if a vegetarian who hasnt eaten meat in like 4 years eats some as a one off bc it is free

will it make them sick also is this like a srs ethical breach. twin pronged guidance needed btw

It is highly likely it will make them sick. You lose the ability to digest meat after not eating it for that long. Unpleasantly sick.

xp

1. what kind of meat? but probably not, except maybe psychosomatically.

2. definitely not a serious ethical breach. wasting food can be unethical too. and it sounds like you're already thinking about it pretty hard.

maybe "how much meat?" too. I accidentally ordered chicken when I was on vacation in Mexico and ate some of it after no eating meat for over a decade. I didn't get sick, but I felt like shit, emotionally.

Last week I took four large bites from a burger — my first in fifteen years.

Felt zero ill effects.

i didn't get sick when i ate meat for the first time in I forget how many years (but at least 4). It depends on how much you eat, what else you eat, etc.

went to dinner with a friend a month or two ago; he hadn't eaten meat in over two years, ate a large piece of lamb, and felt fine.

I was vegetarian for ten years but recently started eating meat again and it didn't affect me at all.

that first burger is a divine thing

Not to put too mild a point on it, but on the few occasions that I've eaten meat (usually accidentally) have had stomach distress and the runs for a day or two afterwards. And I don't think it was psychosomatic because it occured in a case where I did not actually know that I'd eaten some until after experiencing the symptoms. So your mileage may vary. I'd reccommend against it if you have a choice.

if you are a vegetarian for ethical reasons you did breach yr ethics tho

It is highly likely it will make them sick. You lose the ability to digest meat after not eating it for that long. Unpleasantly sick.

is this true of eating, say, lard that's used in the preparation of otherwise non-meat dishes? because i'm pretty sure i've had that happen from time-to-time while eating out over the past 15 years (i don't eat red meat, chicken or turkey).

i'd say that the lard would be worse for your system than the meat tbh

but then the only times i've gotten sick/had digestive problems with food, it's been related to lard/fat/grease/really oily stuff

that first burger is a divine thing
― sarahel, Wednesday, October 27, 2010 2:02 PM (46 seconds ago) Bookmar

I was expecting divinity but was somehow underwhelmed... Mel's Burger on B'way, Upper West Side. I dunno, their homemade veggie burger (w/ predictably emasculating name — "Nurse Betty") was way more flavorful. Will try again.

you should kill the animal by hand to enhance the experience

well - mine was a cheeseburger and was accompanied by several strong drinks, which i'm sure amplified the divinity

If you're a vegetarian for ethical reasons other than, like, mystical "I shan't have the soul of another cosmic traveler in my food" stuff, then it's about your diet affecting the demand curve for the meat industry. In this case it doesn't.

Sick wise, I was a veg in high school for only a few months, then ate bacon, and jesus fuckword did that screw me up. I'm also around the 4 year mark right now, suspect any meat would really, really hurt.

buzza you imp!

i know someone who claimed they got ill after unwittingly consuming a soup with a chicken-based broth

otoh i have eaten veg for almost twenty years and ate half a roast beef sandwich a couple of years ago with no ill effects whatsoever

echoing what has been said upthread i think that it sucks to waste food, and also being especially rigid or guilt-ridden in regards to diet is not particularly healthy. eating should be a happy, life-affirming thing {/dell the greek}

my firstborn recovered greatly when we began to feed him meat after he spent his first two years without

he's right as rain now

so it works both ways

also the few times i have eaten meat in the interim it has been way underwhelming. i have met a ton of people who were formally vegan and are now all "fuck yeah bacon". i don't understand all of that.

Sick? No. I'm pretty sure that vegetarianism doesn't change your physical digestive system. All the parts are still there. Your body still makes the same acids, digests stuff the same way, has the same capabilities as always. If it never made you sick before, it shouldn't now.

Serious ethical breach? I guess it depends on why you choose not to eat meat. If the ethics of vegetarianism are a major reason why you are one, then... you figure it out.

btw, I hear God kills kittens by the boxcarload, but He doesn't eat them. otoh, He may not eat at all, so it's a toss up.

Not true. Although not eating meat doesn't change yr actual intestines, the varying composition of bacteria that break up food in your gut certainly changes. If you continue to eat a lot of animal products you may be OK. If you have been vegan for 20 years, for example, your gut compostition may indeed change. Your mileage may very.

i was gonna say - if you regularly eat a bunch of dairy, you probably won't have much trouble with meat

It is highly likely it will make them sick. You lose the ability to digest meat after not eating it for that long. Unpleasantly sick.

Any scientific data to back this up? I had accidental meat (thought it was mock meat, was in a foreign country and got confused) after 10 years of no meat and the only sick I got was disgusted

If you have been vegan for 20 years

Vegans seem like a whole 'nother animal from garden-variety vegetarians.

bbbut it was mock meat!

xp

smitty OTM - never had any ill effect here other than regret

Yes, the meat was mocking you for believing it wasn't real meat.

a mock is a species of long-haired oxen iirc

sorry, typing from phone, meant "mawk meat" - it kept going on & on about how great joy division was and why aren't there any good bands any more, etc

I have eaten free meat (via dumpster-diving acquaintances) on a number of occasions over the past couple years of being vegetarian, and never had any trouble. Ethically I am okay with this but a lot of people like to give me shit about it.

Also there is an all-you-can-eat chinese place in Oxford which is the only place with a vegan menu and I feel I may be becoming addicted to mock meat. This isn't exactly relevant but thought I'd share

I've always been skeptical about meat making long-time vegetarians sick. Anecdotal evidence suggests it is not a problem (I've known at least 4 vegetarians who started eating meat regularly and they were fine. Interestingly, all 4 of them started eating meat after 7 years off.) But people's bodies are different, so perhaps it's possible. I sort of wonder if the physical illness a vegetarian might feel could be based on disgust or other psychological reactions.

you guys not to extend my subediting tip to every thread I post on but the word 'thought' and the word 'though' are not the same thing

jumped back in after 10 years w/o to no ill effect

yo is it true aero got sonned by some foreigners after a mock beef??????

Louis, I'm pretty sure copy editing ILX will get you to 51 more quickly than just about anything you've ever done. #protip

also, I think only goole didn't catch that

Also there is an all-you-can-eat chinese place in Oxford

which one?

Do vegetarians lose the ability to digest meat? This is a strange idea to me. As a vegetarian of 7 years I reckon I eat meat once every 18 months. Usually by accident and I've been fine. I reckon I would have a physical problem with very fatty, oily meat products, though. The first reason for me not eating meat is that I don't like it and prefer my diet without it (I didn't eat much meat before). Ethically, I wouldn't be too caught up.

I didn't have any issue eating fish after being strictly vegetarian for eight years. I did work into it slowly, though, which was more for psychological reasons than physiological ones.

my sister was vegetarian for 10 years and ate a steak after her phase ended and said it was one of the greatest culinary experiences ever. I asked if she got sick afterwards and she said "nope".

ppl who hit the suggest ban button are even worse savages than the meat-eaters who chronically hit the suggest beef button imho

coulda sworn i saw that tofu walking down the street just the other day

caek: the pink giraffe on st. clement's. the vegetarian menu is the same size as the meat one, and the two or three not-vegan things are clearly marked. (i mean, i don't know if this is need-to-know information for you. they're not strictly good, i guess, but being able to have multiple courses of something that almost exactly passes for peking duck if you don't think about it too much -- i've discovered this is a precious thing to me.)

are there other strictly chinese all-you-can-eat places? i know there's a couple of terrifying pan-asian buffet type things

It is highly likely it will make them sick. You lose the ability to digest meat after not eating it for that long. Unpleasantly sick.

Any scientific data to back this up? I had accidental meat (thought it was mock meat, was in a foreign country and got confused) after 10 years of no meat and the only sick I got was disgusted

I can imagine that enzymes produced by the body to digest elastin and meat proteins might be secreted in lower amounts after years of vegetarianism, but you won't lose the ability to produce them.

have known way too many vegans who become hyper-anxious about the idea that they WILL get sick whenever they imagine that they might have eaten something animal-related (though they haven't) to ever take this idea seriously.

meat eaters who suggest beef all the goddamn time as if it's hilare are some disgusting savages tho

uhh, Here's Science with an actual answer.

a) if you haven't had meat in >10 years, you might get a little bloated or have loose poops. but you won't barfalupagus unless:

b) you are psychosomatically or affectedly sick

meat eaters who suggest beef all the goddamn time as if it's halal are not disgusting savages

hmm... i grew up in a vegetarian household and didn't taste meat until i was 16. no issues. at meat a bit from 16-19, then gave it up again until 31. again, no issues.

note to self: keep kissin' those omnivores!

this thread has proven useful to 1 disgusting savage meat-eater as I did not know the Pink Giraffe did all-you-can-eat. though, while good, it put me in a bad mood the past couple of times by the menu in the restaurant being a lot more expensive than the one in the window (not a takeaway menu, just very out of date)

People can regain these bacteria if they restart eating meat. How? By kissing.

Awesome. Known 2 long-term vegans who started eating meat after a decade or more; neither got sick (yes, I did listen to them being grilled about their decision), both are polyamorous. I guess the wider sampling of bacteria may be beneficial!

as long as it's not chlamydia...

I have gone on-and-off being a vegetarian for the past 13 years; you'll be fine.

eating fatty meat after a long period of abstention might cause a shock to your gall bladder, maybe?

but yeah, the human digestive tract in amazingly responsive & adaptable, able to withstand all sorts of diets and changes therein. you might get gassy from time to time, is all.

Would becoming a vegetarian stop me from getting the farts? Probably not, eh?

lol quite the opposite in the short run

IIRC I was nowhere near the farting wonder you see before you when I was a meateater

I am interested in the long run. Fewer and/or more angelic farts would be worth it maybe.

Oh man, looks like this is a loss. I have been trying to cut my meat intake down anyway.

yeah i have no long run experience i've only ever done it for 6 mo. at a time but ime while farts are more frequent the average raunch level goes way down

in my experience beans and legumes contribute to way more gassiness than meat. i guess if you get a chili cheese tommy's burger with chili cheese fries and an eXtreme Mountain Dew Lavashake or something your results may be different...?

i probably fart more often & louder when i'm trying to eat veg, but my most shameful & rancid are def meat / dairy related

yes, eggs and dairy (esp. those of lower quality) are as bad as the 3 day old lentil chickpea vindaloo leftovers ime.

"meat" as meat though, not the gassy monstrosity it's made out to be on this thread? discus

Been veggie for 20+ years and I find I'm just as farty now as I ever have been, but I don't get that horrible gut-knotting sensation that digesting meat used to give me as a kid. The farts now just flow gently through me like a refreshing summer wind instead of being squeezed from my innards like a bad and miserable clown through a tight pipe.

On the ethical question here PLax, I would say that if your aim is to avoid eating animal flesh, then you have clearly fucked up. If your aim is to avoid bringing harm to animals, then that is a whole other pile-up of a thread.

I kind of want to start a "who has better farts" poll thread but... no, I will not.

Eating oatmeal several times a week is a formula for horror stories.

no it isnt

I am a red in tooth and claw carnivore but my anecdotal experience wrt this is varies and also depends on whether the person once enjoyed eating meat much or not and also on the quantity and the kind of meat. I can far more easily imagine safely eating a chicken stew after years of vegetarianism than lamb or beef. Also, guilt/disappointment may not be very good for digestion either.

i eat porridge p much every day

I love oatmeal

Man, all of a sudden I want some kind of savory demi-glace infused oatmeal dish. Maybe with a red wine/cherry reduction.

I've taken to plain oatmeal (the kind that takes longer to make) with a bit of salt and sugar.

recently tried veg after 20 years without.

xps porridge soaked for ten mins before cooking, and corey otm pinch o salt is key

btw plax how was the burger

I eat it four times a week, and it produces interesting effects on one's colon.

i eat porridge p much every day

― plax (ico), Wednesday, October 27, 2010 6:07 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

And a lot of it at that!! I have oatmeal nearly every day for breakfast and it's wonderful. I don't get what ALS is talking about.

You may get sick, you may not. I've not eaten meat in 16 years so I'm pretty sure something like a bacon cheeseburger would at least leave things a bit . . . er, unsettled.

What's this free meat all about anyway?

it's meat from animals u free from labs iirc

YUM

"continental breakfast included"

kindof wanna take full adv. of that

all that really means is a slice of cantaloupe and a glazed donut

indian veggie cuisine fartiness quotient discus

iranian veggie cuisine farsiness quotient discuss

indian veggie cuisine shouldn't cause much flatulence b/c the spices aid in digesting the legumes

xxp:

Obv beans cause a greater volume of flatuence, and this remains true even for longer term vegetarians.

However, its possible for vegans to have sweeter smelling wind than omnivores, by reducing the amount of sulfur in the diet. Aside from soy, onions and garlic, few veggie foods have the high quantities of sulfur found in meat and eggs, and it the sulfur (in the form of hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol and dimethylsulfide) that gives gas its foul reputation.

xp: Another benefit of Indian food is the common use of asafoetida (especially in Jain inspired dishes) to replace garlic and onions.

Wait, are is it being said that oatmeal gives you the farts? Every day I have a big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and it's the only thing that keeps me waking up. Oatmeal, love you boo, even if you turn me into a farty motherfucker.

There's probably no fart-free diet in this world.

i luv 2 fart and i am vegan

not enough probiotics in avg. western diet imo

i'm guessing that a more balanced gut ecology reduces flatulence

also ppl eat too fast!

shawty i got 30 minutes for lunch, how else am i supposed to eat

in spain, preferably?

All that aside, I'm pretty sure it's natural to fart anyway, right.

NO it is not. i haven't since the late eighties

this bottom does not burp.

abbott i wld totally disregard ur fartiness bc of yr other awesome qualities

That may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. <2

<3 I mean

I also like that you guys forgive my general lack of typing skills.

hahah <2

that's an ice cream cone with a stick of biscotti sticking out

i am not vegetarian or vegan, but since i live with one i don't eat much meat, but still - i usu order a meat dish if i'm eating out. but when i was back in NZ a few months ago i resolved to eat lamb every day. i did this for a week and it really fucked up my stomach something bad.

lol u guys playin science

the only time i ate meat before i was super ill

but like im willing to accept it was a coincidence

all that really means is a slice of cantaloupe and a glazed donut
--corey

um this was actually pretty otm and this wasnt the moral test i was expecting.

minus the melon

:(

I went vegetarian when I was 16 for reasons of asceticism (and, in retrospect, because I probably thought it was alternative and cool). 6 years later I don't really care, but I can't find myself able to eat meat. I wonder whether it's worth the effort (i.e. awkwardness and emotion strain that comes with having a guilty personality) to start again. Not that I have a desire for meat as is, but I've grown tired of the inconveniences of not being able to have it.

I accidentally took a bite out of proscuito awhile back, and I literally gagged at how disgusting it tasted. Though I doubt it would make me sick, I wonder if I've lost the taste for meat...

i honestly feel like there's a middle ground - what about trying to eat only cruelty-free meat?

i would be down with eating only meat i actually participated in the harvesting of personally (hunting/fishing duh) but that is kinda an impossibility in the city, so i just eat what is available.

so now the true story of what happened to your neighbor comes out

Proscuito disgusting! TRAVESTY!

Still laughing at "I shan't have the soul of another cosmic traveler in my food"

soul food

I actually ate a bit of prosciutto on a pizza a few years ago because I was slightly drunk and said fuck it. That's probably the only time I've deliberately eaten meat in the last 12 years. Oh also a couple of alligator nuggets at a Cajun place.

i like my nuggets the same way i like my women: born on the bayou and scaly

The nuggets weren't great, tbh. They were small and deep-fried, so all you really tasted was the oil and breading and maybe a rubbery calamari-like bit in the middle.

balls

I hypothesize that if the entire human race stopped eating meat, in a few hundreds years - maybe sooner - we may lose the ability to eat meat. We may also grow wings.

We'll certainly get shorter.

And cows and chickens will overtake the world.

Or all starve to death en masse, more like, resulting in rampant smelly disease.

I rather doubt that cows, chicken and swine would last long outside of quaint zoos, if we stopped eating them.

And cows and chickens will overtake the world.

There are 24 billion chickens in the world today compared to only 6.9 billion humans. And 1.3 billion cattle!

DOES THAT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT ALL OF THE SHEEPLE?!

idk cattle r pretty dumb, they would prolly die w/ o us

I don't know what would happen, but it's precisely because we do eat meat that there are so damn many in the world today.

we should eat condors

And tiger

i ate some very expired pudding once and it neither killed me nor made me stronger.

no mentions of "freegans" itt?

they don't any problems with it is the thing

I have eaten free meat (via dumpster-diving acquaintances) on a number of occasions over the past couple years of being vegetarian, and never had any trouble. Ethically I am okay with this but a lot of people like to give me shit about it.

― thomp, Wednesday, 27 October 2010 18:54 (Yesterday) Bookmark

I also eat (and have always eaten) seafood, so I am not phased by consuming cosmic travellers of the sea, but I would still feel weird eating a burger...

I think if you hadn't eaten meat in many years, prosciutto would not be a great place to start! It is intensely strong, porky and salty.

Soemthing like poached chicken breast or poached fish would be a better (and healthier!) idea. Organic and free range of course.

seafood has no soul

my firstborn recovered greatly when we began to feed him meat after he spent his first two years without

he's right as rain now

so it works both ways

― make em say ukhh (history mayne), Wednesday, October 27, 2010 2:19 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is interesting. My little girl is still on the bottle, so she's not even at a place where she would have to eat meat, but that's looming ahead in the near future and I've been really worried about providing a nutrient-sufficient veggie diet for a toddler.

My son ate meat last night for the first time in over 2 years. 2 years of die-hard vegetarianism is not bad for a 7 year old! He asked me all worried "I'm gonna get in trouble won't I? Mommy will be so mad." And I had to be like "it's absolutely your choice, kiddo." He loved it. I expect this will complicate my grocery trips in the near future.

and I've been really worried about providing a nutrient-sufficient veggie diet for a toddler

There's plenty of info on this online and it's really not hard at all. You don't need to be really worried about it, just do some research.

I was put in charge of stirring the two chillis one of my friend's made for the game last night, one veggie and one meat. They both looked great so I smelled each up close and the meat one nearly made me sick just smelling it. I'm not a militant veg and don't really care what other ppl eat but I thought it was interesting and just confirmed that I really have 0 desire to ever eat meat again.

xp: yeah, I know. I've read up on it. But it's still daunting territory. Sometimes kids don't eat what you would like for them to eat.

lovin' remy's dear science link up there because now i can tell my girlfriend as long as she keeps kissing me all the time then she won't get sick when she accidentally eats a bit of meat.

i've really chilled out on this whole topic since i started this thread

it's v hard to get good ground beef for chilli/bolognese ime, i've gone off those dishes myself because they often smell p dubious while you're cooking.

Just sayin e, not all meat is born equal

I was put in charge of stirring the two chillis one of my friend's made for the game last night, one veggie and one meat.

opening sentence of a classic spoon-confusion/moral-quandary story

If the very smell of meat makes you vaguely ill, then it is no wonder at all that you choose to be vegetarian. Given a similar situation, I'd be one, too. In a heartbeat.

the butcher's part of the supermarket definitely smells the worse

I sort of wonder if the physical illness a vegetarian might feel could be based on disgust or other psychological reactions.

― I taste like the Tub Girl's back in "The Shining". (Jesse), Wednesday, October 27, 2010 2:55 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect, perhaps?

And this assumes that the person didn't eat gluten or something else that gives some eaters a bad reaction (I'll spare you the description of what cucumbers do to me).

btw, i did a boardwide search on "sonned in a vegetarian beef" and came up with nothing.

i was veg most of my life, when i first had meat at 19 i was completely fine. ethically fine too bc i had amazing friends who volunteered to give up meat during my experimental month. of course i fucked that up seeing as i've been an omnivore ever since (tho one of my friends stuck with being veg so i guess it's not as bad). at that time i also had a roommate who called himself a freegan and would happily eat anyone's meat leftovers at the dining hall, so much that he probably ate as much meat as anyone else there.

if/when i return to vegetarianism i'm not sure i'd want to give myself the "free" escape clause because i would want to drop it cold turkey and lose the desire for meat, which can take some time

For me, I feel like returning to meat would be harder than giving it up. I sort of stumbled into vegetarianism without really thinking about it, whereas eating meat would require a whole process of learning to desire it again. Not that I haven't thought about and come close to eating meat again, but it feels like it's almost more effort [/neuroses].

I can definitely relate to being grossed out by the smell of meat, since I have no qualms about enjoying the smell of a steak and other olfactorally pleasant meats. But every so often (usually when pork, or a lot of fat is involved) I just have this sick-in-the-gut feeling. One time I accidentally bit into prosciutto and actually gagged and spit it out. So at least I have no nagging desire to eat Prosciutto.

raw meat smells weird and funny, cooked meat tends to always smell delicious

otm about losing the 'desire' for meat once you've been off it, I find that even when I have meat occasionally the desire never really comes back, in fact now I kind of feel uneasy if I've had too much meat in too few days

I don't really know about raw meat smelling bad. I do know that street meat is the worst smell ever and I need to hold my breath when I pass those food carts. On the other hand I like the way hamburgers smell so go figure.

this is one of those areas where i think your rationale for not eating meat (or whatever else) affects your response. the smell of meat cooked or otherwise is repulsive to me because i find the notion of eating animals for pleasure morally repellant.

this is one of those areas where i think your rationale for not eating meat (or whatever else) affects your response.

cosign

haven't eaten meat in like 13 years but i still get random meat cravings occasionally, like for fried chicken or a really good hamburger

i think that goes beyond simple rationale -- there are a lot of vegetarians who are morally repulsed by meat-eating who also don't get pukey at the thought of it, who can be around it and live with roommates who have it in their fridge and still just see it as an object. there's a lot more to what you're talking about than just basic ideological beliefs, though i wouldn't know where to start guessing what the variables actually are xp

Yeah, I've been vegetarian for 20 years now, but like I always say, I didn't stop eating it because I didn't like the taste.

like even when i was a little 7/8 year old and the thought of putting meat into my body was disgusting and just wrong in every way, ppl eating meat around me didn't cause any physical reaction. and i still have vegan/vegetarian friends who just complain about living with other veg ppl who apparently can't be within a mile of meat at any time without becoming very unpleasant

like even when i was a little 7/8 year old and the thought of putting meat into my body was disgusting and just wrong in every way

this is maybe the most horrifying way you could have phrased this

I was surprised at my reaction last night because it looked good and also because I don't normally have that (with the exception of aforementioned street meat, of course). I am totally fine with being around meat and meat eaters and will even look the other way at little things like a spatula being used on both veggie and non-veggie burgers alike. Also, like I said before, I love the smell of burgers. This was just really weird. And gross.

haha i actually tried to figure out a decent but accurate way to phrase it bc "eating meat" seemed wrong for some reason, god i dunno

I don't know if making sound like stuffing meat in your ass was a viable option helped

omg DJP!

Maybe the beef they used was particularly gnarly or something. idk.

i just do not compose non-disgusting thoughts fast enough to keep up with the cutthroat speed of ilx analfartsdiarrhea

not totally related to this thread but I have known just a ton of veggie ppl in my life who are fantastic preparers of meat. my ex gf once has to break down a bunch of chicken for a large communal meal because the actual meat eaters didn't know how/ were too squeamish to do it

The only meat I'm repulsed by the smell/taste of is pork/bacon/ham.

tbh it's been much harder to give up sugar. I get pastry/dessert cravings almost every day. probably because the food I eat is so salty - it's nice to cap it off with something sweet.

I still have no idea how to give up sugar.

Still haven't lived down the drippings in separate gravy incident from last summer. I hadn't realised and the girl instantly gagged without even knowing it was non vegetarian. Felt SO BAD.

If the very smell of meat makes you vaguely ill, then it is no wonder at all that you choose to be vegetarian. Given a similar situation, I'd be one, too. In a heartbeat.

― Aimless, Monday, 6 February 2012 18:46 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw, & co-signing EDB, i think it's more of something that comes with the remove from eating meat; it kinda snowballs & seems weirder and weirder & more and more an abstract thing that you just wouldn't eat. it's like you deprive it of its function & so are confronted with the form, & the form is just some gross dead flesh, so

it's gross dead flesh even when presented in its most palatable form

kinda, but i think that's less of a singular response, compared to if it's gross dead flesh that you're looking forward to eating/that you've cooked particularly well/that's of the more expensive variety of gross dead fleshes/that would go well with ____, &c. i think a detachment from 'use' of the object gives it a kinda objectivity?, if that isn't too strong, the lack of conflict with desire/hunger/need &c means you see it as just this one thing. trying not to make it sound like you're all cavemen overwhelmed by the smell of the prey & so blind to your ungodly deeds, sorry.

going veg in times of poverty is really great and really rocks your kitchen creativity.

srs question -- how hard was it for those of you who were meateaters to make the jump to vegetarianism?

not that I'm considering that drastic of a lifestyle change right now, but I do generally like the vegetarian fare I've had. I have ingrained cravings for meat though that I have to satisfy every so often, but I always feel crappy after I eat a full-fledged hunk of meat (physically, not ethically).

fwiw, ilx has a vegetarian or vegan vs. non-vegetarian thread at least 1.3 times a year, iirc, and much the same points are made at each iteration.

My perennial point is that I accept that a largely vegetarian diet is generally better for the planet than a heavily meat-oriented diet. I also accept that a largely vegetarian diet is generally healthier for humans, unless there is some compelling and unusual health condition that would make this problematic. I even accept that the factory-farming methods by which most animals are raised for slaughter are unethical and often insupportable. But, none of these are moral arguments against the eating of meat, in and of themselves. Yet they are by far the most common reasons given for vegetarianism.

There are parts of the planet that are unproductive for food raising in any form but the grazing of domestic animals. Eating very small amounts of meat has no effect whatsoever on the health benefits of mostly avoiding meat. There is nothing inherently cruel about raising farm animals; it can be done humanely. So, my conclusion is that there is no need for absolutism regarding meat-eating.

Yet, that is almost always how vegetarianism is presented, as something that must be pursued rigorously and with complete purity of action, and I'd say veganism is conspicuously absolute about its standards. If you aren't absolute, you are not a "real" vegan or vegetarian.

I then try to figure out why this is true.

My conclusion is that some people are simply disgusted by animal derived food, for reasons of taste or digestion. They can't stomach it, more or less. That's a great reason not to eat it, but not a great reason why anyone else should not. There are other people for whom the idea of eating dead flesh is disgusting, whatever their taste buds or stomach might say about it. Again, this is fine for them and I've no problem with that, but it should not be universalized. It is just a personal choice.

No matter how hard I look at it, I can't see this as a simple, black-and-white moral issue. Cruelty is a moral issue. Greed and gluttony are moral issues. Whether or not you eat meat is not a moral issue.

OK, that wraps it up! See you all next year on the next version of this thread.

BJO - it was 16 years ago so I honestly don't remember but I don't really think it was that hard. I did it in stages iirc.

really rocks your kitchen creativity.

yesssss. i think this is so true, it sorta reminds me of the thing about great art thriving under constraints. i think there's something satisfying about the act of having to think around things, and then something just kinda easy about having a smaller palette of things to decide from (this is maybe just for me because i get option paralysis so like it if there are just three options, & also i know there are still a zillion things, & a zillion nuanced lightly sumac'd variations on those things).

xxp

There are parts of the planet that are unproductive for food raising in any form but the grazing of domestic animal

that's sorta playing hide the ball here, the problem isn't so much 'we don't have enough land', the prob is the ghg emissions created by one person consuming what we would consider 'a moderate amount of meat' + the fact that it's pretty clear that developing countries shifting to these (our) consumption patterns is a v. v. bad thing.

I think there's something wrong w/ telling some newly minted middle class chinese person not to eat meat or drive a car because it's gonna fuck the planet if 1.5 billion more people do it - but, hey, it's okay for americans, cause, ya know, we were born somewhere better.

also: the last pre-vegetarianism meal i ate was a 99p sweet & sour chicken microwave thing, the jump to vegetarianism at the very least a lateral move. i am not a v good advertisement for the delicious ease of vegetarianism bc a lot of the time i just subsist on autopilot, but if you need convincing then i guess maybe commit or think about eating vegetarian meals that are nicer than the carnivorous meals you'd eat ordinarily; so i guess set aside more time for it (afaic vegetarianism just boils down to sauteeing the shit out onions for the rest of your life), buy primo ingredients (primo vegetables, expensive mixed bean salads, bulgur or quinoa over cous cous), spend time making vinegarettes, &c. 'replacing meat' was never really a big focus for me, i just ate other stuff, i don't think i really think logically enough in terms of food groups, or recognise my visceral/nutritional urges well enough to know what i want/need/miss, but i think trying to just make nice food often probably beats getting too hung up on the sudden, specific loss of bacon from breakfasts or w/e

so i don't really believe in being a fussy eater and this weighs on me wrt being a vegetarian. i mean so i'll eat meat if its just gonna go in the. in otherwise, i've eaten dumpster dive meat and i can't really see any problem with this despite being yelled at for it by a vegetarian friend who owns a rabbit fur coat. and so i think about it sometimes. it would be good to not have to be awkward sometimes. but its hard to go back to not thinking about it. i just wish everyone would give it up so that i wouldnt have to be a vegetarian. it just tires me to think about it though, how we go to so much trouble, all these animals taking up so much room, eating so many crops. its not efficient. and people trying not to think about it, abstracting it. because in the end theres something that didnt want to feel pain and didnt want to die.

owns a rabbit fur coat

This'd actually be regarded as pretty ok for some sustainable-usage types here, as rabbits are basically a feral pest. I also know a vege friend who is moving to eating kangaroo as her only meat, as it's a wild farmed, sustainable source.

(and is also delish)

I think Aimless is def onto something w/ how eager we are to draw uncrossable barriers between veg/not-veg

there are all sorts of reasons to have all sorts of eating habits and as a "strict" vegetarian who when he accidentally eats meat still finds it delicious i hardly ever bother to proselytize (especially to people who recognize at least that the factory farms are well-placed on our species' ledger of embarrassments) but i mean regardless of where you draw your personal ethical line and regardless of how impossible it is to be a modern "civilized" first-worlder and truly exempt yourself from all forms of oppression and murder, it would be kind of silly to argue that there is not an uncrossable barrier of some kind between people who feel their personal gustatory pleasure is worth a death and people who don't; that is why we have a word for it

xOP: Two years vegan, I accidentally purchased canned vegetable soup made with chicken stock, and the taste was very offputting. I added it to the dog's chow after two bites.

I haven't otherwise lapsed with meat, but I'm willing to eat cheese so as not to inconvenience hosts. One bean burrito with cheese, though, and I go straight from pleasant 4 to reluctant 2 on the Bristol stool scale. They make Elmer's glue out of that stuff (dairy).

(i don't see a problem w/ dumpster dive meat either and almost all of my meat intake over the past six years has come from waiters accidentally bringing me hamburgers)

pretty hard to argue w/ freeganism

people who feel their personal gustatory pleasure is worth a death and people who don't

I happen to think that his pov entails a definite misunderstanding of the idea of what is "a life" or "a death". My sense of plants is that they are alive and they are distressed in some way by their inability to sustain their life. What they cannot feel is pain, as most animals feel it.

Additionally, it seems true to me that every creature must die and every creature's carcass must eventually be consumed by some other form of life. This is much like a physical law. As I said above, it is possible to escape wanton cruelty, greed or gluttony in obeying this law, but no one can escape the law of incorporating the molecules of another, certainly dead, thing to sustain their own life. It ain't possible.

that's why I swallow living organisms whole

Additionally, it seems true to me that every creature must die and every creature's carcass must eventually be consumed by some other form of life. This is much like a physical law.

i always imagine predatory lovecraftian aliens explaining this to me in slightly confused voices like they're surprised i need to be told

there's plenty to debate here and i'm not saying that choosing not to kill things to eat them is The Only Right Choice or even not on some level deluded, just that it was weird you overlooked it and said that the only reason you could think of to be a vegetarian is that meat tastes bad

Shit. Plants are alive before you eat them. They are dead when you eat them. How willfully blind must anyone be to misunderstand this? You cannot eat, without eating a dead thing that was killed so you could eat it. Fuck. There is not one righteous. No, not one.

anyway surely there is a difference between incorporating molecules into your body that happened once to belong to something else and keeping animals around until they look tasty enough to kill, which is presumably not when they are withered and senile?

the plants thing, i mean, i don't really know what "distressed" would mean in this context, but of course there are more things in heaven than earth etc etc and i don't pretend to know what's going on. but i do feel an emotional kinship w/ creatures capable of exhibiting feelings not too distant from my own (not to mention caring for their children) that makes me uncomfortable with the idea of killing them for enjoyment, is all

i've been considering going back to eating shrimp because i thought about it and i don't really care about them

*more things in heaven and earth obv

You joke but that is seriously the reason i started eating shellfish a couple years ago. :/ I just can't muster any feelings towards the little buggers. Also, they're fucking delicious.

no i'm not joking at all, same here

like i think the cross-purpose we are at here is that you think i think that i am somehow choosing never to kill anything or gain any energy from the death of anything ever, which is yes of course impossible, when all i am saying is that some people are uncomfortable with the idea of killing things they don't actually have to kill only because they taste good

dlh, you are using rhetoric that basically is an appeal to emotion and nothing more that I can derive from it. I have no objection to your emotions, but your emotions, or those of anyone else, cannot be a sound basis for proving my pov wrong. Your right to choose what feels right to you is fine by me, but your feelings are immaterial to my choice.

well there's nothing wrong with killing an animal only because they taste good if you don't believe that animals have a real sense of being etc.

yeah of course not! all i'm trying to do here is help w/ this:

Yet, that is almost always how vegetarianism is presented, as something that must be pursued rigorously and with complete purity of action, and I'd say veganism is conspicuously absolute about its standards. If you aren't absolute, you are not a "real" vegan or vegetarian.

I then try to figure out why this is true.

My conclusion is that some people are simply disgusted by animal derived food, for reasons of taste or digestion.

because there is another reason people pursue vegetarianism rigorously, taste and digestion are not the only reasons

you don't believe that animals have a real sense of being

>:[

for me, the shortcomings of freeganism or dumpster diving or "humane meat farming" or whatever less shitty way of producing/consuming animals come from my feelings that there is value in taboo. i'd no sooner eat my dog if someone accidentally served me his charred remains than i would any other animal even thoughi know on a rational level that no moral transgression occurs against an already-dead animal if i were to consume one

dlh, what you quoted was accurate, but not the most germaine piece of what I said. Read a sentence or two past where your quote ends.

whereas I think overconsumption should the taboo more than not eating meat xp

should be the

I have no problem with people eating annoying little dogs.

― Dan I., Saturday, April 5, 2008

Yorkie's are probably delicious.

Yorkies, rather

i'd no sooner eat my dog if someone accidentally served me his charred remains than i would any other animal

Donner Party to thread!

dlh, what you quoted was accurate, but not the most germaine piece of what I said. Read a sentence or two past where your quote ends.

― Aimless, Monday, February 6, 2012 8:01 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh fair enough sorry:

There are other people for whom the idea of eating dead flesh is disgusting, whatever their taste buds or stomach might say about it.

i had misread this as just meaning that some people are psychologically grossed out by the idea of dead flesh, not that they have ethical objections. while we're here tho:

Again, this is fine for them and I've no problem with that, but it should not be universalized. It is just a personal choice.

no doubt, but how does this make it different from choosing not to buy from factory farms? by what universalizable objective criteria are we condemning torturing animals if there aren't any criteria to condemn killing them unnecessarily? they feel the pain and humiliation of cruelty but don't care about dying because they're gonna do it eventually anyway? i mean, it seems to me that all these choices are personal, since plenty of people could (and do) have a personal ethical system that doesn't have any problem with doing whatever you want to cows. and of course i can't prove your pov wrong and i never meant to try; this is an ethical position and i don't think you can prove those with charts.

i am curious about the taste of dogs (also people natch)

(as aimless warned above this debate pretty much always ends w/ various people hitting their heads against various walls, added to which it's one of the touchier subjects likely to come up in normal conversation since everyone involved immediately feels that they're being called either evil or deluded, so just one more reiteration here that i don't consider myself to have the moral authority or omniscience to call meat-eaters evil; just saying that this is a point that can be argued and isn't in its own special hermetic category)

dlh, you appear to be stating flatly that actively killing any animal is equivalent to subjectng it to torture, pain, humiliation, cruelty, and a complete lack of caring about it as a being, and that whatever form that killing takes it is equivalent to all other possible forms of killing it. This seems like pretty unnuanced thnking and very reckless rhetoric. God forbid you should ever have to euthanize a pet.

In my long post that you have been quoting I deliberately cut out a paragraph I wrote, about how there are a small minority of vegetarians who are so bothered by the very idea of meat eating that they cannot be satisfied with merely abstaining from it, but feel they must condemn every person on earth who does not feel the same disgust which they feel. And these people, through the vehemence of their denunciation of meat-eating, provoke an ugly backlash against all vegetarians, not just those who indulge in flaming holier-than-thou rhetoric.

I decided to cut it out because it seemed inflammatory, considering that no one had yet engaged in such evangelizing rhetoric.

mrs. a & I have been veg forever but we now refer to any particularly desirable food as "outside chicken" so I think the purists are fixing to pull our cards :(

lool

xxp no i'm saying that the question of whether it's ok to kill animals for pleasure isn't any more "personal" than the question of whether or not it's ok to torture them for efficiency. (like you i'm pretty sure torture is worse.) all these questions are personal. there's no reason cruelty should be a debatable Moral Issue and killing shouldn't, regardless of which ones you think are bad or how bad you think they are or any of that. people choosing not to eat meat for ethical reasons shouldn't be any more confusing or impossible to defend than people choosing not to buy from factory farms, and i don't know that the case against factory farms is any less grounded in "emotion" than the case for vegetarianism (on "cruelty" grounds, that is; unsustainability/environmental impact is a different subject). at this point we are tangled up in something like semantics which may well be My Fault and we should probably drop it.

anyway as long as we're implying things i might as well reveal that i cut out a line earlier about how the lamentable thing about this subject is that some people take any vegetarian position any stronger than "this is a totally irrational choice i have made inside my own moral universe that i would never presume to try and defend" as meaning "you are scum and must repent", but i dropped it cuz no one had done that yet.

i eat vegan usually like 3 days out of 7 maybe leaning to a little more often right now cuz ive stopped drinking skim milk and that was one of the last big sticking points

idk sometimes i feel stupid/unethical/pathetic for not picking a side and sticking to it, kinda just dithering abt what i consider right/wrong and so gradually chipping away at the things i will eat. i mean its important to me that i eat in a way thats 'sustainable' but i havent really figured out what that means, exactly.

when did this even become a debate

Gah this thread suddenly went somewhere interesting real fast, but to go back to this:

i've been considering going back to eating shrimp because i thought about it and i don't really care about them

This reminds me of a Futurama episode about the Popplers that everyone loved til it turned out they were babies of Omocronians, then it was all "nooo sentient cute beings! cannot eat".

At the end of the ep evryone expresses horror at Farnsworth serving up dolphin, til he explains its ok cause "this one blew all its money on lottery tickets"

shrimp is one thing i have actual trouble eating bc whenever i try i think about this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMO8Pyi3UpY

gah cannot believe that thing looks delicious to somebody

It doesnt in that state but in this state it totes does:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UIXOn06Pz70/Sp7-vk_YiVI/AAAAAAAAIfw/BxkzF3D7IsE/s800/Thai+Tom+Yum+Grilled+Shrimp+500.jpg

could probably get centipedes to look like that too

Well ppl eat those too in some places dont they? Certainly crickets et al. Actually I asked my vegan ex if he had a moral objection (taste prefs aside) for eating insects. He fond that an interesting question, but in the end said it was still killing something.

But yes where do insects fall in the scheme of things?

Shit. Plants are alive before you eat them. They are dead when you eat them. How willfully blind must anyone be to misunderstand this? You cannot eat, without eating a dead thing that was killed so you could eat it. Fuck. There is not one righteous. No, not one.

― Aimless, Monday, February 6, 2012 7:38 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, sure, but it's not just "killing for food" that vegetarians & vegans typically object to, but rather the killing & mistreatment of animals. the reasons why we might value the lives of animals more than those of plants & fungii & c should be fairly obvious: animals clearly experience fear and pain. the mammals we're most fond of eating seem to be sentient. they clearly think and feel, and it's this capacity to which we attach special value. the moral objection to eating animals may be based in emotion, but it's not arbitrary or irrational. to some degree or another, humans can know the minds of animals. not so true of plants.

*eats coma patient*

lol yeah, it's not a hard & fast line

xp

killing & mistreatment of animals

No argument here about mistreatment of animals. It is wrong.

But one may reasonably make a distinction between killing and mistreatment. This distinction is one most people, including vegans and vegetarians btw, accept with regard to euthanizing pets, for example. So, unless killing is always accepted as mistreatment and cruelty, an appeal to mistreatment or cruelty cannot be cited as a blanket argument against killing, but only against instances of mistreatment or cruelty.

animals clearly experience fear and pain

As for fear and pain, for the sake of argument, if these were entirely removed from the deaths of food animals, if they were killed swiftly in their sleep for example, would it change your mind about eating meat?

well, i do eat meat. i regard it as morally wrong, but i have no scruples.

the euthanasia argument doesn't seem terribly compelling to me. we euthanize animals in order to spare them pain (and, of course, to spare ourselves the expense of treatment). killing can be acceptable if the degree of suffering entailed by the continuance of life becomes overwhelming. this reflects the extent to which we value not just the simple physical property of "life", but the sentient mind that experiences existence.

i suppose that some would be mollified by kinder, gentler means of execution, but others would continue to object that the killing was still unnecessary and unjustified, thus a violation of sentience's basic rights to life and self-determination. i mean, some people want to extend to animals the same sorts of rights we grant humans.

also one trolly question before I go to sleep: if we have to consider animal welfare and suffering, shouldn't we be far more concerned about the suffering that billions of animals experience in their natural lives on this planet? if you were to tally up the suffering experienced by animals, the amount that's caused by human-for-food is going to be a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

which would not excuse creating more suffering, but at the same time, if *total animal welfare* is the single most important thing (and if animals can suffer, then I can't see why this shouldn't be the case) then the suffering that animals experience in nature is an exponentially larger problem to solve. I don't think a goat that's being eaten alive by a tiger 'suffers less' than a goat in a slaughterhouse just because it's dying as nature wanted.

that's to say, even if all humans were to go vegetarian, you'd still have animals being eaten alive throughout the world and total animal welfare would prob not have actually changed substantially. and if you believe animals are sentient beings and it's morally wrong to cause them suffering, then yeah, regardless of what's happening elsewhere, it's still wrong to kill them. but I do think that people w/ that POV are sorta zeroing in on a tiny, tiny segment of animal suffering, which is strange. sure it's *bad* but in this context 'humans eating animals' is just a tiny battle in an enormous, enormous, probably endless war to bring animals better lives.

anyway like I said people should be vegetarians anyway.

also one trolly question before I go to sleep: if we have to consider animal welfare and suffering, shouldn't we be far more concerned about the suffering that billions of animals experience in their natural lives on this planet? if you were to tally up the suffering experienced by animals, the amount that's caused by human-for-food is going to be a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

which would not excuse creating more suffering, but at the same time, if *total animal welfare* is the single most important thing (and if animals can suffer, then I can't see why this shouldn't be the case) then the suffering that animals experience in nature is an exponentially larger problem to solve. I don't think a goat that's being eaten alive by a tiger 'suffers less' than a goat in a slaughterhouse just because it's dying as nature wanted.

that's to say, even if all humans were to go vegetarian, you'd still have animals being eaten alive throughout the world and total animal welfare would prob not have actually changed substantially. and if you believe animals are sentient beings and it's morally wrong to cause them suffering, then yeah, regardless of what's happening elsewhere, it's still wrong to kill them. but I do think that people w/ that POV are sorta zeroing in on a tiny, tiny segment of animal suffering, which is strange. sure it's *bad* but in this context 'humans eating animals' is just a tiny battle in an enormous, enormous, probably endless war to bring animals better lives.

anyway like I said people should be vegetarians anyway.

^^^this is how colonialism happened

suffering and morality gets complicated fast, but few moral systems compel us to eliminate suffering entirely. most simply suggest that we attempt to minimize it where possible and allow compassion & respect to guide our decision-making.

our awareness that suffering and death exist everywhere shouldn't incline us, i don't think, to be less careful about the harm we might personally inflict.

humans are the only animals that can decide whether or not to be a part of the food chain. obv trying to disrupt the rest of the food chain isn't really possible but it's more about our actions/choices than the sum effect i guess. i think it's telling and interesting that vegetarianism isn't a relatively new trend and that human beings have been separating themselves from the "natural order" of predator/prey for centuries. or even the many cultures that developed a tradition of respect for the animals they did kill. compassion is what separates us and makes it hard to put us in the same context as non-reasoning creatures.

any true sentient being knows to incorporate suffering into its own pleasure.

only eat euthanized pets imo

gonna go out on a limb and say food animals outnumber wild animals bc of "attrition" esp once you consider fish (as far as land animals go, in usa alone its 8-10 billion land animals killed per year)

so basically

you'd still have animals being eaten alive throughout the world and total animal welfare would prob not have actually changed substantially.

this is a bullshit copout that vastly underestimates the scale of animal use now and to come on a global scale

I happen to think that his pov entails a definite misunderstanding of the idea of what is "a life" or "a death". My sense of plants is that they are alive and they are distressed in some way by their inability to sustain their life. What they cannot feel is pain, as most animals feel it.
...
Shit. Plants are alive before you eat them. They are dead when you eat them. How willfully blind must anyone be to misunderstand this? You cannot eat, without eating a dead thing that was killed so you could eat it. Fuck. There is not one righteous. No, not one.

― Aimless, Monday, February 6, 2012 7:38 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, sure, but it's not just "killing for food" that vegetarians & vegans typically object to, but rather the killing & mistreatment of animals. the reasons why we might value the lives of animals more than those of plants & fungii & c should be fairly obvious: animals clearly experience fear and pain. the mammals we're most fond of eating seem to be sentient. they clearly think and feel, and it's this capacity to which we attach special value. the moral objection to eating animals may be based in emotion, but it's not arbitrary or irrational. to some degree or another, humans can know the minds of animals. not so true of plants.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Tuesday, 7 February 2012 06:14 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wanted to co-sign this. i think one of the problems with interrogating the perceived righteousness of people who are 'militant' about vegetarianism is that it reduces the small step people have taken towards trying to mitigate their effect on the world into an unwinnable, inevitably flawed calculation; either because they wear leather, will continue to contribute towards/benefit from the oppression of animals elsewhere or whatever; there will always be something. i'm not arguing that people aren't, probably, assholes about it, but it nonetheless feels like the wrong calculation to make about people who are, i think, trying to do a thing, pointing out that there is no platonic and successful end goal for their efforts, only compromise and alternation, only degrees and semantics to which they can meet a stated aim. re: the above, i think that shooting for an objectivity regarding animals, and then plants, and then life on a cellular level, to spare us from the more immediate if flawed and subjective reality that animals seem like life-like-us, is maybe not so much a cop-out but a construct that shoots for an objectivity humans don't have; part of recognising that we are animals, also, is acknowledging the weight & hard-wiring of our basic emotions and associations, & i feel like sentience is just so utterly, all encompassingly, a human thing, the human thing, that extending it to plants & onwards to suggest it's hard to draw a real technical line (which it is! you're right on your terms) is evasive. it's like some of the arguments about OWS, that becuase it has no concrete endgoal, its idea of general improvement and benevolent expenditure of effort isn't worth it, somehow. i appreciate the aimless posts above, & agree that many of the personal narratives of forgoing meat lack broader evidence to suggest that it's morally imperative for others to vegetarian-ise, but i feel like something that's in so many ways 'emotive' - & i don't mean necessarily linked to a touchy-feely fondness for animals so much as i do rooted in ideas about consciousness and life - is more likely to present itself as a moral decision, around which everything else should be ordered, rather than a rigorous, pragmatic one (which i think maybe segues into iatee's post about the actual effects of people forgoing meat en masse and what would happen).

schlump is the right person for the big posts imo

lol "big posts"

<3 you guys but gd you are a wordy bunch

like i am going too far here but i think playing when does a heap become a heap with this is going too far:

http://www.pokharacity.com/photos/creative-corner/pickin-carrots/pickin-carrots.jpg

vs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk4LHcOMA4s

(sorry to be the guy who felt compelled to post le sang des betes, but there we go. the above contains abbatoir footage)

(also this is the most brutally propagandist i have ever been on ilx, what w/the innocent-children-vegetable-pickers imagery)
xp

i refute you thusly (picture of steak)

tg; de

xp
mid-afternoon slaughterhouse-film posts are properly rebuked by the sb, iirc

also there is that great barthes essay steak and chips (p34) about how you just eat steak to feel all tough

u are misreading Barthes a little there

well short of rehydrated mush we all eat whatever to feel *something*

Or, y'know, i'd rather eat steak to feel tough than cabbage to feel smug

i was googling around for it & some of the results are 'well if barthes loves vegetables so much maybe he should be vegetarian'. i do sorta think that's some of his point?, but i haven't read the essay for a while so maybe he derails after the first graf.

Or, y'know, i'd rather eat steak to feel tough than cabbage to feel smug

ha

lol i swore to myself i wd not touch veggie debates i am out.

seriously tho, "we eat steak to feel tough" is reductive to the point of rong re: that Barthes essay

it's tied up with Frenchness and expression of speciesist/national character iirc

i am happy to rescind my meat eaters wanna be tough guys charge, at least until i find something else in support of it, maybe a drawing i will do

wdn't argue about a cult of machismo around meat-eating but wd argue it's often justification after the fact, as are plenty of pro-veggie arguments too?

if we say conscious carnivores and vegetarians often aspire to be certain kinds of people and their eating habits are a reflection of this

wdn't argue about a cult of machismo around meat-eating but wd argue it's often justification after the fact, as are plenty of pro-veggie arguments too?

wd argue there is an equally strong cult of holy righteousness around vegetarianism (and veganism moreso), but als that it's justification after the fact

(nb neither of these arguments apply to most people)

that's what i was saying remy - and i don't know, i think they apply to most people who take a stance about what they eat, because that sense of selfhood is ultimately deeper and sub-rational than the logical path leading to a decision?

selfhood is fine, grand, maslow level 99 enjoy that, whatever. it's 'taking stances' that, imo, sucks balls (or a vegetarian equivalent)

stances can suck i guess, if you're thinking about something for display or social standing? but i understand the impulse to evangelize about some of the stuff we believe. if you sincerely believe a thing is right surely it's a natural impulse to try and persuade others? nb your persuasive techniques may be more or less obnoxious, always read small print etc

Plants communicate pain to each other - http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_178237_en.html

not natural at all imo (re evangelising)

i can't decide whether 'pain' feels anthropomorphic, to me, there, but that's a really interesting article

i didn't want to use "natural" but you know what i meant. you don't see any link between "i think this ought to be the case" and "i will try to persuade you that this ought to be the case"?

we cd look at political actions that have, by largish majority consent, improved the quality of the world and say that those actions cdn't have happened unless people were prepared to try and persuade others of rightness?

nope! But i'm strange with ppl iirc

you wd have sucked in 12 Angry Men, dude

i think that great action is motivated by change in (a) reconceptualization of X (b) utility/non-utility of extant system X (c) compromise between X and not-X . rightness/righteousness can enter at any point,and does – mostly – but it an epsilon sum to the large shift in thinking/using/understanding X

i agree with the first part but i dunno about the second. slave trade is the obvious analogy i was thinking of here. but for example the UK government's abolition of the slave trade ended up falling back on a relatively small number of people seeking to persuade one another, and that had to impinge on the larger processes.

cd argue that the US Civil War is in part a continuation of persuasion by more forceful means.

like a naive Marxian "superstructure doesn't change unless base does" argument feels inadequate to me sometimes because political systems amongst other things create disproportionate power to effect change

sry i wandered a long way off into the woods here

hah, I get your point nevertheless. I just think that 'eating somewhat differently' doesn't find equivalence with 'enslaving humans' unless we're really, really militant abt. things.

my 12 angry men would have ended in a three minute guilty verdict with fonda getting a slap for his trouble. Bish bosh etc

tho my 'nope' was, tbf, an xp

I eat meat. I love it. My wife was vegetarian as a teenager, for many reasons, primarily to do with 'control' though, I suspect, but started eating fish about 6 years ago and meat about 4 years ago. She's very particular about where we get stuff from, though; as often as possible we use our local, organic, award-winning etc etc posh butcher (who do trips around their farm to see how well cared for the animals are etc). Chicken and eggs are always free range, etc. Fish comes from the local fishmonger. Etc etc.

I just think that 'eating somewhat differently' doesn't find equivalence with 'enslaving humans' unless we're really, really militant abt. things.

i absolutely agree. obviously there's a cadre of people who don't agree. but the argument was really with darragh about whether a personal moral impulse usually does or should lead to an attempt to convince others that they shd change their behaviour.

new thread imo

but yknow i'm not campaigning to anyone for it like

i started writing it up then i thought nah bollocks

true/false: food pickiness is a good metric for general craziness

otm

liberal me says "hey we're all different", unmediated me shakes my damn head at adults who are picky eaters

false imo

anyway, arguments for vegetarianism based on empathy w/ mammals seem weird to me, because as mentioned above, where do you draw the line - crustaceans, insects, shellfish, fish are okay to eat because they are Of The Void and don't have doe eyes?

gotta love an ex of mine who spent most of the week drinking and smoking herself stupid and then lectured me on how unhealthy meat-eating is tho

http://i.imgur.com/Hmmk6.jpg

i have a (gladly) untested theory that most people are only ~ 48 hours from cannibalism

nah i'd give it a week, how long did those dudes in Alive hold out allegedly?

Picky eaters need therapy.

http://i.imgur.com/7bjjK.jpg

http://f00.inventorspot.com/images/int-fish.jpg

Dayo what is that creepy fish with the faces thing? I vaguely remember that but I can't place it!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_(video_game)

Oh wow. A guy I dated in like 2001 had that game and it used to freak me out. I'd completely forgotten about it. Those things were so so creepy.

I think they talked and they were fresh too iirc. Wow talk about something I haven't thought about in over a decade. Damn.

"fresh"?? like cheeky?

i sold an unopened box of that on ebay like 7 years ago for a decent price

now make a joke

Yes, like cheeky. They talked back to you!

lol Lamp

"Cheeky Fish" wd've been a better game name imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6oajPBSnO8

Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16972761

would you?

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/02/all-you-can-eat-shrimp-side-ecologial-ruin

there was that interesting factoid about when oil was cheap, it was more cost effective for british shrimpers to ship their shrimp to thailand to be frozen and then shipped back to britain, than for british shrimpers to invest in freezing facilities in britain

god, I've been craving cheeseburgers like a motherfucker.

Quick, go out and kill a kitten with your bare hands! I guarantee that will stop the craving.

i am having a serious craving for buffalo wings, a food i have never actually eaten.

just eat an assload of hotsauce + ranch.

buffalo don't have wings.

Had a recent debate about how american 'buffalo' wings are just chicken wings pumped full of bullshit to make them HUUUGE. British chicken wings are the real size of wings, minuscule, almost meatless and reassuring.

This. You can get make or buy buffalo wing sauce pretty easily, then just toss some veggie chicken nuggets in it, or some seitan. Whatever. This is an easy one to avoid.

I've been talking myself out of getting a hamburger on a daily basis lately.

xp

American buffalo wings are pretty small too

Had a recent debate about how american 'buffalo' wings are just chicken wings pumped full of bullshit to make them HUUUGE. British chicken wings are the real size of wings, minuscule, almost meatless and reassuring.

― owenf

buffalo wings are just deep fried chicken wings with sauce. they are called "buffalo" because the style was invented in buffalo, ny. the size is the same as any normal chicken wing.

But everytime I go to the states they seem so huge. Guess it's been a while.

there ought to be a reconstituted chicken wing with "bones" made of hardtack and honey so there'd be no waste, and with divots so that the sauce can be injected directly into the "chicken". also the "marrow" is made of ice cream.

http://www.gardein.com/products.php?t=frozen

get on my level

so after being vegan/vegetarian for over a decade i've had some seafood and meat a few times this month. i feel ambivalent about it.

the seafood was a good experience, i feel okay about that. on our family vacation in north carolina my brother made crab cakes using my grandma's recipe and i felt like i was appreciating a family tradition, i've always felt alienating over the past 12 years passing up these crab cakes so it was nice to participate.

on the same trip my dad made these incredible pan-fried soft shelled crabs that were probably one of the best things i've ever eaten in my life. again this was kind of a family tradition for my dad to make these and most of the time it has been really easy being vegan/vegetarian but whenever he made these soft shelled crabs i felt like i was missing out. so i has happy i ate them.

then last week i went to a farmer's market in town and a vendor had a grill and was selling barbecue sandwiches w/ meat from locally raised animals from small farms in new england. i had a pulled pork sandwich, it was very intense. i was still okay with eating it.

the next day i had this burrito from a local burrito/tacqueria chain and had some pork w/ chili verde and it was really really gross, i felt pretty disgusting eating it and felt physically terrible all day and through the night.

i'm okay w/ having meat i think but i will need to figure out some way of balancing, i love being vegetarian but i think it is more the special occassion/family thing where i'd like to continue eating meat/seafood. like on thanksgiving my sister-in-law serves turkey that she raised and slaughtered on their family farm and it has really been weird passing that up for a "tofurky", so this year i think i will eat some.

cheese & eggs have been in my life for a few years now, i am definitely a much happier person with eggs and dairy in my diet.

Do u boo 👅

idgi m bison :(

buzza you imp!

― acoleuthic, Wednesday, October 27, 2010 7:12 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Marcos, your posts felt like a confession, it's rly ok

lol they were totally a confession! I feel like I've been vegetarian forever. Most of the crew I hung around with in my twenties were vegan animal rights activists (and I married one, now vegetarian though)

I've been vegan going on 12 years now, wife's about 10, son been from birth. It's kind of second nature and I don't rly think abt it much anymore. Def more interested in other areas of food justice. Still plan on being vegan until I die at the age of 138

I will be the fattest old person over 110, life goal

I've been a vegetarian for 20 years. That's crazy.

OK here *my* confession - I eat seafood about 5x per year. I might stop that though - idk. I can't imagine eating any other kind of meat ever again which is probably down to my not eating it longer than I ate it for at this point.

And by seafood I really mean shellfish because it's the only kind I really like not that that distinction really makes a difference.

I'm not a vegetarian but without noticing I've all-but stopped buying and eating meat for some reason. There is no real reason I can think of.

expensive

yeah it's that, i think.

maybe u secretly love animals too

<3 animals

Especially with mustard.

noooooooooo!

<3 not eating animals

But have you ever tried one with mustard?

mustard tastes equally mustardy with veggie sausages or baked potatoes or braised kale fyi

idd no mustard diss, mustard is awesome and vegan too

i'm not a huge animal guy to be honest, and this is something people get a bit o_O with me about, but i never had pets growing up and so i've never had that special bond with non-human creatures a lot of people find natural.
but were i to quit meat for conscientious reasons, they would be environmental. the more i think about it, vegetarianism makes so much ecological and humanitarian sense, and the western world is now at a stage where given the choice, we could all just forego meat if we wanted to and make the world a better place.

i'm not a huge animal guy to be honest

huge animals are the best.

i was waiting for that.

the environment is where i take my dumps

and the western world is now at a stage where given the choice, we could all just forego meat if we wanted to and make the world a better place.

― 9 days from now a.k.a next weekend. (dog latin), Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why 'the western world' here?

well not just the western world, but most of us do have the privilege of choosing exactly what we can and can't eat, so why not put it to good use?

"i'm not a huge animal guy to be honest, and this is something people get a bit o_O with me about, but i never had pets growing up and so i've never had that special bond with non-human creatures a lot of people find natural. "

You can get a pet now - it's never too late! ~ a huge animal person who can't imagine not having a pet and honestly thinks that everyeone who can should have one because the experience makes you a better person imo

And I totally get o_O at not animal people mostly because it's just something I can't comprehend.

i'm allergic to cats and have a residual fear of dogs from a bad childhood experience.

plus animals make your house smell bad and i have a hard time looking after my own life, let alone an animal's life.

plus renting a house = dodgy territory when it comes to keeping pets. my partner is pressing me on it though, so it may happen one day when we have a garden and don't have our front door going onto the road.

i have a hard time looking after my own life, let alone an animal's life.

should get one of those service animals then

we had goldfish when i was little and then our family got a cat when i was probably about 15, but that's when the constant sneezing and headaches started. i had three younger brothers and sisters and they were all animals, so not much room for pets.

monkey butler what about a monkey butler

i'll take it!

i p much can't stop watching this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0V9CoZNrNc

omg that is amazing

monkey butlers

http://www.monkeyhelpers.org/

dog latin i never had pets either growing up, i do feel amazement at animals in general though but i totally identify w/ you b/c of allergies and how that can impede your relationship to animals(or at least dogs and cats), i'm very allergic to both dogs and cats and my life would really be way shittier if i had them in my home, if i spend any time at someone's house with a dog or cat i have to dose up on a ton of allergy medication beforehand and i still feel the symptons. i think people are sometimes weirded out when a dog runs up to me all friendly and everything i just seem like really anxious and won't touch or pet them. if i do pet them i have to immediately wash my hands.

i think though if i wasn't allergic i'd probably have a dog

oh what am i talking about i had a turtle for about 6 years, he was amazing but we had to find a new home for him when my first son was born, it was just too much to handle and the tank gets so filthy and there is the salmonella risk. it was cool having him though when we did, but i kind of never want to have a turtle again, i put in my time and that's that