Athena, thanx for getting my point. I was beginning to fear that my command of the language wasn’t up to par. Here goes again: **Different people have different dietary requirements.
Some people do very well on some variation of a vegetarian diet.
Some people don’t.
Some people who claim that they do look like they don’t.
Some people who claim they do well living on Big Macs and Cheetos look like they don’t.
Someone who takes 40 sick days a year and looks like he just crawled from under a rock shouldn’t tell me that whatever he is doing would be better for me.
In return, I won’t tell him that what I do would be better for him.
Someone who drives an SUV that gets 20 gallons to the mile shouldn’t have a bumper sticker that admonishes me to “recycle” or “save the earth”.
I hereby vow not to force meat broth on a vegan, cake on a diabetic, or milk on a lactose-intolerant individual (that’s as much for my benefit as his, though).
I fully accept that killing things unnecessarily is inconsiderate, and probably bad karma. I consider “making me not feel like shit” to be consistent with “necessary”. This is a point of debate.
**
BTW, I am doing my best to tend my own garden. Where do I go to get cow seeds?
Alright. That does it. The next person who assumes that because I’m vegetarian, I eat soy all the time–or even at all–is getting a pit beef enema.
I went through four years of dietary hell because some asshat at the school dining hall couldn’t figure out that vegetarian dishes do not require tofu/tempeh/soy derivative of the week. Even perfectly decent dishes like lasagna were ruined by the addition of tofu.
Not a single day went by without at least one soy dish.
Ok so it isn’t going to win me a 'deep philosophy o the year" award or anything, but hell;
I just can’t stand to eat anything that looks cute.
(for similar reasons I am against fur as well. Hehe. Except Minks, I was anti-mink fur and then somebody bothered to tell me that the little buggers are raised on farms and aren’t endangered by any meaning of the term. -_- )
About the ONLY animal that I do eat that I could possibly feel any bit of guilt at all for are pigs, and that is because they are so intelligent.
By comparison I eat assloads of icecream, chocolate, potato chips, nachos, meat, LOTS Of meat, gravy, honey, sugar, fatty stuff, bacon, milk (2% but I TRY to aim for whole, ugh, $$$ and all. ) and I am sick about once a year on average.
The flue that went around this year and knocked people out for a week;
took me out 3 days.
2 days completely, 1 day recuperating.
(My immune system kicks ass. )
Of course I also eat tons of carrots, tomatoes, apples, oranges, grapes, celery, drink lots of water, (did I mention the milk above? ) exercise somewhat regularly (though only within the last two years, before that I was the lazy bum for a goodly number of years), and generally vary my diet by quite a bit but try my best to remain within overall healthy limits.
Which means that I just eat whatever the hell I want to, and it just so happens that my good ol’ parents raised me to like my fruits and veggies along with my meats.
I was looking for a thread like this in the Pit; thanks, Jon.
Dalmuti’s thread irritated me no end:
His OP was misleading–he claimed he wasn’t looking for a fight but honestly curious; when he didn’t get the answers he wanted, he was the one that got his panties in a twist.
He could only cite secondary (and indeed, sometimes tertiary) sources to support his argument.
He sidestepped and dodged legitimate points that were made to him, and I doubt he read any of the cites from the ‘other side’ of the argument.
He was hypocritical.
He was proselytizing, not actually open to opinions from us omnivores.
Finally, rather than respond to the other posters, he threw a hissy fit.
Me, I don’t give a shit what someone else eats. Just stop preaching to me already about what I eat! Also, if I bother to spend an hour or so looking up cites to support my opinions, at least have the decency to read them!
I hate trendiness in opinions. At least do a little research, consider all sides, and think before you come to one.
I’m not a preachy vegan by any means, I like to avoid telling people that I am, it’s just easier that way.
I’ll just say this: the day meat eaters stop being confrontational and making vegetarians/vegans have to explain themselves and their RIGHT to eat what they want, is the day they can complain about “militant veggies.”
The “food” movement: brought to you by rabid anti-smokers, the MPAA, and concerned mothers everywhere who tell you what to do with every other portion of your life.
I find it no more offensive that someone wants to make me feel guilty for eating meat then they want to tell me what sort of person I must be if I like to watch pornography or violent movies, or what an idiot I must be if I smoke, or how I am in league with Satan for listening to heavy metal (yes, I really was told this personally).
Which means I find it totally offensive, yet not shocking. They’ll have their revenge, though, when I am a wheezing 40 year-old man with lung cancer who is overweight, gone blind from masturbating, lacking a soul because I signed it away by listening to Slayer, and having heart problems from all that excess cholesterol. And the five years or so that I am a burden on society will never make up the burden on me that these people were my whole fucking innocuous life that probably drove me to drink, smoke, fuck, and swear in the first place.
I have been a vegetarian all my life, my husband as well. And i mean ALL my life. From the time i was two i would have a ‘hamburger’ with the bun, ketchup, lettuce, tomato, but no meat. My family eats meat but my husbands family doesnt. For me personaly I have no problem with people eating meat. What i do have a huge problem with is the horrible way these animals are kept till theyre lead off to the slaughter house. Free range chickens, fine. Small cow farms where the cows lead a normal life out in the pasture and have their little society, fine. Same with any animal really. But unfortunatly its just not like that. If someone would take the time to actually look at the conditions the animals are kept in I cant see how someone could support it. My parents do still eat meat but even they cant eat veal, the conditions the calves are kept in is too much for even them. And i suppose if you have to eat meat the best way is to hunt for it. That way at least the animal has lead a complety natural life.
My husband and i tried to be vegan but it really was hard. Just about everything has whey or some other milk ingredient in it. We are still very careful about what we buy and always check to make sure shampoos and things are animal friendly.
The only time i think its ok to have fur is if you live way up north, hunt for your own food and then use the fur from the animal youve killed. In fact if you kill an animal i think its best to use every part of it.
Too bad the Veggie Nazis don’t actually examine the “entire environmental aspect”; I (and others) tried to tell Dalmuti about agriculture, land use and water issues, but all he wanted to know about was slaughterhouses. :rolleyes:
Hi, I’m a meat-eater who has never made a vegetarian defend their dietary choices. Please don’t lump me in with assholes simply because I enjoy the same food. This is exactly the sort of attitude that pisses off rational people on both sides of the meat-eating divide: the assumption that my diet makes me either morally inferior, or in some way responsible for the behavior of people who have a similar diet.
“if the veggies keep on shoving those slaughterhouse pictures in my face I will keep on shoving miscellaneous animal organs in THEIR faces.”
Popular in high school biology class, the class vegan had a real time in the dissection part of things, heh.
I pioneers popping out the frog’s eyeballs and playing around with them. ^^ Still a bit ashamed of it though (dishonoring the frog I mean, anybody who insists on telling me how awful it is to eat animals had better be able to handle it when I show them real life examples of how ‘awful’ animal meat really is. ^^ )
