A place for my thoughts and ideas, my creative outlet, a little piece of the web for me to call my own...yeah...right...
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| a bite of chocolat... ::home:: A place for my thoughts and ideas, my creative outlet, a little piece of the web for me to call my own...yeah...right... |
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Thursday, October 05, 2006 There's a question I'm often asked that is never easy to answer: "Why are you a vegetarian?" This requires a long answer. I've always been basically vegetarian simply because I don't like (the taste of) most meats. (I always had to eat it dry and well-done anyway... "Cooked like shoe leather" as my dad, a man who even eats raw ground beef, would criticize.) A few years ago I started to hear about a number of studies showing that vegetarian diets were often healthier than their omnivorous counterparts, did some research into the validity of these findings (out of curiosity), and found myself rather convinced. Most people are immediately concerned with how a vegetarian diet must be insufficient because of what it appears to be lacking, but these same people take as a given that their non-vegetarian diet must thus be inherently well-rounded and complete (and, in my opinion, this is definitely not the case for most people, no matter their diet, especially if it revolves around fried foods, fast foods, etc.). A well-planned vegetarian diet has many benefits including lower levels of saturated fats, higher levels of complex carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidants. Also, animal proteins release sulfur in the body that can result in draining calcium from bones. People on vegetarian diets have been found more able to rebuild lost bone mass than their omnivorous counterparts. Vegetarians are also at a much lower risk of heart attacks and heart disease, etc. etc. etc. All this health stuff is not out of a desire for longevity, but just a desire to feel good and function day-to-day at max mental and physical ability. Although I have been transitioning to healthier eating habits gradually for many years now, I've become more dedicated to this quest in response to my life becoming unusually stressful these past two years. I figure if I can at least keep my body and mind healthy and well nourished through good eating habits, then I'll be better able to handle other stresses (such as a lack of sleep or an emotional distress). It stems from a desire to gain some control, stability, and normalcy amongst chaos. Of course, there are other elements that have pulled me towards the vegetarian lifestyle. On a personal level, I couldn't kill an animal myself, so why should I make someone else do it for me? I won’t even squish a spider – I'll catch it and free it outside... This has probably stemmed from my general misanthropy, the disgust I often feel towards many of my fellow human beings. I feel like we have institutionalized the disrespect of life and nature - harsh examples being genocide, pollution, animal cruelty. I find the idea of factory farms disturbing in that it's the mass-production (and very poor treatment) of conscious-feeling-life with only the intent of destroying it. I can tolerate systems such as the hunter-gatherer system, in which there is a respect and reverence of nature, in which the hunter is a part of nature. But we don't live like that anymore, and I don't think we are willing or capable of any sort of "return to nature." We have done so much to attempt to remove ourselves from nature and to conquer nature that it's hypocritical and illogical to argue that we should eat meat because it's the "natural" way of things. I have this silly impossible sci-fi dream that someday we will live in solar-powered cities in the sky, built upon strong steel pedestals or something – to somehow truly remove ourselves from disturbing the balance on Earth or at least find some far better balance. And we could still climb down and visit :) On a somewhat related note, we were recently discussing in my sociology class how advertising has shaped society. One example was how (at least in American society) it has come to be expected that meat is the main element of every meal, everyday, and how this, historically speaking, was never the case in any previous human society. Thinking way back to the ways of the hunter-gatherer, the amount of time and energy that must be spent hunting, killing, preparing a meal of meat was multitudinously more "expensive" than picking berries or what have you. The roots of this idea of eating meat often in our modern western society actually began amongst the aristocracy of Europe because meat was much more expensive than the equivalent quantity of other foods, and they could afford the luxury. In America, with the advent of household televisions, the meat and dairy industries put a huge amount of money and effort into getting us to think of sausage and bacon and eggs as breakfast foods. Meat for breakfast used to be something rather unheard of. And thanks to Wikipedia, I can provide you with this final delightful tidbit: "According to Dr. Michael Greger in a January 2004 lecture at MIT (which was the basis for Whistleblower, a 2006 documentary film by Jeff Bellamar) each year more than one million tons of animal excrement are fed back to farm animals raised for human consumption to lower the feed costs. He also says that up to 10% of blood from killed animals is mixed into some cattle feed, and up to 30% of some poultry feed is made up of the blood. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is believed to be caused by cows being fed with contaminated meat and bone meal, a high-protein substance obtained from the remnants of butchered animals, including cows and sheep." Eww... posted by Shannon | 5:44 PM |
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