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Zeusthecat

Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

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I also kind of get scatterbrained talking about this subject, because the scale and repercussions of it are almost unfathomable.

For basically my entire life, I've been hearing about how the Ogallala Aquifer is going to dry up and a big junk of the great plains are going to become an actual desert. Western Kansas has faced some of the sharpest drops in the water table, resulting in some pretty big changes in farming and irrigation. If you do any reading on water and food production, there's no doubt that meat is crazy wasteful. Like, its insane how much water a pound of beef takes to create.  If the conservation efforts on the Aquifer don't work, we could be seeing truly radical shifts in American food production within our lifetime.  But I'm pretty sure when I was a kid, people were saying by 2015 western Kansas would be an empty desert, and it hasn't happened (yet). 


With changes to irrigation over the years here, it radically affects which crops you can grow. Only a few grains are really hardy enough to produce well in the natural environment in the grain belt. So when people talk about how all that grain could just be used to directly feed people instead of cows, something they miss is that we simply don't need to be producing the amount of grain that we do. A big chunk of grain production simply wouldn't need to exist anymore if we were no longer feeding animals. There isn't much else you can grow in some of these places, so those fields aren't taking the place of bell peppers or some other vegetable. You could grow some other crops there, but you'd have to go back to intensive irrigation, which would ultimately end up being a wash in terms of water consumption with the water we already expend on meat production. What would actually happen is that the rural populations of the Midwest would dwindle even more as fewer people would be needed to support pure grain production. You'd have the rural version of Detroit (which is actually already happening, but on a smaller scale).  And then when you get into animal production that depends primarily on pasture land and grazing, you're talking about land or regions where any kind of profitable agriculture is nearly impossible and the raising of animals is about the only use for the land.  Again, in order to convert that land to usable agriculture space, you're going to have to irrigate the hell out of it, again making the whole water savings from animal production moot. 

 

Also, American beef is as far as I know, the single most wasteful of all meats (primarily because the feedlot system has dominated such a large percentage of beef production).  Once you're talking about bird or pig production, the amount of water and grain needed drops by as much as 2/3s, so those meats don't have near the waste that beef production does.  But if you're reading literature about meat production that is critical of it, a lot of those writers tend to focus on the worst offender without mentioning the economies on other meats.   

 

Short story is that the economy of meat production is a lot more complicated than many people realize, and the environmental gains would not be as much as people think while there would also be significant unintended consequences that would be hard to foresee (like even more people flocking to cities to look for work). 

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With that out of the way, and with no insult meant, I find the sometimes moral high horse that vegetarians and vegans get on about the ethics and morals of food production to be kind of surreal.  Unless you're raising large portions of your food, you are probably a wiling participant in a worldwide industry that depends on child labor, virtual slave labor, dangerous and disabling work, pollution on a massive scale, the exhaustion of resources, the destruction of local economies, corporate staged takeovers of foreign governments and more human rights violations than I can name.  We are all part of that food economy, and being vegan or vegetarian puts someone maybe a single point ahead of meat eaters on an ethical scale of a hundred, where we're in one disgusting pile with each other at the bottom of that scale.

You're absolutely right that nobody can be justified in feeling proud or aloof because of their food choices, given all the things you listed. But if you accept the ethical vegetarian's premise that animal lives, and therefore deaths, have value, and are therefore important, that's no sort of an argument against vegetarianism. Sure, all industrial food production is bad, but, according to the aforementioned premise, meat is way worse. It's literally billions of lives every year; however you adjust that for relative importance against human suffering, it's still huge. Much more than a single point on a hundred point scale. Your larger point that no-one should be resting on their laurels is spot-on, but the "who cares until we can fix it all" aspect is thoroughly unconvincing. Murder doesn't become irrelevant when war breaks out.

All that said, I'm a meat-eater. I guess I don't buy the premise. Or I just have no integrity. It's probably the latter.

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My point was that meat, to me, is only a tiny bit more wrong than almost every thing else we eat. Hence my note at the top of that first post, I knew I was going to end up not communicating my point terribly well.

I also didn't communicate that I have a lot of sympathy for the ethical concerns about meat. For me, those ethical and moral food concerns end up being about fruit, particularly imported fruit, and the damage that industry causes to people and communities in Central and South America.

 

No worries man, you are raising some good issues.

 

Tying it back to one of my original points, it is interesting to contrast our attitude towards meat consumption to our attitude towards other social issues. A lot of people in this thread seem to agree that yeah, it is hard to argue that it is wrong but it is just something that they are not willing to give up. If we can recognize how difficult it is to actually follow through with this and are unable to cut meat out of our diets because of the myriad of social and environmental factors that encourage us to keep eating it, maybe that provides some valuable insight into why a lot of people would rather maintain the status quo as it pertains to other social issues. By all means, we should continue to strive for equality and all of the hot button issues that are discussed on here are super important. But I think it is also important to evaluate ourselves and our own failings and reflect on the fact that none of us are perfect and maybe we have some of the same failings as some of those assholes on the other side of the internet.

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There isn't much else you can grow in some of these places, so those fields aren't taking the place of bell peppers or some other vegetable.

 

That is, unless it was legal to grow cannabis. From what I understand, cannabis can grow just about anywhere and hemp seeds are one of the most nutritious foods on the planet. But that's probably another topic for another day.

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That is, unless it was legal to grow cannabis. From what I understand, cannabis can grow just about anywhere and hemp seeds are one of the most nutritious foods on the planet.

 

I know farmers who would love to be in the business of growing hemp/cannabis. Farmers are ultimately business owners and they would like to maximize the profits from their fields. There's been a quiet, but persistent, push from some land owners about this but its never gone anywhere.  Go back a few decades before the war on drugs and the rise of the DEA, there were at least a few farmers out there who had hidden pot fields, planting corn on the outside 50 feet of the field, then pot in the middle.  But once they started doing flyovers looking for that, it all stopped.  I'm always amused at how farmers are portrayed in media (usually conservative, maybe even uneducated), but the reality is a lot different from that. 

Something to further complicate my original point. It would actually be possible to restructure where and what we grow to maximize a non-meat economy, like focusing on grains in Kansas and moving grain production over to other crops in places that have the water to support them. But you'd be talking about upending huge chunks of our food production on a national level. So not like that's going to happen.

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No worries man, you are raising some good issues.

 

Tying it back to one of my original points, it is interesting to contrast our attitude towards meat consumption to our attitude towards other social issues. A lot of people in this thread seem to agree that yeah, it is hard to argue that it is wrong but it is just something that they are not willing to give up. If we can recognize how difficult it is to actually follow through with this and are unable to cut meat out of our diets because of the myriad of social and environmental factors that encourage us to keep eating it, maybe that provides some valuable insight into why a lot of people would rather maintain the status quo as it pertains to other social issues. By all means, we should continue to strive for equality and all of the hot button issues that are discussed on here are super important. But I think it is also important to evaluate ourselves and our own failings and reflect on the fact that none of us are perfect and maybe we have some of the same failings as some of those assholes on the other side of the internet.

 

Omnivorous lifestyles are literally natural in the way that social marginalizations are not. That informs some of my absolute answer to the thread title being no. It is not WRONG to eat meat, although the way in which meat is delivered to the table might be. I have more to mull over, but I don't think my position will change on that front even if I didn't personally find meat pleasurable to consume.

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Got curious about cannabis farming, as that tickled some part of my memory.  Growing consumer grade plants is really water intensive.  I don't know about industrial/food grade hemp, it may not take near as much.

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Omnivorous lifestyles are literally natural in the way that social marginalizations are not. That informs some of my absolute answer to the thread title being no. It is not WRONG to eat meat, although the way in which meat is delivered to the table might be. I have more to mull over, but I don't think my position will change on that front even if I didn't personally find meat pleasurable to consume.

 

I think that is a bit of an appeal to nature type of argument and I'm not sure that it holds. Just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it isn't bad. And what is natural really? Could an argument be made that social marginalizations are just as natural because they came from us and we came from nature?

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Got curious about cannabis farming, as that tickled some part of my memory.  Growing consumer grade plants is really water intensive.  I don't know about industrial/food grade hemp, it may not take near as much.

 

If I hadn't already created this bullshit thread today I would totally start a new one about legalization so we could continue this discussion as it is a topic I find super interesting. But I think I've been overbearing enough already.

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To me, focusing on the ethics of animal consumption is just a way of not addressing all the horrors that go on in food production and distribution all over the world to sustain the appetites of the well off.  We've got to solve some other, baseline issues before tackling the question of meat. 

 

To answer the thread title, it's basically wrong to eat anything.  But we've all got to live. 

I'm sorry, I hate this argument. It's one thing to be annoyed at people who cast moral judgement on you for consuming meat (that's understandable), but it's another to deflect the issue of the meat industry by saying there are worse problems. If you want to solve those problems then get on it, don't get mad at people who are trying to make a difference. Chances are that if they're willing to change one part of their lifestyle they're willing to change another. We can't make a list of global issues and start from the top down.

 

Anyway, meat. I don't think it's inherently wrong to breed and kill animals for consumption, but the way our society goes about it is abhorrent. Yes Bjorn, many other things are too, but I try my best to avoid some of those as well.

 

edit: I hope I'm not sounding too aggressive. We're all friends here.

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Marginalisations are natural due to our psychology encouraging various biases and prejudices. In particular the process of othering and people's inclination to assign meaning based on small sample sizes both inherently create prejudices towards social groups in society.

 

Our bodies naturally incline us to want to gorge on sugar and fat filled foods, that doesn't mean that's a good idea at all.


Does a natural inclination towards violence make it ok? Or a natural desire for sex make rape an acceptable side effect of instincts?

 

 

 

Also thank you for that Bjorn, I wholly admit that I had a pretty basic model of the impact on the environmental side so I want to read though that again later and get a clearer full idea of the situation. (right now I probably shouldn't be on here...)

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My potentially terrible two cents. 

I don't have anything to say about mass farming of meat or global food issues, I think I largely agree with the posts in here so for this post lets just assume the larger farming issues have been solved and inhumane treatment of farmed animals is not occurring. 

 

It seems to me you have to find a line where you can say humans have a right to do what they will past this point, the problem is that line is massively blurred and changes depending on the circumstances of each individual. So I guess in my opinion it is an area blurry enough that enforcing one idea of morality on everyone would be kind of incompatible. 

I think it is up to the individual to decide whether ending an animals life prematurely will have enough benefit to justify the action. 

 

Heh well thats a first stab at saying something, hope that made sense. 

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I'm sorry, I hate this argument. It's one thing to be annoyed at people who cast moral judgement on you for consuming meat (that's understandable), but it's another to deflect the issue of the meat industry by saying there are worse problems. If you want to solve those problems then get on it, don't get mad at people who are trying to make a difference. Chances are that if they're willing to change one part of their lifestyle they're willing to change another. We can't make a list of global issues and start from the top down.

 

Anyway, meat. I don't think it's inherently wrong to breed and kill animals for consumption, but the way our society goes about it is abhorrent. Yes Bjorn, many other things are too, but I try my best to avoid some of those as well.

 

edit: I hope I'm not sounding too aggressive. We're all friends here.

 

That's totally fair, and I knew someone would call me on that bullshit, but I had already typed it up and it is how I feel even if it isn't perfectly relevant to this thread. I was really trying to answer the question of the thread title (Is it wrong to eat meat?), and went off into the weeds a bit. My follow up posts are a lot more nuanced.  I probably came off as too aggressive in that first post.

 

Also thank you for that Bjorn, I wholly admit that I had a pretty basic model of the impact on the environmental side so I want to read though that again later and get a clearer full idea of the situation. (right now I probably shouldn't be on here...)

 

Thanks!   One thing I want to make clear is I'm no expert, so its possible I'm off on a few places, but I think I've got the general principles right. I haven't worked on a farm for about 16 years, though I do regularly talk to both my father and my father-in-law about this stuff (both farmers, though my dad is retired now). The important takeaway is that resource use and allocation are pretty complex, and that if you just look at a handful of numbers (like water to meat ratio), its very easy to make bad assumptions about how changes in our food economy would actually work.

 

 

And to further complicate the topic, there are some fascinating discussions to be had about the nature of government subsidies to food production and how that shapes what is available to us in our markets.  This is something I get pretty lost on, but the interconnectedness of subsidies, lobbying, food programs, international treaties, food stamps, global markets, etc, is jawdropping and almost invisible to the average consumer.  I wish I actually understood it better.  I think its difficult to understand the forces that are driving production without getting into that territory though. 

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I think that is a bit of an appeal to nature type of argument and I'm not sure that it holds. Just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it isn't bad. And what is natural really? Could an argument be made that social marginalizations are just as natural because they came from us and we came from nature?

 

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Look all I can add to this is how this works in my mind & I'm afraid it's kinda simple

Q: Is it wrong to kill(to eat meat)?

A: Yes, when the killing is unnecessary for survival or for the prevention of harm.

It's just that simple to me, I don't need to do it therefore I don't.

I'm not sure it even "feels" like the idea of killing for meat is 'wrong morally' to me, I don't feel angry about it. If I had to define my feeling it's more just a vague sense of frustration at what feels illogical and kinda pointless to me.

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I think that is a bit of an appeal to nature type of argument and I'm not sure that it holds. Just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it isn't bad. And what is natural really? Could an argument be made that social marginalizations are just as natural because they came from us and we came from nature?

 

Yes, I did consider that the conversation would go in that direction. You can go ad nauseam should we not drive, not have fire, not wear clothes. There is social codification to specific suppression and marginalization (as opposed to the "natural" example of survival of the fittest) that isn't there with consumption of meat. It is natural in that our bodies evolved to both consume and process meats and vegetables. It's not natural in the same meaning as "gorge on sugary and fat filled foods" is "natural". You could argue that land cultivation is less a normal state of being for humans than hunter/gatherer. But that's not the question you're actually asking.

 

Beyond bogging down in semantics, I still do not think it is wrong in an absolute or moral sense to consume things other than vegetables. I haven't hunted, but I have participated in every step from water to table from fishing. I don't feel any moral ambiguity in doing that. This is a completely different conversation to the one you actually want to be having and are fostering well in the thread. I have major questions and hang ups about how the world's food is produced. But directly answering the thread title, nope it's not wrong.

 

 

The entire conversation is also completely muddied in the way so many modern questions are (arguing that global warming doesn't exist so you can dump stuff in rivers). It is such a dumb and easy stereotype to strawman people who are living a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle as being a yuppie hypocrite who only eats seitan burgers because meat is murder and it's destroying the planet, but only drinks bottled Fiji water while checking their iPhone, no contradiction there. "Every vegetarian is PETA." That's infuriating, isn't it? It is to me, from the other side. I think a lot of people who aren't interested in actually having your conversation and just want to exclude non-omnivores build that strawman because it's more convenient than actually thinking about the practicality of vegetarianism. It's hard to have a real discussion.

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On 1/15/2015 at 1:20 PM, Bjorn said:

With that out of the way, and with no insult meant, I find the sometimes moral high horse that vegetarians and vegans get on about the ethics and morals of food production to be kind of surreal.  Unless you're raising large portions of your food, you are probably a wiling participant in a worldwide industry that depends on child labor, virtual slave labor, dangerous and disabling work, pollution on a massive scale, the exhaustion of resources, the destruction of local economies, corporate staged takeovers of foreign governments and more human rights violations than I can name.  We are all part of that food economy, and being vegan or vegetarian puts someone maybe a single point ahead of meat eaters on an ethical scale of a hundred, where we're in one disgusting pile with each other at the bottom of that scale.

I feel the same way, except instead of finding the moral high horse vegans/vegetarians are on surreal, I find the moral high horse ridden by people who pull your line of argumentation to be pretty surreal. I mean, it's one thing to find "I'm vegan because I don't think it's okay to kill animals for food" weird because it ignores the fact that lots of food production hurts lots of things, even if it's vegetable production, but I find "I'm not vegan because horrible stuff happens with all food" weird because it ignores the fact that horrible stuff happens outside the realm of food production too. All the rare earth metals in your cell phone and your other electronics, your clothes, the gas in your car, everything else... I mean it's not like this is all morally unproblematic and food production is the only unfortunate morass. Getting wigged out by vegans who think they're one up on everyone else when in fact their "one up" is very small seems to me no more or less sensible than getting wigged out by people who say "almost all food production is evil" because production of all sorts of stuff is evil.

 

I mean, yes, if you want to say "there are problems larger than what happens to non-human animals in food production when people eat meat rather than just vegan food," then yes, you're correct. I don't think any sensible vegan has ever disputed this. I'm a vegan and I certainly wouldn't dispute it. But that's not really the point. There are problems larger than what happens in food production when people eat food rather than starve to death! They're the problems of global capitalism with respect to the production of almost everything. Totally true! But I take it that when I point this out, you're not about to withdraw your point about how almost all food production has moral issues.

 

And if you're not going to withdraw your point, I don't see why vegans ought to withdraw our point. Yes, it's true, there are problems in the world aside from the torture we inflict on animals on a massive scale for no reason other than that we'd rather eat a hamburger for lunch than a vegan dal. No shit! But that's not really an answer to the question "is it okay to kill and eat non-human animals for food, especially when it's not necessary for survival?" Because no matter HOW evil carrots are, the answer to the meat question seems to me worth asking just like the answer to the "is all food evil" question is worth asking even though products other than food face ethical issues as well.

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I'm not entirely convinced that eating meat is unnecessary. I mean, yes, you can substitute legumes, but my vegetarian housemate basically has to eat eggs every day to ensure he's getting enough protein. If he couldn't have eggs? He'd have trouble (also, he is a big cheese fan, so that'd probably be only one of his major objections). I get that people could stand to have some good meat-free recipes in their arsenal, and that people's diet should be mostly plants, and that Twig is cruising for big health problems down the line... but cutting it out entirely? I think that comes with problems that aren't readily acknowledged. 

 

I do live in a city that has amazing access to seafood, though, which changes the equation somewhat. The environmental impact of farmed fish isn't anywhere near as bad as cows, and they have much smaller brains.

 

I also wonder what happens when vat-grown meat becomes a reality and many of the animals we've domesticated because they were useful to us start to die out. Humanity evolved to wrench the environment into a shape that was comfortable to us - so which is better, ethically: taking responsibility for the environment that we made, or trying to wrench it back into our perception of a more 'natural' environment?

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It seems to me you have to find a line where you can say humans have a right to do what they will past this point, the problem is that line is massively blurred and changes depending on the circumstances of each individual. So I guess in my opinion it is an area blurry enough that enforcing one idea of morality on everyone would be kind of incompatible. 

I think it is up to the individual to decide whether ending an animals life prematurely will have enough benefit to justify the action. 

 

Heh well thats a first stab at saying something, hope that made sense.

Do you feel similar about killing human beings, or do you think there can be reasons to enforce "one idea of morality" to prevent, for instance, people from killing other human beings?

I'm not entirely convinced that eating meat is unnecessary. I mean, yes, you can substitute legumes, but my vegetarian housemate basically has to eat eggs every day to ensure he's getting enough protein. If he couldn't have eggs? He'd have trouble (also, he is a big cheese fan, so that'd probably be only one of his major objections). I get that people could stand to have some good meat-free recipes in their arsenal, and that people's diet should be mostly plants, and that Twig is cruising for big health problems down the line... but cutting it out entirely? I think that comes with problems that aren't readily acknowledged.

I'm vegan, other people in this thread are vegan, I can assure you it's possible...

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Twig is cruising for big health problems down the line...

Yo what!

 

I mean I won't deny that I eat like shit but actually most of my shitty eating isn't even meat!

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How about this thought. Animals and vegetables are mistreated in the food industry in order to meet demand for food. The real problem is demand. So maybe we should ask if reproduction is wrong.

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I'm not entirely convinced that eating meat is unnecessary. I mean, yes, you can substitute legumes, but my vegetarian housemate basically has to eat eggs every day to ensure he's getting enough protein. If he couldn't have eggs? He'd have trouble (also, he is a big cheese fan, so that'd probably be only one of his major objections). I get that people could stand to have some good meat-free recipes in their arsenal, and that people's diet should be mostly plants, and that Twig is cruising for big health problems down the line... but cutting it out entirely? I think that comes with problems that aren't readily acknowledged. 

 

Dude, I'm sorry but this is just absolutely false. You can literally find all of the essential nutrients on a purely plant based diet. You have soybeans, hemp seeds, rice/bean combo, or just a wide mix of veggies to get your complete proteins, nutritional yeast for vitamin B12, and so on and so on.

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Okay so why do I keep hearing about people that have to come off vegan diets for health reasons? I'm aware that vegans exist because I read the thread and I'm not a fucking idiot.

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Dude, I'm sorry but this is just absolutely false. You can literally find all of the essential nutrients on a purely plant based diet. You have soybeans, hemp seeds, rice/bean combo, or just a wide mix of veggies to get your complete proteins, nutritional yeast for vitamin B12, and so on and so on.

 

When I lived in Greece for half a year and couldn't afford any meat at all, I had serious problems with energy, hair/nail growth, and healing that no amount of legumes was able to assuage. There are scars up and down my arms from the little nicks and scratches that took months to close over. I'm sure there are solutions, but with my metabolism and whatever, they seem to be outside of my price range, so I just try to eat as ethically as I can without eliminating meat entirely.

 

That's really where I'm sympathetic with some of Bjorn's points. I eat very little meat, maybe once a week in a single meal, and most vegans and vegetarians are fine about my choices, but there is a surprising percentage that has told me to my face that I'm no different from some big hoss eating a steakburger for every meal if I don't eliminate all meat from my diet (or eggs and milk, or consumer products from cruelty, or whatever). I understand feeling like there's a line to be drawn, but it feels shitty to have made the most ethical decision within my means and be told that it doesn't mean anything if it's not absolute.

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