What do you think of vegetarianism?!
What do you think of vegetarianism?
Answers:
i think it's wonderful that people at this advanced day and age are finally beginning to reallise that killing animals for no real reason is a pointless and cruel thing to do, we can actually make the choice not to. I'm a vegetarian and i don' like to preach to others about what they should eat, it's for them to reallise individually, but i really do think it's the most civillised and peaceful choice a person can make about their diet. Since becoming a veggie, i have no regrets. I eat a huge variety of really healthy meals and my conscience is so much clearer. It's one of the best choices i've ever made. So what do i think of vegetarianism? I love it!
unnatural. We are designed to eat some meat.
Vegitarianism is to Veganism what Atheism is to Agnosticism.
I generally don't. If someone doesn't want to eat meat, that's cool with me. However, I detest preachy vegetarians who try to get everyone to feel guilty for eating meat.
Love it!!! If you don't like meat.
it's a step to become vegan!!!
I think it's a meaty subject...
I think its up to the individual but coming from personal experience i think most veggies are dying for at least a bit of chicken.
It is a personal choice.If you make that choice,you need to really educate yourself about nutrition,because you can end up with nutritional deficiencies if you do not adequately replace what you get from meat.
I think it is silly if one does it because they believe that they are morally superior to us meat-lovers. If you generally don't like meat, then go for it. However, your body needs protein, find a supplement if you decide to go herbivore.
It works well for some, but not for everyone. If people just let others live the way they wanted to live with out dissaproval this world would be a better place.
each to their own. i would do it myself but i love my meat to much to give it up
don't know, what does vegetarianism mean, i forget things since i stopped eating meat
I have been a vegetarian on and off at various points of my life. I enjoy it a lot now although it takes a greater amount of effort to get all the proper proteins in your diet.
Overall, I do not think it contributes to a more healthy diet. ie, it does not seem to me that eating meat, birds, and fish are actually detrimental to your health. And boy do they taste good. (if God wanted us to be vegetarian then why did He make animals taste so good).
That being said the most amazing meals I've had were prepared by Macrobiotic cooks who knew what they were doing. They somehow filled me with energy that no other meals do.
The reason to be a vegetarian stems from the desire to reduce the suffering of animals. The litmus test I use when looking at a menu (or shopping) is to imagine that someone was offering me the animal as a choice, or some vegetarian dish. I will always say "let the animal live, I'll eat the tofu". Why kill animals if you don't have to? And you really don't have to; it is just an easy and tasty way to eat.
Lastly I would say if you choose to eat meat, then make it a land animal. The fisheries around the world are collapsing due to over fishing at an alarming rate. We will drive many species extinct and create vast deserts of lifeless ocean unless we dramatically reduce our catches. I love spicy tuna handrolls, but will never eat another fish in my life in the hopes that my grandkids can still choose to have one.
don't care but personly i love meat it's even better if you sloter it your self (i'v done it)
I think it's form of neurosis that's justified by the seemingly plausible excuses of health and concern for animals.
It's absolutely fine for those who decide to take that route.
When I go to a vegetarian restaurant, and ask for the meat option, what will I be offered?
I answered a question, the other day, in reply to a question about why vegetarians don't eat eggs. My response (a bit flippant) suggested that the answer lay in the question.
I was getting "thumbs up".
Later, I added the thought that I love vegetarian food because it goes well with meat. Within a couple of minutes I had twice the number of thumbs down !! Sensitive? Or what?
Dentition? Why do we have canine teeth which are only useful to meat eaters? Why are our front teeth so well adapted for cutting meat?
It's friggen alsome! Cause I am one!!!! :) Plus go kill a human or somthing. WIERDASS
its good! im a vegetarian and i havent craved meat ever since, i guess its up to ones decision
If you look at the dental structure of human beings you will accept that by natures selection we are vegetarians. I am a vegetarian by birth and follow the same without much problem. Vegetarian food gives all the necessary needs of the body. Only you have to know where and what you should eat.
Not much. Most of the vegetarians I have met have been preachy and self-righteous. Live and let live. I don't tell you how to eat; don't dictate to me that I should not eat meat.
Like others have said, that's what they've chose to do, but please don't try to make me feel bad because I eat meat.
I think its not a good idea if you r growing up but already grown completely, then its ok if thats what you REeaaaaly want to do
i think its your personal chiose and if you choose not to eat meat or to eat meat i except it
Does it mean no wearing of leather apparel as these are made from animals, and a rejection of leather goods etc as part of the interior design of some homes? I think its okay especially now that vegetarians can gain nutrients from soya and tofu which replaces cow's milk and poultry. Problematic occasionally when eating out.
Please,at least think about it,give it a try,every day when you sit down and eat, your choices of what you eat have a large impact on you,the enviroment,animals, and other humans,a larger impact than you may think.YOU have a choice,they don't.
1.Caring for the enviroment-
America's meat eating habits are bad.Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.Our topsoil is damaged by raising animals for food,we only have about 6 inches of topsoil left,it takes 500 years for 1 inch of topsoil to be created.Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
.Animals create a huge amount of waste,a population of 60,000 pigs creates the same amount of waste as a group of 240,000 people,and our poop is flushed and filtered so the water can be used again,animals' waste is put into a manure lagoon or a small amount can be put back into soil,but most of it builds up.Think about what I said before
60,000 pigs=240,000 people
and now think of the 10 billion animals raised for food each year.Imagine the waste created.The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both.
The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water. Aquifers are beginning the run dry all over the world, largely because of abstraction by farmers.Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment. In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. (Within the 12-year period preceding 1992, the number of chickens worldwide increased 132% to 17.2 billion.)It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat.Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year. Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year. Recent marginal growth in animal protein consumption in increasingly affluent developing countries has led to huge increases in the need for feed grains. In 1995, quite suddenly, China went from being an exporter to an importer of grain. World shortages are predicted as both populations and meat consumption rise together--an unsustainable combination. Early in 1996, the world was down to a 48-day supply of grain. According to Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, the world "may have crossed a threshold where even the best efforts of governments to build stocks may not be enough."The passage of local laws favoring massive corporate pork operations in North Carolina recently propelled the state into the number two spot in national hog production, practically overnight. In terms of manure, the state might as well have grafted the human population of New York City onto its coastal plain, times two! Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water. In the summer of 1995, at least five lagoons actually broke open, letting loose tens of millions of gallons of hog waste into rivers and on to neighboring farm lands. No mechanical method of retrieval exists that cleans contaminants from groundwater. Only nature is able to purify things again; and that could take several generations.Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US. Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources. Livestock in the US produce 20 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams. Becoming a vegetarian does more to clean up our nation's water than any other single action.Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.Meat contains no essential nutrients that cannot be obtained directly from plant sources. By cycling grain through livestock, we lose 90% of the protein, 96% of the calories, all of its carbohydrates, and all of its nutritional fiber.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year. Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day). acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef. In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person). Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds. For every acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.
2.Caring for animals-
To see how meat ends up on your plate go here(http://meat.org/)
Around eight billion animals are killed for food every year in the U.S. alone -- a number greater than the entire human population of the planet. Each meat-eating American eats the equivalent of about 24 animals per year. What's worse, modern agricultural methods mean that animals are raised in cramped confinement operations instead of the pastures from childhood picture books -- a practice known as factory farming. Chickens are crammed into cages with no free space, and are debeaked to keep them from pecking each other to death. Animals are pumped full of various powerful drugs to kill diseases resulting from filthy living conditions, and to make them grow or produce faster than nature intended. When cows and chickens stop producing as much milk and eggs as the younger animals, they're unceremoniously slaughtered and made into low-grade meat (fast food and pet food). For some, vegetarianism and veganism are ways to refuse to participate in the commodification of animals.In the official words of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), The Animal Welfare Act, as passed by the US Congress, "specifically excludes animals raised for food or fiber." With virtually no protection of farm animals (at either the federal, or on the state level), institutional cruelty and abuse have become the norm. In legal terms--which is where it counts in a for-profit environment--cruelty and abuse of farm animals is, for the most part, simply not against the law in the United States of America.Pigs in today's factory indoor facilities are likely to be stacked two and three decks high, each solitarily imprisoned in a bin--a cage just a bit larger than a pig's body. Those pigs who live through their stress and fright will adopt coping behaviors--from pacing, to repetitive rocking, to incessant biting of, or banging on, the bars. Industry blames the animals; it calls these behaviors "vices"So-called "redskins" are those chickens which--on the conveyer belts to their deaths--missed not only the brine-filled electrified stunning trough, but the knife that was to cut their throats. Their deaths occurred in the scald tank where feathers are loosened before plucking. Industry throws aside piles of them every day.Farm animals in our factory sheds today are supposed to have their drug intakes stopped at proscribed intervals prior to slaughter to avoid residues ending up in the final consumer product. Withdrawal schedules, however, are not always properly followed. With so many different drugs, the regimens can be complex, with written instructions often not very coherent. Due to the mechanized nature of today's conveyer belt feeding systems, troughs of old, drug-laden feed may not get cleaned away when withdrawal should begin. In addition, since farm animals are often fed animal waste as well as animal flesh, drug and pesticide residues continue to be recycled.About 98% of all milk in the US is produced using factory methods. Part of factory life for a cow includes dangerous levels of drugs administered to boost milk output. Due to selective breeding, cows already produce at least two and a half times the amount of milk of yesterday's pastured counterpart. Then, as of February, 1994, farmers were given the go-ahead to use the genetically engineered hormone Bovine Somatotropin (BST) on their herds. Designed to boost milk output by an additional 15 percent, milk per cow statistics are already showing the effects nationwide. A cow naturally has at least a 20-year lifespan; today's stressed out cows, however, become hamburger in less than 4 years, as a cow's ability to give milk quickly diminishes under modern conditions.In today's factory henhouse, certain lighting schedules will be employed to maintain an illusion of eternal spring--a technique that keeps egg production up to speed. When production drops off, the birds may be put through a brutal forced molt, induced by days of starvation and darkness. Some, and often many, of the birds will inevitably die in the process. Cruelty can be a regular occurrence at stockyards. Sick and crippled farm animals, called "downers," may lie suffering for days until dragged by chain to slaughter. The downer phenomenon would drastically be reduced if all stockyards refused to allow ranchers to make any money on them. (Slaughter of a living creature affords a rancher a better price than "dead-on-arrival" meat.) With every one of their natural instincts restricted and unfulfilled, pigs in today's factories will take to "tail-biting." Insane, bored and frustrated, these naturally intelligent and playful creatures may be driven to gnawing neurotically on one another's pig tails and hind ends. If not prevented, a mauled pig may die from an attack. Mauled pigs cannot be sold, so they become a problem to the producer. The answer? Pig tails are routinely amputated, and pigs are kept in total darkness except for feeding time.In egg factories all over the country, male chicks are weeded out and disposed of by "chick-pullers." Over half a million chicks a day are stuffed en masse into plastic bags where they are crushed and suffocated. Or they may be ground up while still alive to be fed to livestock or used as fertilizer.A male calf born to a cow--what does the farmer do with this useless by-product of the dairy industry? After the calf's birth, if he is not immediately slaughtered, more than likely he'll be taken to a veal factory. There, he will be locked up in a stall and chained by his head to prevent him from turning around for his entire life. He'll be fed a special diet without iron or roughage. He will be injected with antibiotics and hormones to keep him alive and to make him grow. He will be kept in darkness except for feeding time. The result? A nearly full-grown animal with flesh as tender and milky white as a newborn's. The beauty of the system from the standpoint of the veal industry is that meat from today's so called "crate" veal will still fetch the premium price it always did when such flesh came only from a baby calf, just a lot more of it.
A method used to crank up pork production is to take piglets away from their mothers soon after birth. The forced weaning allows the sow to end her lactating period so she can become pregnant again. To prevent piglet death due to the emotional loss, a mechanical teat may serve as a substitute. Tending to the mother's emotional loss has no economic value and so is given no consideration.Chicken feathers, guts, and waste water, which normally need to be discarded during processing, are routinely "recycled" back to the layer and broiler houses as feed. Industry experts believe that along with unclean slaughtering and processing techniques, this forced cannibalism is leading to the rampant salmonella epidemic in poultry plants. To produce foie gras, a duck or goose is force-fed huge quantities of grain three times a day with a feeder tube. This torturous process goes on for 28 days before slaughter, causing stomachs sometimes to burst. Livers, diseased and swollen to several times normal size by this process, are considered a delicacy which sell for about $12 an ounce. About 7,000 tons are produced worldwide per year.
Each to his or her own. People should be able to follow the diet they wish, and neither vegetarian, vegan or meat eaters should dictate, condemn or force the others to follow their particular way.
Although I don't eat a lot of meat, and I do have vegetarian days or meals, I don't feel I could be totally vegetarian or vegan, but I respect wishes of those who are.
I've had meat eaters telling me I should eat more meat and vegetarians dictating that I shouldn't eat it at all. I like to choose.
I think it's the way we're supposed to eat.
Re. "Most of the vegetarians I have met have been preachy and self-righteous" --
-- you mean, the ones you've met who you actually know to be vegetarians. Few of the ones I know have much reason to talk about it. Obviously, you tend to mention it when discussing what pizza topping to get, but, beyond that -- what are these people doing? Showing off their lunches? I don't get the ones that need to blither about it.
(When not on the Yahoo! Answers "Vegetarian & Vegan" section, I mean...)
great stuff
"don't care but personly i love meat it's even better if you sloter it your self (i'v done it)"
You were obviously out "slotering" it while the other kids were learning to spell.