vegetarian

[gleameil]

I've been concerned about animal welfare for years and have not done anything about it--to the extent there's an excuse it's that I love meat and dairy and know that one person's diet, without my getting into political activism that's beyond me right now, will make that much of a difference. Possibly I should go vegan and definitely intend to aim for humanely produced dairy until / if I do, but working out a vegan diet is going to take up too much of my time and is risky health-wise to boot.

I would really be interested in my friends' take--ethically and scientifically--on vegetarianism or any animal rights issues. To be very plain--are most species sentient / conscious enough that it matters? My intuition from living around animals for years the way we all have says ABSOLUTELY, but intuition is fallible, and many scientific sources seem to say no. My impression is that we don't know nearly enough yet to have any idea. Why are or aren't you a vegetarian?

If you are lurking on my journal and going to poke up your head and reply, this is the entry to do it on.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

I love, love dairy, but have seen enough scary things on the subject to believe that the anti-milk crowd has a reasonable argument worth considering. My brother is allergic to milk, which unfortunately actually gave him diabetes, which really sucks. But like I said, different people do well on different diets, and there are plenty of people who seem perfectly healthy on diets with lots of milk.

I should add that juice may not be all that better, since it is a refined sugar. I don't know.

4. Vegetarians like to talk about how it takes 10 units of food to make 1 unit of meat, and if we're talking cows in a feedlot, they're basically right. However, this is a pretty incomplete picture. I'll use my dad's ranch as an example. They have a couple hundred acres and can produce a hundred cows on a good year.

The area is very dry and doesn't have enough rain for agriculture unless you want to pump a ton of water from the aquifer, and to be honest, water levels are so low that my dad's well doesn't work and he has to go to my grandma's house to use the toilet.

Cows, however, can eat the brush and cacti that grow on the land--things we can't. They can eat corn husks and hay (or if they can't, pigs can,) and other agricultural leftovers that we can't. Feeding these things to the cow not only produces food from something that wasn't, and makes fertilizer as a convenient by-product--very useful if you want to keep growing plants.

Now, my dad is not one of those lucky farmers who get to sell their animals as free-range organic blah blah, even though they basically are. Instead he sells them to the feedlots, making, like, $20 bucks a cow, where they're shipped out to a big stinky barn to be fed mass quantities of corn shipped in from Kansas or wherever for a couple of weeks to fatten them up for slaughter. But if you are buying free-range, pasture-raised beef, then you'll looking at an animal which wasn't eating imported human food, but brush and grass that humans can't digest anyway.

Many parts of the Earth are too dry, cold, or have growing seasons that are too short for agriculture. You will have trouble raising plants in Alaska, for example, but native peoples have survived by fishing and hunting for thousands of years. Other parts produce plants so abundantly, raising animals is a silly waste of resources, except inasmuch as someone needs to turn those cornhusks into poop. It all depends on where you are, what you're eating and how it's raised.

I'd also note that different animals convert feed at different rates. Chickens are very efficient at producing eggs; cows much less so at making meat.

Let's see, sources. I'd recommend starting with something general about animal husbandry, like Barnyard in your Backyard, which ought to talk about feed and conversion ratios and pasture and such. Almost anything by Joel Salatin is probably good for getting a wider perspective of the whole farm, and he has been doing some very innovative and interesting work--you've heard of him already if you've read Pllan's Omnivore's Dilemma. The book Collapse by Jared Diamond looks a lot at environment and I think it was this book which first inspired this line of thought for me.

Tangentially, if I could recommend only one book on food, it'd be Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Price.


6. As I see it, no matter what you're eating, you're killing something. Even vegetables require the deaths of animals, so at some point, you'll have to chose.