to sell us. People use it as a way to assert their superiority: 'I have lamb, you have mutton. I'm better than you, you see? Now back in your place.'

I spent a week recently with no television and no internet. I came away with a new understanding of both, and my life's so much richer for it. I have high hopes that I can achieve the same sort of thing with this project. I'm hoping I can break my psychological dependence on food and appreciate it in a whole new light. I am, however, prepared to accept that at least the first week's worth of tweets will be, 'I'm hungry', and 'I'm so sick of rice!'

I've been reading this on and off for the past couple of weeks:

http://www.amazon.com/Feast-Why-Humans- ... 0199209014

It's probably not the best source of information for the damage caused by the agricultural revolution (I'll copy down and look up the footnotes when I finish the book), but one of the things the author talks about as an aside is the difference between the 'multistrand' food web, in which people ate whatever there was to eat, as part of the food chain--for example, they may have planted grains, but if grains didn't grow they ate 'weeds' instead--and the 'single strand' food web we have now, in which people are at the top of one biological line of 'food' rather than inside a thriving biosphere (single strands not being much of a web, such a 'food quest' is innately highly unstable). He also points out that it's been common knowledge for maybe 20 years now that pre-agricultural people were far healthier than post-agricultural people, and that this remains true to this day.

All this to suggest a possibility for your next month's food experiment...!

I have been a vegetarian for almost 33 years- and have lived a very active lifestyle. I am very much a live & let live person- not only with regards to the animals ("anything that has a mother", including eggs), but also to the people who eat them. =-)

One common curiosity I encounter when people find out I am a vegetarian is their erroneous assumption about why I am. They expect it is because of some Koombayah type of sensitivity- until they see me light up my cigar and pour a scotch. I love it when they ask if I am not in some type of vege-violation for wearing leather shoes, to which I respond "not unless I am eating them".

We all have our own reasons for extending ourselves into this world as deeply as we can stand. The longer I live, the less I judge. I do think hurting people's feelings is worse than eating meat, on the karma-scale of things...

Happy 2010 Everyone!