So, like, why am I sort of trying to be vegetarian? Is it because of the poor, fuzzy wittle animals? Nope. I’ve bottle raised lambs and then eaten them. I remember we had a lamb we named “Phoenix” after a character in a soap opera. We raised him from a baby. He was so cute. When we stocked the freezer with the packages we got back from the butcher, we labled them with his name: “phoenix stew meat” “phoenix lamb chops”
I have gotten a little more animal-rightsy as I have gotten older. I’ll never be PETA material, but I won’t eat things like milk-fed veal or such, but I have been known to eat a burger without qualm, and I have no guilt over feeding my three pets, a cat and two dogs meat. They are all predators. It’s their natural and appropriate diet.
Actually, my qualms are environmentalist. There are a lot of people on this planet. There are even more with each sentence I write, and they consume A LOT of resources. Growing grain to feed a calf for a year, to slaughter the calf to make the steak to feed the person is a much less environmentally economical then just eating the grain directly.
I believe there are health benefits, also. In the United States, we are dying of heart disease and obesity. Diseases of overconsumption. Isn’t it astounding that we’re eating ourselves to death? How wretched does that make us? Vegetables have fewer calories, less fat, less colesteral, less salt. They have oodles of dietary fiber, lots of vitamins and nutrition. Vegetables are good stuff! – and the less processed, the better.
Another concern that tied into it was the sanitation of the meat industry. I’ve raised farm animals. So many antibiotics and hormones and sulpha drugs are forced fed or injected into them. They don’t go away. There still there, in some form, in that burger you are eating. Also, meat inspection is just funny. They don’t inspect most of it, and even that small percentage that is graced with an inspector’s attention is only checked for astoundly gross faults – visible or smellable rot, that type of thing.
Then, there came the mad cow issue in England. They were taking diseased, dead sheep, grinding them up and feeding them to cows, who became disease, who they were grinding up and feeding to us?!
Wow.
So, that jumbled combination of squeamishness, health concerns, environmentalism, and media panic is why I want to be vegetarian. Just thought I would explain.
