I’m not an Eskimo, I’m a Scot, ethnically. That shit fucks us up. The quarter English is from Manchester where we also have a really high rate of premature death from heart disease. It doesn’t all come from smoking and drinking.
.[/quote]
You are looking at it the wrong way.
Germans drink more beer than the British and probably eat more meat. Yet more British people die of heart attacks than Germans.
Russians drink more vodka and smoke more than the British yet more British people die of heart attacks than Russians.
Mexicans eat more meat and drink more tequila than the British and same here. Less heart attacks.
My point being?
Speaking English fluently causes heart attacks.
[quote=“urodacus”]I eat meat because it tastes good and is full of the stuff that makes up me, so it’s good for me. Meat tastes good because we’ve evolved to eat it. If we’d evolved to eat spinach, meat would taste like crap.
I can and have killed my own animals to eat. Well, not my pets, but anonymous animals I’ve bought from markets (pigs, chickens, ducks) or hunted (kangaroo, rabbit, boar, and of course all kinds of fish with a spear or a line). Wild oysters are great too: that’s hunting when you think about it. Remember: don’t eat your friends, just strangers.
I would say that even if you can’t do that, you don’t have to become a vegetarian either: civilisation has arisen from a division of labour, so there’s really no need for anyone to feel guilty if they didn’t personally slaughter the lamb.
I eat far less carbs than I used to, and more meat, veg and fruit. No cakes or sugar. I’m fifty and fitter, stronger, and healthier than I was at 30. Oh, and fat. Fat is also good for you. Eskimos live to a good age with few heart problems eating just meat and fat, so that’s pretty good support for the evils of sugar and cereals. And please don’t go on about the benefits of soy protein: urgh. Think of the Amazon, please.[/quote]
There’s little evidence we evolved to eat lots of meat. We can’t even eat it safely or easily without cooking unlike cats or dogs. We don’t have the teeth or jaws of meateaters. We lack the capacity to hunt (as opposed to scavanged).
Sugar, now that’s something we clearly have evolved to love. Makes our taste buds and pleasure centres go nuts. But yeah, it’s not really good for us. Not sure why meat is necessarily good for us simply because it tastes good (after cooking of course; chicjen is shit raw).
I eat meat, but not much. The only thing that I kind of like is chicken. Mainly I just don’t like the taste (depends on how it’s cooked though). I hate the idea of everyone eating meat because it’s inefficient. Rather than sun -> plant -> food, there’s an extra step: sun -> plant -> animal (repeat one or more times) -> food. There is energy lost at each step. We’d have fewer environmental problems if everyone ate less meat (less land wasted, fewer crops to grow, fewer cows farting, etc). No problems with meat morally though.
Overall I just think eating is a pain. If I could press a button to relieve hunger, I would never eat again.
[quote=“urodacus”] And please don’t go on about the benefits of soy protein: urgh. Think of the Amazon, please.[/quote]FYI a lot of the meat comes from animals who have been fed that soy protein. And to produce the meat they eat 12 times as much of it as you would need to eat.
Most Indians are vegetarians, it makes sense for them and they couldt afford meat anyway. Regular meat eating is not automatically part of human culture.
Im always intrigued to see people write ‘I don’t eat much meat’. I say the same thing, but maybe I eat lot of meat compared to billions of other people!
I’m not an Eskimo, I’m a Scot, ethnically. That shit fucks us up. The quarter English is from Manchester where we also have a really high rate of premature death from heart disease. It doesn’t all come from smoking and drinking.
.[/quote]
You are looking at it the wrong way.
Germans drink more beer than the British and probably eat more meat. Yet more British people die of heart attacks than Germans.
Russians drink more vodka and smoke more than the British yet more British people die of heart attacks than Russians.
Mexicans eat more meat and drink more tequila than the British and same here. Less heart attacks.
My point being?
Speaking English fluently causes heart attacks.[/quote]
You may be on to something. And the sheer amount of English produced by my family is a cause for concern. :aiyo:
That’s sad to hear. I used to feel that way, too, mostly because I didn’t know what foods did good things for my body. If you have a frappuccino everyday, it dulls your enjoyment of it. But if you only drink water, the occassional frappuccino every other month becomes something to relish. Please find out how to enjoy food because you’re missing out on a lot of fun.
MuchaMan, you’re correct that ancestral diets probably didn’t include a lot of meat on a regular basis, but we have evolved a way to gorge and store the excess food rapidly when there is an abundance (say killing a large animal). Humans are actually fairly efficient hunters in groups and with tools. The fact that we have sophisticated mechanisms for storing fats, for converting excess calories into fat, for releasing large amounts of digestive juices at a time unlike continuous eaters like rats (i’m talking about the gall bladder here), tells me that humans have evolved to eat occasional large meals of meat and fat.
Don’t eat a lot of meat, just some pretty much every day. No 24 oz steaks for me: better an 8 oz of good food that’s well digested, and not wasted. One or two meals a day at most.
Meat eaters or not, most people eat far too much food and crap most of it out the other end. Consuming less than half of what others eat actually means that I have a smaller resource footprint than many others. And it’s better for you.
Most of what people do is artificial, it’s thought up, it’s made up, because we think too much about good and bad … just because we have a conscience … well some of us do … but still.
That’s sad to hear. I used to feel that way, too, mostly because I didn’t know what foods did good things for my body. If you have a frappuccino everyday, it dulls your enjoyment of it. But if you only drink water, the occassional frappuccino every other month becomes something to relish. Please find out how to enjoy food because you’re missing out on a lot of fun.[/quote]
I don’t really think it’s sad. Food is food - just something we require. Do you enjoy breathing?
Just for the record… I do enjoy eating, drinking and even breathing. Yeah, I said breathing. I love then the air is cold and clean, I love breathing it. And if it’s in the mountain and the air brings special smells form this and another plant, tree or flower, it’s also something I enjoy doing.
This. I don’t think it’s childish at all. It really, really irritates me when people say this is just mawkish anthropomorphism. They usually wave their hands a bit and cite “science” as the reason. Anthropomorphism is a perfectly respectable theory, but it’s come to be used as a pejorative by people who want to justify some unconscionable action. Anthropomorphism says that since animals (mammals particularly) are constructed in a very similar way to humans - biochemistry, mechanical arrangements, brain architecture and organisation - they probably operate in much the same way, and experience similar moods states. There is no reason to believe humans are qualitatively different. Anthropomorphism predicts animal behaviour very well - making allowances for known differences (eg., lack of language ability), and alternatives that assert that animals don’t feel real pain, depression, affection, joy, etc. don’t work nearly as well in practice.
OTOH, I have a problem with the view that we humans are “free to choose” whether to eat meat or not. Well, sure we are, but I’m not convinced it’s morally right to choose not to eat it. If you don’t like it, nobody can argue with that. But we are genuine omnivores. Our teeth, digestion and metabolism can deal with animal protein very effectively, either using it for “building material” or inserting it into the Krebs cycle for energy. There are societies that survive just fine eating mostly meat (Masai being the most famous, I suppose, but meat is a big component of the typical African diet).
So I don’t think it’s wrong to kill and eat. Most animals have predators. The world runs on death: it’s what keeps everything working properly. Humans are natural prey for large carnivores. I find it interesting that people who survive, say, shark or bear attacks, often have no lingering animosity towards the animal or its species. We seem to have an innate knowledge that it’s the natural order of things.
The reason I posted the question is this: I’m considering keeping pigs, specifically a domesticated crossbreed of a wild (endangered) species. The wild variant will inevitably go extinct; there is only one gov’t station attempting to preserve it, and it is illegal to set up private breeding programmes. The domesticated version is still quite easy to get and the authorities aren’t interested in it; it’s a small, compact, territorial, docile animal with instincts for both rooting and grazing, which makes it an ideal “assistant” in a natural-farming context. Like many of the posters here, I’d have trouble killing them, even though I’m aware that (a) in the wild they would die of disease, injury, or trapping (b) I have land enough to sustain only a small population and (c) they’re tasty. You can’t keep pigs until they die of old age; they can live for years, and they’d destroy the place.
From your answers so far, I get the impression there are a lot of fence-sitters like me, who hate the way animals are raised under abusive conditions, but don’t dislike meat. Only one person stated that it’s not his problem if meat-farming is cruel. How many of you, I wonder, might be induced to eat pork if you knew that piggy had spent a few years doing what pigs do best (eating, sleeping and humping) and died with its nose in a trough in a nitrogen atmosphere? As opposed to the usual scenario, which involves being locked in a filthy cage for a few months, and then inexpertly dispatched amid a pile of blood and guts? Or would that actually make it worse?
They are. Eating more meat in the context of a western diet correlates with a risk of increased cancer and other diseases, but ‘flexitarians’ - people who eat meat sometimes - are not measurably different to vegetarians. This suggests that your second sentence is closer to the truth. It’s never as simple as “substance X is good/bad for you”. Often it depends what you eat with X, or the form in which X is ingested. For example, eating fruit is good for you. Drinking fruit juice is apparently not nearly so good for you, because the sugar (fructose) has been separated from the fibre which would otherwise slow down the rate at which the sugar hits your liver. Eating animal fat (in moderation) is neither good nor bad for you. Eating it in that peculiarly Western combination - with starch (a bun) and sugar (ketchup/sauces) - is harmful, because you crave more of it and end up eating a lot more than is healthy.
Unfortunately, E04teacherlin’s reasoning is roughly on par with the quality of contemporary nutrition research.
Good grief man. It’s not like breathing. It’s like saying, yeah, well, sex is OK, but I can’t really be bothered with it all. Food is one of life’s great pleasures. If you’re not enjoying it, you’re eating the wrong things.
Same here. A particular turnoff for me are the steaks served in “upmarket” restaurants, beloved of a certain sort of Taiwanese 老闆 to impress visiting Americans (=any foreigner). You get a big bleeding lump of dead animal on your plate, with a miserable chunk of sweet potato or cauliflower on the side. Apart from the ostentatious consumption aspect, it’s boring, and it leaves you with indigestion. It’s just not a nice meal.
It’ll mean different things to different people. My “not much” is compared to the average European or American (250g/day). I might have a couple of eggs for breakfast, a tuna salad (1/3 can) for lunch, and a bian dang containing a few pieces of chicken or shredded pork (not a whole 豬排). Often, one meal is pure vegetarian. I’m guessing about 50g/day of meat on average, plus milk and eggs. It’s commonly stated that the meat industry creates about 12% of our GHG emissions. If we slashed our intake by 80%, then emissions would fall accordingly. I don’t think that’s an important consideration, but a lot of people do.
This one is often deployed by vegans, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. The argument only holds water if you assume industrial-style meat rearing, where animals are treated as machines to be provided with inputs (crops grown for the purpose). In nature, and agricultural systems that mimic nature, animals actually increase efficiency by scavenging plant material that humans can’t eat, and turning it into something useful: meat, milk or eggs. They also modify the environment in complex ways which make it more suitable for plant growth - for example, by eating insects, controlling fungus (rotting fruit spreads disease), turning over the soil, or dropping excrement which adds humus and accessible nutrients. Animals and plants complement each other, and attempting to produce one without the other inevitably requires extra inputs of energy or materials.
Industrial farming of vegetables and grains is responsible for catastrophic environmental destruction; now, it’s true that a lot of it ends up feeding cattle, but even if the feedlots disappeared, the dysfunctional methods wouldn’t.
Ideally, I’d prefer to eat wild game meat but, sure, I’d settle for one of your porkers, finley. In Australia I’d eat kangaroo more than any other animal - no one farms kangaroos, they are all shot. This hunting pressure is good for the environment as kangaroo populations are unnaturally high thanks to the activities of the pastoral industry like the control of dingoes and the creation of permanent watering points where previously none existed.
This is a little off topic but my friend put this video on Facebook yesterday.
I’ve heard of the wolves thing before. Slightly off-topic but this, I think is why science and technology has gone badly wrong on the subject of food, environment, and whatnot:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Science is great for certain things. It works a lot less well for extremely complex things, specifically where your gut feeling can give you a quicker, more reliable, and much cheaper answer.
, tubers 
and leafy vegetables :neutral: .