Vegetarians

Discussion in 'Health and Fitness' started by Cheshire Cat, Jun 6, 2006.

  1. wrydolphin

    wrydolphin Pirates... yaarrrr Supporter

    I am under a lot of stress, so I may be coming off as shorter then what I actually am.

    But the points are valid. I believe that small farms are more beneficial to rural economies and I support that belief by buying organic produce as they tend to be run in small farms. I also don't expect that all people will do the same, though I think it would be nice. I do it because I long ago decided if I believe something, I should act on that belief, else what is it worth?

    Yes, GM had a wonderful potential- that potential has, in my opinion, been ruined by business practices being conducted by the agrocompanies. To the extent that much of the environmental problems that are being encountered, massive deforestation, ground water loss, and fertilizer and pesticide pollution, are being perpetrated by agrobusinesses. And how you connected water pollution, which is what I specifically brought up, to green house, I am still trying to puzzle out.

    I realize that we have all strayed off topic, but in truth, the answer to the original post is merely you can be healthy or unhealthy on any diet, it just depends on the daily food choices you make.
     
  2. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    The points may be valid, but I can't know that unless you support them. I'm quite interested in why small communities are so important. Would I go too far if I assumed that you have problems with Wal-Mart too?, the ol' "They put ma and pa stores down" argument. If you have logic and science to back your claims, I'm all ears, and if you don't mind I'll point out any flaws or inconsistencies I see, as I expect anyone else to do for me. I don't debate for the sake of debating, although I do find it very enjoyable. I as well act on my beliefs, and I have a genuine interest in my beliefs actually reflecting reality and being internally consistent.
     
  3. David

    David Mostly AFK, these days

    It takes 10 kilos of plants to make 1 kilo of beef. 90% of all crops over the world are destined for feeding farm animals. Think how much more space there'd be if animal-farming disappeared. Nobody would be hungry, either. There is no dietary requirement to eat meat. There's no moral justification for eating meat - and it is a moral issue, rather than a matter of taste or personal preference.
     
  4. Kishu

    Kishu New Member

    Here are my thoughts on Vegetarianism;

    First of all people who eat meat don't need to come up with any more reasons to eat meat than a lion does. We as humans evolved that way long before we were actually human, and that added concentration of protein is what gave us our big brains and put us (currently) at the top of the food chain.

    We are not carnivores however, we are omnivores all of which we all know. My point is this, it is totally nature and in human nature to eat meat, but we don't have to.

    I look on vegetarianism the same way I look on celibacy. It is purely a choice and if it gives the practitioner a false sense of moral superiority than more power to 'em, but they are deluding themselves and not acting on their true nature. I would say that they most likely have a buried sense of self-loathing and think they are not "worthy" to eat meat or have sex in the case of the latter.

    Perhaps the best case would be a person who eats meat every three or four days like our ancestors (or like most married folks have sex ha ha)
    :D
     
  5. Ad McG

    Ad McG Troll-killer Supporter

    Depends what you mean by dietary requirement. There are a lot of micronutrients you get in meats that you simply cannot get from other natural sources such as creatine. You won't die by not eating it, but unless you're very clued up and use the right supplements you definitely won't be consuming a complete diet. Mike Mahler is one of the few vegans who I've ever seen to have a complete diet as a vegetarian.

    Saying there is no moral justification is your opinion. Personally I think there is a moral justification. I'm not going to argue about it because there is no point, and I'm certainly not going to state my opinion as though it is fact.

    I had a big chat with an Asian chap last week about how they saw animals back home - he said that if they wanted to eat an animal, they had to kill it in their house. It is my opinion that if you can't stand the idea of killing an animal, then you shouldn't eat it. That is one of the main things that irritates me about this issue - the number of people who love meat, yet cringe at the idea of actually killing the animal. I buy from shops simply for convenience, if there was no meat in shops then I would definitely kill them myself for food.
     
  6. Kishu

    Kishu New Member

    I have killed and butchered MANY animals myself.

    Not just deer and birds from hunting. Hogs, chickens, cattle too.
     
  7. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    Could you cite a source for that 10 to 1 ratio. Could you also explain how getting rid of animals would end world hunger. Can you also tell me why someone needs a moral justification to eat meat?
     
  8. Kishu

    Kishu New Member

    The 10 to 1 ratio is a bogus calm.

    Vegetable matter doesn’t equal animal matter pound for pound.

    Human waste i.e. feces is mostly bacteria, and dead red blood cells (hence the color) and ruffage or fiber i.e. all the vegetable matter that you couldn't digest and use. We need this fiber to "stay regular" as my mom would put it.

    Humans must consume WAY more vegetable matter to get enough nutrition than they need animal matter (could be meat, dairy, or even jello)

    It is a fact that when you eat meat and even fat your body makes use of every bit of it (provided you have normal digestion) NOTHING comes out as waste.

    There are areas of the world where the only cost effect way to grow food is to have herd animals like cattle eat grass (which humans can not) and then eat those animals. It would not be cost effective to cultivate and try to grow crops in those areas.

    Much if not most of what we eat of vegetable matter (depending what it is) comes out as waste, i.e. un-digestible.

    Animal matter is “concentrated food”.
     
  9. wrydolphin

    wrydolphin Pirates... yaarrrr Supporter

    By the way, the 10 to 1 ratio is the loss of energy as you move up the trophic levels.

    So it does actually equate with a ten fold loss in orginal energy input (i.e. solar radiation), but is not exactly a great argument for vegetarianism.
     
  10. Mr Punch

    Mr Punch Homicidal puppet

    I've read a couple of pages here and there and I'm now going to jump in with both feet! :D

    Or, think of it terms of a CBA. Sure, supporting more people is important, but this theory only seems to work only if you're talking about a local large farm supplying an area nearby. The further you go, the more negative offsets there are. For example, my local Tescos supermarket in the UK shipping irradiated refrigerated apples covered in pesticidal waxes from New Zealand, supports the NZ economy, plus the finances of the shipping companies, thus more people than a small local farm.

    However, given that the shipping companies usually make the biggest mark-up on the deal, and cause the largest amount of pollution, we could say that supporting the economy through shipping companies is not as worthwhile as supporting local economies with a smaller footprint. Not all economies are equal: not all economies are worth supporting.

    The support of some is often detrimental to human and other life but good for a very few people's pockets. Within that shipping company, who do you think makes the money? The guy who owns it... the guys on board are the ones probably working slave labour costs to just scrape through supporting their families with minimal protection form health and safety laws or insurance.

    Then given that the local apple-growers in the UK have suffered a lot through supermarkets' decisions to choose the right-looking easily transportable bulk apple over the local smaller traditional apple and you have immeasurable loss of UK farming infrastructure and in the case of apples the loss of nearly 800 varieties of apples in 15 years. I don't have time to lecture you on biodiversity but this is not a good thing, when all it would take is a simple little superbug to wipe out a whole apple variety.

    Fortunately, consumers are voting with their pockets in some parts of the UK and your supposition that people will always buy cheaper may hold true for large uneducated parts of the US but do not for many parts of Europe where consumers will buy local to support their local economy over buying from supermarkets. Consequently the lie of economy of scale in farming has been proven and prices of lesser, local varieties of everything have started to come down.

    So, your other major supposition that it's vegetarians who have this moral superiority complex is not necessarily true. While some of them undoubtably do, the rural support phenomena (again I'm chiefly speaking for the UK, which supplies over 60% of its own food needs) has united a lot of people in their defence of local economy. Partially this is related to a reaction to food health scares such as BSE. But this makes it all the more relevant to other countries like the States.

    The US agriculture office has just bullied the Japanese government into buying US beef again. Some US beef was found to contain BSE, which was then (amazingly) cycled straight back into the food chain, so quickly (based again on economy of scale arguments) that the extent of the spread had not even been accurately measured. The Japanese govt slapped on a import ban. The US govt then threatened trade sanctions and all kinds of embargoes until the Japanese govt accepted the beef again. So essentially, you had a sovereign govt refusing to accept foodstuffs that did not come up to their own levels of safety being blackmailed into doing just that.

    This is not an argument against the US, it's just an example. It is an argument about the general (lack of) morality of some these economic practices based on macroeconomic scale: more is better.

    Who am I to judge what is a moral business? Well, I take as much information as I can and assess it from their. I am a human, so as the poster above said, no more should a man have to justify eating meat any more than should a lion, nor should a man have to justify making quality judgments.

    As always with these matters it's where you draw the line that's important.

    Again, you are assuming that more spending is always a good thing. If I have more money to spend, so I go and buy those shoes at local Payless that supports the local staff of say 20 people, fine. But if those shoes are made in a Mexican factory that refuses its members access to labour unions, adequate insurance or health and safety, AND pollutes their local river rendering their own local consumables toxic (and these cases are happening EVERYWHERE, especially with the clothing industry) where is the improvement of conditions that the free market boasts for all?

    I'm not Imelda Marcos. I have one pair of feet. I don't need to buy excessive amounts of shoes.

    So yes, again, you're right about the moral continuum, but knowing where you should draw the line is important. Unfortunately most people don't give two hoots. Do I think I'm more moral than some mouth-breather who eats in McDonalds twice a week and buys as much of everything as s/he can every weekend to feed up his/her useless do-nothing life? Hell yes!

    Again read my point above. There is evidence to suggest that in many places this is changing in favour of food health.

    Now you're parading your ignorance.

    Factory farming's pollution is not really connected with global warming.

    As someone who studied a lot of agriculture as part of my major in forestry, I can tell you that the problem is not even debatable. The main issue at stake is the lack of sustainability of the soil. You are always taking something out of the farming system (the crops). You have to replace this with something else (nutrients). If you are getting this fertiliser from somewhere else how long will that supply last? If you are constantly taking the same nutrients and replacing them with chemical alternatives they do not bond in the same way as the originals did with surrounding natural chemical compounds, some are leached from the soil, which will never be returned, and the end result is a serious lack of fertility in three or four generations. Given that we are already at the the fourth generation since the postwar agrichemical boom, you can see this is not unrelated to why China has had to start importing rice for the first time in history, and can no longer export it (rice being the single largest cereal staple in the world: world yield of which has fallen 80% in 10 years).

    Undoubtably that rice yield wouldn't have been so high were it not for genetically modified rice (bred strains): anyone arguing organic vs intensive conventional is missing the point. There should be balance.

    OK, so then let's add the superbugs. These are not myths: there are easy examples like SARS (which turned out to be a storm in a teacup) and bird flu (which may well be the next Spanish flu). These have always been around (80% of influenza-type viruses in humans come from chickens, most of the rest from pigs)... but the fact that they are increasing in frequency is directly related to overuse of steroids and antibiotics which (over)produce weak birds and strong viruses.

    Lastly, look into soil impaction and other forms of erosion which are all considerably worse with intensive conventional farms than organic systems.

    Again, I don't have time to start on global warming, but besides it's not particularly relevant to farming, though of course extremely relevant to the general more-is-better culture.

    That's your prerogative and is not relevant to odious vegetarians or farming. However there were over 1000 varieties of apples in the UK 20 years ago (most of which as I've said were lost due to EU farming policy through the actions of Tescos). While many of them wouldn't have been organic, many of them were... so I'm not sure you've even eaten enough to even qualify you to talk about the flavour of 'organic apples' in general! :p :D

    Hypocrisy and making those little moral judgments are both part of being human, no? I do as much as I can to prevent leaving ANY kind of footprint behind within the boundaries of choice.

    I choose not to drive a car, I choose to avoid Nike, Adidas and other major polluting and human-rights trampling brands wherever I can, I choose to switch off every electrical appliance when it is not in use or necessary... so yes, if I want to I think I'm quite within my rights to preach! :D (Though I do prefer discussion)

    Of course in some cases things are not quite as easily chosen as they may seem: I can't choose only organic food as there are not enough outlets. I can't choose to live closer to organic food sources, because I can't afford to move. I can't completely avoid buying from pollutant companies as I need a pair of running shoes that will not damage my health in the future. These are the CBA style life-choices we should all be making. Sometimes we make sacrifices, sometimes we have to treat ourselves, and always we should compromise. The treating ourselves (and many of the other things you maybe wrongly peg as choices) is human: we are not monks.

    Cheers,

    Eagerly awaiting your finding anomalies in my logic and ethics,

    Punch. :D
     
  11. Satori81

    Satori81 Never Forget...

    That was...amazing.

    Wow.

    I <3 Mr. Punch
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2006
  12. Socrastein

    Socrastein The Boxing Philosopher

    Punch

    If it's not too much bother, could you give me some double-blind studies on the effects of "irradiated, pesticidal wax covered" fruit vs organic fruit? Anecdotal of course isn't worth much, but I only know a small handful of people who solely eat organic food, or even mostly organic fruit, and they aren't noticeably any healthier than other people I know who eat 'poisoned' food, all other things (activity levels, diet, etc.) being equal.

    Regarding the poor slave workers:

    Every course in economics, even the basic ones, teach that wages are governed, like everything else, by the laws of supply and demand. Workers will not sell their good (labor) for less than they can afford to produce it, and companies will not pay more for labor than they can. You can't expect some big company to pay labors more just for the heck of it anymore than you can expect a consumer to pay full price for clothes that are 1/2 off. These "slave laborers" set the wages, they determine the price at which they work. Assuming they are not coerced into working (which does happen, but is vastly the minority) they ultimately decide who to sell their labor to and for how much.

    For example, a lot of the low paying (by American standards) out-sourced positions in China are vastly superior to what Chinese laborers would make trying to farm, which is what a signficant portion of the poor Chinese end up doing. If foreign workers are choosing to work in shoe factories or whatever, it's because they find it to be a desirable quality of life compared to the alternatives as they see them. If this wasn't true, outsourcing simply would not work, because our low-paying jobs would be scoffed at. The reason outsourcing works so well, and just about every large American company does it, is because the company can cut costs, and the workers they hire can make a living. It's a win win, and this fact is muddied when we try to compare, straight across, their wages to American wages. It's a bad equivocation.

    Think about it. What would happen if some company opened up in your home town and offered half the wages of every other business? They would go under immediately. Supply and demand.

    Regarding BSE:

    Their were correlation studies that associated eating BSE beef with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. They found less than 200 cases of this worldwide. It's a non-issue, simple as that. Overhyped by the media, like so many other things. You mentioned another one, Bird Flu. Over 200 confirmed cases in the last 9 years. Again, a complete non-issue.

    Regarding pollution and soil loosing nutrients:

    I don't see the point. The problems you describe are problems with all agriculture. Was it just a fun factoid? As for fertilizer runoff, usually the phosphorous and nitrogen leads to overproduction of aquatic planet life in nearby rivers and streams, which can deplete oxygen in the water and squeeze out some lifeforms. Not exactly a crisis. The problem can be managed and treated anyway. It may not have been addressed everywhere yet, but that's obviously to be expected. Nobody can snap their fingers and stop pollution everywhere, and we can't very well cease all polluting activities, so we do exactly what we're doing - work on the problem progressively.

    Regarding superbugs:


    The one's you cited are anything but super. They barely qualify as mild irritants. Quit watching the news so much, or at the very least, read between the hysteria if you can. Biodiversity takes many forms, not just species diversity. There is genetic diversity within species that provides plenty of protection against threats of extinction. Besides, species go extinct all the time, and new species are created all the time, and the circle of life (cue Elton John) moves us all. Genetic engineering produces new, more agriculturally viable strains of fruits and grains and vegetables all the time. Biodiversity is once again one of those hyped up media keywords that the environmental hysteria movement uses.

    Finally, yes, hypocrisy in moral judgements is human. What's your point? Does that make it okay? Or any less hypocritical? Are you subtly appealing to majority, because it sounds like you're implying "Everyone does it, what's the big deal?" You aren't really addressing my argument, you're simply sweeping it aside.

    Nevertheless, thanks for a *mostly* reasonable and relevent post.
     
  13. Kishu

    Kishu New Member

    I will say this for "organic" meat, when I lived in Amarillo, Texas there was a ranch that sold "organic" beef, chicken, eggs, and pork. What they meant by organic was no growth hormones, or batteries of antibiotics that most animals get. They were a little more expensive, but they were local.

    Now, I couldn't tell a difference in taste when it came to beef, but there was a small difference in the pork, and HUGE difference in the taste of chicken. When I was a kid I loved chicken, and then as an adult I thought chicken tasted nasty. It was the growth hormones they started using. The chicken tasted like it did when I was a kid, it was good.

    These chickens were allowed to run around too (free range I guess).
     
  14. Topher

    Topher allo!

    I have a quick question...

    While I agree to some extent with your argument, would you not agree that there is a difference between intentionally causing harm (i.e. intentionally killing animals specifically for food), and unintentionally causing harm (i.e. animals dieing due to transport... we don't build cars to kill animals)
     
  15. blessed_samurai

    blessed_samurai Valued Member

    Why in the world did you bring up a thread that no one has paid any attention to or posted in in over 2 months??? We're not going to start playing the philosophy game that you like so much in the H&F forum with old threads.
     
  16. blessed_samurai

    blessed_samurai Valued Member

    I have decided to reopen this due to a member(s) request. I am going to watch this carefully and if it turns into a philosophical debate and does not stay related to the confines of health then I will close it again for good. Also, this is not to turn into a "my lifestyle is better than your lifestyle because you're a mean meat eating person who has no blah blah blah for the welfare of the blah blah blah."
     
  17. Lily

    Lily Valued Member

    Vegetarians of the world UNITE!!!!!!! Booyah!

    I had tofu for dinner tonight :cool:
     
  18. Patrick_baji

    Patrick_baji Valued Member

    bezamatez!
    im gonna keep saying this til ppl start sayin it
     
  19. Mr Punch

    Mr Punch Homicidal puppet

    Thanks mate, I'll be back to it on Sunday when I have a bit more time.
     
  20. Levi

    Levi New Member

    If you are going to eat a dead animal, its the same as killing it.
    The Assasin is just as guilty as the one who hired him.

    It doesnt bother me Killing and eating animals. Its to better myself. Thats what animals are here for according to the Bible.
     

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