I can relate to eating a lot of healthy calories. I was trying to bulk up at one point in time and was attempting to eat 5000 cals a day of meat and veggies. I think it's nearly impossible personally :)

You know that hemp seed hearts are a good source of iron?

My wife takes SlowFE for her iron deficiency (she's mildly anemic).

It is near impossible.

Loads of people mix up vegans with vegeterians here ...

You're an eternal conversationalist, not usually given to bashing anyone but rather throwing out a few contrary points of view in order to cause others to either strengthen their arguement or realize they perhaps need to concede there's more to the subject than they first realized... definitely not a bad thing.

No one should be getting worked up over anything you've said in this thread.


As for me, I'm an interminable meatetarian, but my diet does include a lot of whole grains, fruits, a high amount of vegetables in addition to LEAN meats that are healthily prepared. Perhaps 'meatetarian' isn't quite accurate. I'm a well-balanced-diet-etarian. Sorry to anyone who finds that intolerable but nothing beats a well-aged medium rare NY striploin or porterhouse steak sizzling right off the barbecue.

Well thank you.

omnivore!

the times I've not eaten red meat etc.. I got a real lack of energy. I see no issues with you being a vegan etc.. more power to ya :)

I'll say it again, Maddox fucking rocks. :thumbsup

His answer to that PETA email is fabulous.

About 12 years ago I was into the whole fitness thing...and went from 135 lbs. to 185 lbs. of pure muscle in 8 months. My diet was a ton of egg whites, chicken, tuna, rice and beans...and pasta. What sucks now is I am not training with weights and it is getting tough getting below 185 lbs. now although I am playing handball a couple times a week...the wife likes to cook.

This was written by a vegetarian. And obviously needs to be quoted :thumbsup

BTW, I have eaten with Kathi in every restaurant imaginable - including Brazilian steakhouses. It can be done.

My sister, OTOH, hasn't eaten meat since she was 5 and she's in her 30's now. She used to be the most outspoken vegetarian imaginable. This included bitching if we went to a restaurant that served meat to celebrate SOMEONE ELSE'S birthday. Then she fell in love with a meat eater. She's still a vegetarian but she realizes she doesn't run other people's lives.

Life's short - eat what you want to eat, don't eat what you don't want to eat.

There is a hierarchy of intelligence. It's not hypocritical to sacrifice insects for higher animals. Pragmatic attempts to live as ethically as is practical under the circumstances should not be dismissed because the harsh reality of nature doesn't offer a perfect solution.

Of course it's all pretend. This "morality" exists only in my mind, and trying to impose it on the chaos of existence is so futile it's funny. Nobody is watching us or grading our behavior, and in the end we're all dead anyway, and then it's as if none of this ever happened. But for a very brief moment, whatever creature you choose not to kill gets to enjoy few more small pleasures, however ultimately pointless. And a cow or pig or deer, because of more advanced brain faculties, is better able to appreciate that than bugs or whatever gets caught in the thrasher.

so we think, many bugs have been around longer than humans , cows, pigs or deer , maybe they are smarter than we think.

We are assuming we are professional painters judging a painting, if it turns out we suck as painters then it could very well be the painting we think suck might be fabulous and the ones we think are great might suck

then by raising animals to eat we are actually giving them a moment of life they would never have experienced if there weren't meat eaters raising them.

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Will drop another serious question to non meat eaters or vegetarians, mostly those that do it for ethical reasons foremost - yet anyone can chime in.

Why do you all not consume insects as a primary protein group? Diet wise they are a near perfect food source. Many other cultures eat them with no problems or stigma. They are very easy on the Earth resource wise. Give a great deal of energy out as opposed to what it takes to raise them. They often are a bane to many other food crops. Then naturally they are not highly up on the ethical issues either, aside from perhaps taking a life but at that level it is almost equal to the life of a plant and are often killed for the sake of plants.

This line of argument is resorting to metaphysical BS that I don't have a lot of patience for. I don't believe in souls, or that the sum of a thing is more than it's parts. We are organic machines, and the question of superior intelligence of a pig vs a locust, or a human vs a cow, is not controversial among neurologists.

Now that at least is debatable. I'll answer by posing a similar moral question; would it be ethical for us to raise humans specifically to harvest spare body parts? Afterall, without this program, they would never have been born in the first place. At least they get to enjoy some life first, right? If you do not agree with this proposal, why not? The answer, as I said originally, is empathy. You are extending empathy to those you relate to. I just relate enough to other intelligent lifeforms to extend my empathy to them also. I do not see them as very different from myself.

I'd support replacing our beef-industry with a bug-industry if that was the bargain. Properly processed, they'd probably come up with some tasty products. It's not purely ethical (What is?), but it would be a big improvement, better for the environment, and cheaper too. I propose we should eat only the least sentient life available, starting with plants and working up from there only as far as we must. If you can't commit to being a full vegetarian, give up pork first, because they are almost as smart as dogs and kindergarteners. You wouldn't eat a child, would you? Then give up venison and beef, then chicken, then fish, in that order. If you don't make it all the way down the list, at least you're eating dumber lifeforms than before. As we've established, perfect isn't possible, but it's not an all-or-nothing dilemma.

And again, for any vegetarians or vegi-curious, go try some Quorn. My wife has served her curry "chicken" to people and they couldn't tell the difference. (but she is an amazing chef) It will do until scientists develop Meat-Trees.

Are you asking because you want to quit?

I gave up eating meat one day in my teens, for about 10 years. But then I'm like Sickboy in Trainspotting, being able to give up crack on a whim.

I eat meat now, best to keep it down to a few portions of red meat per month, Aussies have the highest incidence of bowel cancer in the world, and meat is the main cause.

Just be sensible about your consumption, I wouldn't suggest to anyone to totally give up meat, unless they were critically ill. Read books on food science, unless you supplement your dietary intake with lots of B12 etc, your body needs a few serves of meat per month at the very least.

I agree with and have argued previously most of boobzooka's observations as to a continuum of "death acceptability" amongst other life forms. Whilst I don't personally object to killing animals for food, I think arguing in a binary fashion about all living things to the point of comparing a microbe to a dolphin is an intellectually bankrupt endeavour.
The only exception that can be made to this is a case of a particular lower life form's utility to the biosphere. It's hard to disagree that the extinguishment of a non-sentient life form is less of a moral issue than a sentient life form. The exception would be that if the destruction of the microbe, bee colony etc were to threaten the biosphere in a manner that it was to have a significant deleterious effect on the sentient beings attached to it.
Some people won't stop equating a mosquito with a puppy for trolling purposes, but the troll isn't going to cry about a moving story about the sudden death of the fungus causing their athlete's foot. It's facile, argued purely for hollow and ineffectual "gotcha" hits that never seem to land in any one else's mind.

At any rate I accept all that but still don't particularly have that much of an issue with people killing animals for meat.
I can't really comment as to the original poster's question as I'm not a vegetarian. However, I read a long article about mad cow disease about a decade ago. It really disturbed me. I hadn't really ever entertained the notion that the food I ate might not be safe in a fundamental and systemic way, it was a bit of a revelation. Sometime later I was eating a doner kebab when I looked down at the processed meat and saw all the little holes in it, which essentially is what mad cow disease does to your brain matter. I threw up as soon as I reached the nearest toilets..
The idea that your health can be held hostage by ignorant or profit driven farmers incensed me. I couldn't bring myself to eat red meat again even though I was a heavy meat eater. I used to call myself a "meatanarian". When I was 16 I worked in a pizza hut and would make pizza's to take home for myself (back when you could do that and it wasn't an offense) and I'd double the meat on the meat lover's pizza until it was almost unstable heh. Slowly I began to see chicken, not so much in a similar light, but as something unnecessary. I do however still catch, kill, gut and eat fish. I don't have any issue with this. I find salmon to be the most naturally tasty of meats so I don't even feel like I'm missing out on the others (Sure bacon is great, but I mean as a proper meal, as in a steak of salmon). Of course like all carnivores fish does have issues with bio-amplification of toxins (the only reason in my mind not to eat cats and dogs over pigs unless grain fed). And solutions to this (eating little fish) invariably aren't good for the ecology of the oceans. Even farmed fishing isn't good because of this. But short of spending 20 million dollars setting up a grain fed sardine farm it's about as healthy as I think meat can get with it's Omega 3 and proteins.

I have eaten an insect before, a BBQ'd witchetty grub, although I think grasshoppers would be a nicer texture. I think most vegetarians wouldn't eat them quite simply because they're not vegetables ;). One rule I've heard is "nothing with eyes".
I think if they were processed the way most food is processed and re-constituted into little smiley faces or something meat eaters (and probably myself) wouldn't have a problem with them though. Otherwise they're a bit fiddly. Fried grasshoppers probably isn't particularly healthy either. They have large surface to mass ratios and would carry a lot more oil per gram than other fried foods with their uneven body surface.

I think the health of a vegetarian diet probably has something to do with age and culture. America's fast food and portion sizes simply puts other countries to shame. Also if you're young and ignorant, maybe you are stupid enough to eat ice cream instead of a real meal. However I would say it's a lot more to do with carbs. Lots of vegetarians do eat lots of cheesy pasta's, lasagne's and pizza's also chips.. but overall I'd have to say they're a healthier bunch, just the mere act of looking at your diet is something most people don't even do.. So it's not exactly coming off a highly set bar. A vegetarian diet isn't hard at all. The hardest part is probably going out to dinner and dealing with jokes about why you're not eating the steak.

So again, I think it's a fairly tried and true path to vegetarianism to go from beef to chicken and pork to fish and then much less fish, to eventually no meat at all if that is your desire although I don't think there is much of a problem with a small amount of any meat in a diet (although given most people eat it twice a day that "lean meat 2-3 times a week" thing would almost feel like vegetarianism ;)). Personally I think not eating honey is bat shit crazy so I'm not even going to discuss veganism.

Those bacon wrapped filet mignons we had last week were meattastic. Had em with spiced oven fries, steamed mixed veggies and creamed corn.

mmm-mMm.

yeah i can give up red meat easy enough it's the chicken that is killing me!

Have you guys ever tasted grilled tofu that's been wrapped in bacon and beef fat? It is sooooooooooooo good!

ok so we will compare squirrels and crows because they are found in fields and killed to grow veggies , compared to cows that are killed for my steak..

squirrels and crows are far smarter than a cow so you kill smart things to achieve a goal i kill dumber animals to achieve a goal .


i am not advocating killing our own species i am advocating kiling another so its a rather strange comparison. I will tweak it a bit as a better comparison. If a smarter life form such as aliens were growing humans for spare body parts , would it be ethical ? for them or us ? heh, i could understand it.

Vegetarians make good hardcore.

gfy just came out of it's coma.

This argument is a bit of a strawman. While of course there will be some accidental casualties (mostly among the old or injured), generally crows or squirrels are quite capable of avoiding farm equipment with a wide safety margin. The noise alone would drive them out of harms way long before they're threatened. I've seen our cat try to catch both, through speed or stealth, but I've only seen her be successful against lesser creatures (lizards or snakes or small mice). They've evolved to be aware of their surroundings and fast enough to escape any potential danger. If not, at least that's a fair example of Darwinism. Farm animals don't get a chance to survive on their merits, so you're not even offering them the option of evolution.

It's not a strange comparison when you consider that you are distant cousins, descended from the same prehistoric beasties on the same planet, very similar genetically; so similar that we test our medicine on them first, and are now on the verge of cross-species organ transplants. The animals you eat are very nearly "human" with only relatively minor variations. They have similar emotions, because emotions are nothing more than inherited behaviors, genetic memory, acquired to advance the odds of your species survival. Your feelings are hardwired instructions triggering hormones, for utilitarian reasons only, not because you're some special creation. Some peoples egos won't allow them to acknowledge that, but much of the population felt the same way about other human races until recently. Our similarities outweigh our differences, which are mostly just in adapted form/function.

Because I wouldn't want your superior alien to harvest me, I try to follow the "do unto others" rule. I'm aware that my own continued existence isn't without cost and harm, but I'm not trying to find loopholes to justify ignoring the issue and not caring what happens to my fellow earthlings. I see the circle of life as a triage theatre; prioritize, help as many as you can, you can't save everyone.

ever lived on a farm ? i have , tons of crows and squirrels and other "smart" animals are killed to grow vegetables, sorry , you can use whatever theoretical argument to make it better in your mind but the facts remains if you feed 100 people on meat and 100 on veggies MORE SMART animals are killed for the veggies.

Just so you know animals and their babies are plowed under and displaced in fields , by the THOUSANDS, and that doesnt even count the ones purposely poisoned/killed.

and p.s. if you lived on a farm you would know most animals aren't capable of outrunning farm equipment.

hm sounds alot like it to me.. they aren't accidental if you know they will happen.

Thats like saying , "when i plow my car thru a crowd of old people there may be some accidental casualties as my purpose was not to kill old people"

animals are PURPOSELY killed to grow your veggies.. FACT

you are attempting to use loopholes to justify ignoring the issue, saying they are just old or weak , or if they cant go fast enough they deserve to die . excuse after excuse to explain why its ok for animals to die for your food but not ok to die for mine :)

It's hard to describe exactly how untrue this is. It is factually incorrect. Unconceivably wrong. The opposite of being right.
There is no possible way to believe this, I know you're trolling, but for the benefit of anyone reading. If you have ever lived on a proper farm, and I don't mean an acre or two with a couple of cows, but a proper meat production farm, you'd know that for the most part, cows pigs and chickens are fed cereal and soya. Yes there are some ranges and grass fed cows and chickens, but overall, grain fed beef, pig and chicken is how our meat is produced. Grain fed cattle grow 3 times faster than grass fed. It's simple economics. At any rate, it takes 10 kilos of feed to produce 1 kilo of beef and 5 kilos of feed to produce 1 kilo of pork. Meaning that pound for pound eating a big mac kills TEN TIMES your smart animals than a gluten/soya/etc burger. And then the actual cow as a cherry on top.
It's kind of funny how people don't understand the EROEI on meat production. It's so simple.
Stack up the 3 meals a day you've eaten your entire life in a large warehouse. At around 35 it's probably enough to feed 33,000 people one meal each.. Whereas if they ate your body which took in the energy from those 33,000 meals you'd only feed maybe 50 people.

Because eating plants is like eating the stacked up meals it's far more efficient. So yes, a certain amount of field mice and so on die to produce a tofu burger, but for some reason people just don't click that whatever that amount is, someone eating a beef burger kills ten times more. So it's not an argument against vegetarianism. If killing field mice is the thing you have an issue with, going vego "saves" many, many more of those animals.

Personally I don't give a shit. If I could kill the crows that wake me up every saturday morning without getting spotted by the neighbours I would. But I can't let a flasehood like that pass.

Look into juicing. I wanted to ramp up the amount of veggies in my diet for the health benefits so I started researching. I ended up buying a juicer and a few books on the subject. Now I drink about 50 ounces of fresh fruit/vegetable juice every day and feel pretty amazing.

yet its still true.

for the record a 1200 acre farm, that is more than twice the size of the average american farm, and it wasnt a meat producing farm :)

ftr i eat grass raised cows, didnt require any animals to kill other than the cow. A cow feeds roughly 300 people. so 1 death = 300 meals. To grow/harvest an acre of vegetable you are looking at hundreds and hundreds of animals killed.

p.s. the vegetables we eat and cows eat are very different and require vastly different amounts of rodenticides to deal with them.






in theory perhaps , in reality no it doesnt. Not one animal besides the cow was killed for my burger, LOTS of animals were killed for the salad.

lets use an actual example to help put it in perspective for you and others.

Man #1 eats naturally grazing cows/chickens
Man #2 eats only veggies from supermarket
Man #3 eats meat from supermarket


The fact remains LESS animals were killed to make MY meal ( man #1 ) and i didnt have to kill any of the top 10 smartest animals on earth to do so :) the supermarket vegetarian had hundreds of the smartest animals on earth killed for their salad. Now if you mean picking natural vegetables then sure they do less klling , my bet is there isn't one vegetarian in this thread or on gfy that eats only "natural wild vegetables".

So the fact remains, less animals are killed for my meals than any vegetarian we have heard from so far and practically ANY vegetarian around.:thumbsup:thumbsup and i am not the side claiming to be eating vegetables to "save animals" . I eat what i eat because it tastes good , and as a side benefit i kill way less animals than your average vegetarian does to eat :)

I think I should stop eating meat and become a vegetarian.

http://www.trueamateurmodels.com/tat...images/291.jpg

Thanks for the tip! :)

I want to eat healthier and I also am against the slaughterhouse practices of the mass market meat giants. anyone ever read fast food nation? great book, shitty movie lol

Why are we even discussing this issue? Animals were put on the planet for humans to eat. It's always been that way.

I don't care what anyones opinion is on the way I eat. I chose to give up red meat and pork. I feel 3x better than ever before. I ate tons of red meat daily my entire life. Then in December I just stopped. You can argue and debate all you want, I don't care. :)

I used to follow the Dead and eat tons of LSD and other psychedelics... You can't eat meat when your high on psychedelics... You can feel the animals energy in your hand.

Things have changed and now I eat meat... And my belly is growing.

I better do something. ;)

now that sounds like some diet! lol

Talk about continuing to prove yourself either spectacularly ignorant or pointlessly argumentative. I won't waste as much time on this one but given you weren't on a meat producing farm (we used to own a piggery, and we currently work with an organic pig farm)- the vegetables we and animals eat aren't especially different. In the case I gave with burgers they're the same. Perhaps you're unaware of even how much cereal and soya is even in meat products. The average sausage is 30% vegetarian. People can't hack on vegetarians for only eating tofu and then say that tofu isn't soya when it suits them. 90% of what's in the vegetarian section of most supermarkets is cereal and soya.

I've already given an "out" for grass fed cows so no need to repeat my point. However you only need ONE meal to be from McDonalds out of ten to have ruined this. And although of course you're going to pretend you only eat lean steaks of pure grass fed cows and have never eaten a sausage, burger or taco you haven't made the mince from steaks yourself, and you NEVER eaten bacon, ham, pork chops.. and you only eat your own hand reared chickens you kill and you never eat chicken burgers, satay sticks or anything.. quite frankly, you're full of shit ;) You might make an effort to, but I doubt you actually achieve a pure natural/wild meat diet and that you don't eat pigs and chickens (free range just means they can go outside for a bit before coming in to eat their grain and roost). We used to kill our own raised chickens - you'd need a lot of them and it's very time intensive. But I'm in the same boat, I try to only eat wild caught fish but it's not easy either. Of course I don't have any moral objections to failing in that regard so it doesn't matter.

yes they are , they are specifically grown for them to eat, remember i grew up on a farm that grew them.



in the ones i eat . zero.


to ruin what ? i am not making any claim of no animals killed for my food, my claim is less animals are killed for my food than your average vegetarian .. and you haven shown anything to prove otherwise yet.. sorry to break it to you.

p.s. theres no way i eat even 1/100 meals at mcdonalds or anywhere similar



i eat em all
i got an old lady for that :)
can't say i do , maybe a few over the years, not something i eat, anything chicken or seafood i eat local and fresh :)
cant say i have tried those before, if you have a recipe i might try it.

and i never will nor did i ever aspire or claim to :)

I have raised , and killed chickens&pigs since i was a tyke.
I cant remember the last time i ate fish i didnt catch myself or know the person who caught it. Not to hard for me, and i certainly dont eat "wild" food because of any moral reasons , i do it because its easy for me and its tasty. I live in an area where its easy for me to take advantage of these things.

The point i think you miss is not that meat eaters kill less animals , its that making a claim that store vegetarianism doesnt kill animals or only kills slow dumb animals is false. They kill some of the smartest animals on earth for their veggies.

Tonight I had sole filets, poached and lightly spiced, with buttered spinach on a bed of rice.

It was so mindblowingly good that it just reaffirms there's no way I could cut meat completely out of my diet.

Sorry to any and all grazers out there.

the biggest issue with vegtarian diets is that some people, specially children need animal protien, so do males who do hard work for a living.

The older you get the less meat you need and a vegetarian type of diet becomes more beneficial but for children and most people under 40 who have an active lifestyle it is generally NOT healthy

and a vegan diet is bad period. You really need fish in your diet at the very least ...specially fish high in omega 3 like salmon but the protein is the main thing ask any good qualified nutritionist.