Justification for eating meat?

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I've checked out your veggie website. Quite amusing.

I suppose I justify my continued consumption of meat and seafood on the following grounds:-

1. It tastes good (no, really, it does - or don't you remember?)

2. On the whole, vegetarians look like shit compared to their meat-eating cousins - they look permanently half-starved, which is most likely unhealthy and certainly unsexy - I like to shag people who actually have some meat on their bones! (Ever seen an athletic, muscular vegetarian? Nope, me neither...)

3. The high protein content of animal-derived foods enabled the human race to move away from subsistence agriculture and develop the civilization that we know and love today, because meat is a much more concentrated source of nutrition than vegetables and cereals. I'm not sure where the human race would be if we'd never discovered flesh-eating - probably still living in straw huts, trying to feed our small, half-starved families on the pathetic harvest from virtually uncultivatable 'farmland' or mosquito-infested paddy fields (most food animals eat grass, and grass grows everywhere - i.e. in places where a lot of other types of crop won't...)

4. There are certain dietary requirements that cannot be satisfied by an exclusively vegetarian diet (trace minerals, certain B vitamins, etc.)

5. Carnivorism is rife in nature; lots of animals prey on other animals for food (including our closest cousins, chimpanzees). You don't see eagles, sharks, lions or crocodiles getting an attack of conscience about it, so why should we? Evolution has designed us to eat both vegetables AND meat (that is why we have some meat-specific dietary requirements - see 4); you can't suddenly decide that you're going to go against millions of years of evolution without expecting negative consequences somewhere...

6. Vegetarianism isn't as healthy as veggies would have us believe; it's difficult to eat a truly balanced and nutritious veggie diet (see 2,3,4) and it's recently been suggested that too much dietary fibre can actually CAUSE bowel cancer, rather than prevent (recent New Scientist issue).

7. A vegetarian diet is expensive, partly because you have to buy more quantity to equal the nutritional quality of meat/fish (see 3,4), and partly because 'Organic' food (which serious veggies apparently favour) is of poorer quality, spoils sooner, and yet is actually more expensive than non-organic equivalents - go figure that one...! So it could be argued that the only people in western society who can AFFORD to be vegetarian are the relatively affluent middle-classes (and there is a strong correlation between the two groups, in my experience). So maybe vegetarianism is a (possibly subcounscious) status symbol - how 'PC' is that? (Consider Linda McCartney - wife of a multi-millionaire pop star - I rest my case... : ))

7. Fact: Vegetarian food gives you chronic wind. Quite apart from the discomfort, what about the potential environmental damage?; if everyone went veggie, just think of 6 billion people out there all blowing off clouds of methane, hydrogen sulphide, etc. and calculate the damage that all that gas might to do the atmosphere...(okay, so cows fart too, but there aren't 6 billion of them...)

8. If food animals are reered and killed humanely, how do they suffer? Aren't we anthropomorphising, and applying a particularly HUMAN definition of suffering to an ANIMAL?! And if you argue that killing them is wrong per se, consider that they probably wouldn't have had a chance at life anyway, if they hadn't been bred for food... Oh and, by the way, when you harvest vegetables you kill them too, so even veggies are killers in that respect...

etc. etc.