People who know me in person know that I am a vegetarian. I have been a
vegetarian for many years. Technically I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian, which means
I eat milk products and eggs on occasion. It also means it makes me less of a
picky eater as I can eat most things made with flour without looking to see if
they have milk or eggs in them.
Vegetarianism is an infectious life style. In my first year of university I meet two women that were vegetarians and they had an impact on my life, obviously, but I had an impact on other people too. There is not too much fuss being a vegetarian if you are cooking food for yourself exclusively, there is more of a fuss if you eat out regularly. When people see you easily going through life without eating meat, they begin to see it as easy and give it a spin.
There is history in those veggies. Carnivores and omnivores like to trot out that we invented fire to char meat, which makes it taste better supposedly, and that is why we have fire. But how many people do you know who have tested that idea? I only know one person who eats Steak Tartare, uncooked ground beef mixed with salt and other spices, most other people think it is disgusting. Truthfully properly prepared beef has no dangerous bacteria when raw, but people have grown so used to cooking it that they find raw meat unpalatable, with the possible exception of Sushi. Most people I know love sushi a lot; they love the taste, so I guess that means raw fish tastes better than cooked fish. The Inuit, in the extreme north, (some people) claim that cooking meat ruins the taste, so there is a culture that eats raw meat and has had cooked meat and knows the difference. Additionally, food scientists would tell you that cooking meat destroys a lot of the beneficial nutrient content of meat. So cooking meat may destroy the taste, it destroys the nutritional quality. The only good thing that cooking does is kill harmful bacteria, but then most people do not cook their meats long enough to do this anyway.
What food scientists will tell you, however, is that a lot of the calorie content of vegetable matter that we regularly eat is inaccessible to humans until we cook it. Certainly a lot of the vegetables and fruit we eat are good for us in their raw states, but it you want to tap into the calorie content of many of them; you have to cook them first, like all the grains and some legumes. Don't believe me? Try eating raw rice or crowing down on uncooked maize (corn-on-the-cob) and see how far you get. Raw potatoes as bland while cooked taste fine. Trust your tongue, the tongue knows, after all we evolved with the tongue and it can tell you if something is good to eat. So fire was invented not for meat, but for vegetables and grain.
The truth of the matter is that most people are lazy; they don't want to work a bit when they eat a meal. I know people who come home after a day at work and drop a steak onto the grill and then eat it and are done. Plants are not that simple. First thing to dispel is that only meat has protein. The truth is everything has protein; well everything that grows has it. Protein is made up of 20+ amino acids which our body forms into chains that range in lengths from no less than three to many millions in length. They together make everything that the body needs to live and function. It is really about the cells. Every structure in every cell is composed of protein structures. Muscle cells contain more protein because their function is different than all the others and plant cells have less, because plant cell walls are made of cellulose, which is fibre to us. Fungus cell walls are made of chitin, which is pure protein, but is mostly indigestible to us. What meat has is a complete protein, meaning all the amino acids that we use on a day to day time period in one source, so that makes eating meat easy. Not that eating plants is difficult, mind you, one just has to use variety over simplicity. Some foods have a complete protein, mushrooms, potato skins, quinoa and a few others, but mostly plants have a more limited variety of amino acids. Eating two different vegetables solves this concern but a variety is always best.
More history. When people picture ancient humans they picture and hunter gatherer society. Should probably be called a gatherer hunter society because most of the food that the society ate was gathered and there were only occasional spikes of animal protein, unless the people lived on a coast. The wealthiest American Native peoples, meaning North and South America, we're the ones that got most of their food from the sea, picking up clams, seaweed, critters and spawning fish like salmon. An hour’s work would supply food for a day and a day’s work in spawning time for many months. Agricultural societies were the next most wealthy and the rest were poor. Wealth being measured by free time to create decadent cultural artifacts. Those that relied on hunting were the most poor, always moving looking for game and often starving. Gathering means for most cultures though picking the food off the land, picking seasonal fruit, berries and vegetables. Planting and growing vegetables is a natural offshoot of gatherer societies and occurred many times and many places across the world. Raising live stock took longer to develop but is also similar as raising meat animals, means meat more regularly. But it should be noted that meat was never a regular part of the human diet, until recently, unless the humans in question lived by the seashore.
Preindustrial peasants were mostly vegetarian too. Granted they did have some meat, but far less meat that what people picture. If they had chickens they would be used for egg production more than cooking. Cows would be used for milk production and as heavy labourers, field needed to be tilled and carts needed to be pulled. European farmers learned that horses were more efficient at these tasks than cows, but Europeans never developed a wide spread taste for horse milk or meat so it would be difficult to justify the expense of owning horses, but not cattle. Sheep provided wool, goats: milk, cattle: milk and labour, pigs eat anything from spoiled food to roughage and all can be eaten too. But, the peasants mostly ate vegetable stuffs throughout the year. They grew four or more varieties of grain in the same field, wheat, barley, rye, millet and others, hoping one would do well in any given year along with split peas. Pease porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old; everyday every meal. The grains would be harvested and milled to flour altogether and because flour storage was so difficult, made into bread right away and stored to grow hard and stale within a few days, to be eaten with the peas porridge through the year. Meat was eaten very rarely or sold to the wealthy or as rent for the land. Yup, being a peasant sucked, but it would have been a common occurrence in any agricultural society from China through India, all the way to Europe and even Central America; any place that had a high population to feed. You just have to substitute the grain crop, rice in Asia, maize in the Americas. Possible exception was the Andes who grew potatoes and quinoa.
We live in more modern times though, so why vegetarianism? Every time people ask me I come up with more reasons:
1) Health: eating a variety of vegetables with every meal means that I get a complete protein and the mineral and vitamins that the variety of foods brings with it. Steak and potatoes gives you protein and carbohydrates but misses out on the rest of the vitamins and minerals one needs and often the ones that exist in the meat are cooked out of them. I am lazy; being vegetarian forces me to eat healthier.
2) Being vegetarian means it is not easy for me to eat out and almost impossible to eat fast food. This makes me healthier. Go to McDonalds, pick from their vegetarian meal selection only. There are some choices like at Harvey's or Burger King which have a palatable veggie burger, but mostly fast food is out, so I don't get to dine on all that salt and empty calories, yum. Restaurants usually have a vegetarian option and some restaurants are mostly vegetarian, like Indian food, extra yummy. Generally the food is better for you. I love a good Buddhist Chinese restaurant too.
3) The Environment. Really, for me this is number one through ten, but it is not a big concern for most people. Today, most food animals live in buildings and never see the light of day until they are slaughtered. They do not room free like in children's picture books. Food is brought to them from fields far away. The waste is taken far away. The animals are shipped to abattoirs far afield. Every step of the process involves burning fossil fuels. Then the meat is packaged with fossil fuels (Styrofoam and plastic wrap) and shipped around the country, around the world.
4) Land use also Environment. To grow enough food for one person for a year on some land you will need x land units. To grow enough fish or chicken to feed a person for a year you need 2x land units and fish and chicken are the most efficient food animal. The least efficient is beef cattle where you need 30x land units to feed one person for a year. People are starving so you can eat a Big Mac and it is not good for you to boot. Seven billion people are on the planet right now, expected to crest at ten billion. Growing meat will mean starvation.
5) 3+4=Environment. To grow all this meat we learned in the Eighties, beef farmers were pushing Brazilian farmers off their land to grow cattle. They farmers had to survive and went to farm on cleared rainforest land, which became unusable quickly; whereupon it was bought up as pastureland for beef farmers and the farmers moved to newly cleared rainforest lands. I suspect that this might not be true anymore, because it sounds utterly horrid, but that also makes it seem all to true too.
6) The kicker is that in the West, this does not matter. We grow nutrient intensive crops on the best land year in and year out to feed livestock. The crops have to be fertilized heavily which uses a lot of fossil fuels, so we are mining the land and the environment to produce crops that feed a fraction of the people the land could feed to feed people with meat.
7) When is the last time that you heard a food recall for vegetable product? I heard of one recently, the food was contaminated by nuts. When was the last time that you have heard a meat recall? All…the…time. Processed meats that have deadly bacteria, deadly prions in meats and let us not forget mislabelled food stuffs, horse served as beef and cheap fish sold as expensive fish. Nuts can be deadly too, you say. And I agree, but only to someone who has a strong allergy and strong allergies are very rare for nuts; milk allergies are far more common. Meat is recalled because prions and bacteria will kill whoever eats them. Meat is processed in bacteria friendly environments, that it does not happen more frequently is amazing. Prion diseases like 'Mad Cow Disease' are passed on to humans when a diseased brain of a cow is eaten by other cows. If you did not know already, we feed our cows processed cow to make them grow faster. We eat cannibals.
8) Because most of our meat is grown in factory farm: close quarters, massive populations and sedentary lifestyle, with little circulation, disease can be rampant. To keep animals alive, antibiotics were proscribed. It was then noticed that animals on antibiotics grew bigger and faster, so all animals were given antibiotics in their food every day. The result was larger animals, more profits and antibiotic immune bacteria and diseases, which have jumped to humans in the past.
I know, vegetarianism may not be the solution that you will choose, but you can see that it is a better choice for the planet. Granted some people who are raised on farms that allow their livestock to go to pasture and range free will say that a lot of my points do not apply to their farms, but you will also know that I am not really directing my gaze there as I believe that the most productive vegetable farm has a more symbiotic relationship with animals. I would however point out that productive land used to grow cattle is misuse of the land unless the land is currently in fallow rotation.
We should, as a species, farm the arable land responsibly and use the marginal land for animal production, for milk and eggs and other meat products, because it makes sense and damages the world less. There is another reason to be a vegetarian, the most common reason:
9) Cruelty to animals. Meat production hurts animals. I do not see this as a valid reason, but I am a cruel heartless man. I know that there is pain in the world and that when we die; we die in pain, unless we are drowned or suffocated. We die in distress in any case. I know that the veal industry and the milk industry are tied; sometimes newborn calves are harvested for veal so that their mothers produce milk for longer, not always, but sometimes. Life is death, to live something must die, it is the only truth in the world. Plants die for me. Plants and animals die for you too.
Vegetarianism is an infectious life style. In my first year of university I meet two women that were vegetarians and they had an impact on my life, obviously, but I had an impact on other people too. There is not too much fuss being a vegetarian if you are cooking food for yourself exclusively, there is more of a fuss if you eat out regularly. When people see you easily going through life without eating meat, they begin to see it as easy and give it a spin.
There is history in those veggies. Carnivores and omnivores like to trot out that we invented fire to char meat, which makes it taste better supposedly, and that is why we have fire. But how many people do you know who have tested that idea? I only know one person who eats Steak Tartare, uncooked ground beef mixed with salt and other spices, most other people think it is disgusting. Truthfully properly prepared beef has no dangerous bacteria when raw, but people have grown so used to cooking it that they find raw meat unpalatable, with the possible exception of Sushi. Most people I know love sushi a lot; they love the taste, so I guess that means raw fish tastes better than cooked fish. The Inuit, in the extreme north, (some people) claim that cooking meat ruins the taste, so there is a culture that eats raw meat and has had cooked meat and knows the difference. Additionally, food scientists would tell you that cooking meat destroys a lot of the beneficial nutrient content of meat. So cooking meat may destroy the taste, it destroys the nutritional quality. The only good thing that cooking does is kill harmful bacteria, but then most people do not cook their meats long enough to do this anyway.
What food scientists will tell you, however, is that a lot of the calorie content of vegetable matter that we regularly eat is inaccessible to humans until we cook it. Certainly a lot of the vegetables and fruit we eat are good for us in their raw states, but it you want to tap into the calorie content of many of them; you have to cook them first, like all the grains and some legumes. Don't believe me? Try eating raw rice or crowing down on uncooked maize (corn-on-the-cob) and see how far you get. Raw potatoes as bland while cooked taste fine. Trust your tongue, the tongue knows, after all we evolved with the tongue and it can tell you if something is good to eat. So fire was invented not for meat, but for vegetables and grain.
The truth of the matter is that most people are lazy; they don't want to work a bit when they eat a meal. I know people who come home after a day at work and drop a steak onto the grill and then eat it and are done. Plants are not that simple. First thing to dispel is that only meat has protein. The truth is everything has protein; well everything that grows has it. Protein is made up of 20+ amino acids which our body forms into chains that range in lengths from no less than three to many millions in length. They together make everything that the body needs to live and function. It is really about the cells. Every structure in every cell is composed of protein structures. Muscle cells contain more protein because their function is different than all the others and plant cells have less, because plant cell walls are made of cellulose, which is fibre to us. Fungus cell walls are made of chitin, which is pure protein, but is mostly indigestible to us. What meat has is a complete protein, meaning all the amino acids that we use on a day to day time period in one source, so that makes eating meat easy. Not that eating plants is difficult, mind you, one just has to use variety over simplicity. Some foods have a complete protein, mushrooms, potato skins, quinoa and a few others, but mostly plants have a more limited variety of amino acids. Eating two different vegetables solves this concern but a variety is always best.
More history. When people picture ancient humans they picture and hunter gatherer society. Should probably be called a gatherer hunter society because most of the food that the society ate was gathered and there were only occasional spikes of animal protein, unless the people lived on a coast. The wealthiest American Native peoples, meaning North and South America, we're the ones that got most of their food from the sea, picking up clams, seaweed, critters and spawning fish like salmon. An hour’s work would supply food for a day and a day’s work in spawning time for many months. Agricultural societies were the next most wealthy and the rest were poor. Wealth being measured by free time to create decadent cultural artifacts. Those that relied on hunting were the most poor, always moving looking for game and often starving. Gathering means for most cultures though picking the food off the land, picking seasonal fruit, berries and vegetables. Planting and growing vegetables is a natural offshoot of gatherer societies and occurred many times and many places across the world. Raising live stock took longer to develop but is also similar as raising meat animals, means meat more regularly. But it should be noted that meat was never a regular part of the human diet, until recently, unless the humans in question lived by the seashore.
Preindustrial peasants were mostly vegetarian too. Granted they did have some meat, but far less meat that what people picture. If they had chickens they would be used for egg production more than cooking. Cows would be used for milk production and as heavy labourers, field needed to be tilled and carts needed to be pulled. European farmers learned that horses were more efficient at these tasks than cows, but Europeans never developed a wide spread taste for horse milk or meat so it would be difficult to justify the expense of owning horses, but not cattle. Sheep provided wool, goats: milk, cattle: milk and labour, pigs eat anything from spoiled food to roughage and all can be eaten too. But, the peasants mostly ate vegetable stuffs throughout the year. They grew four or more varieties of grain in the same field, wheat, barley, rye, millet and others, hoping one would do well in any given year along with split peas. Pease porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old; everyday every meal. The grains would be harvested and milled to flour altogether and because flour storage was so difficult, made into bread right away and stored to grow hard and stale within a few days, to be eaten with the peas porridge through the year. Meat was eaten very rarely or sold to the wealthy or as rent for the land. Yup, being a peasant sucked, but it would have been a common occurrence in any agricultural society from China through India, all the way to Europe and even Central America; any place that had a high population to feed. You just have to substitute the grain crop, rice in Asia, maize in the Americas. Possible exception was the Andes who grew potatoes and quinoa.
We live in more modern times though, so why vegetarianism? Every time people ask me I come up with more reasons:
1) Health: eating a variety of vegetables with every meal means that I get a complete protein and the mineral and vitamins that the variety of foods brings with it. Steak and potatoes gives you protein and carbohydrates but misses out on the rest of the vitamins and minerals one needs and often the ones that exist in the meat are cooked out of them. I am lazy; being vegetarian forces me to eat healthier.
2) Being vegetarian means it is not easy for me to eat out and almost impossible to eat fast food. This makes me healthier. Go to McDonalds, pick from their vegetarian meal selection only. There are some choices like at Harvey's or Burger King which have a palatable veggie burger, but mostly fast food is out, so I don't get to dine on all that salt and empty calories, yum. Restaurants usually have a vegetarian option and some restaurants are mostly vegetarian, like Indian food, extra yummy. Generally the food is better for you. I love a good Buddhist Chinese restaurant too.
3) The Environment. Really, for me this is number one through ten, but it is not a big concern for most people. Today, most food animals live in buildings and never see the light of day until they are slaughtered. They do not room free like in children's picture books. Food is brought to them from fields far away. The waste is taken far away. The animals are shipped to abattoirs far afield. Every step of the process involves burning fossil fuels. Then the meat is packaged with fossil fuels (Styrofoam and plastic wrap) and shipped around the country, around the world.
4) Land use also Environment. To grow enough food for one person for a year on some land you will need x land units. To grow enough fish or chicken to feed a person for a year you need 2x land units and fish and chicken are the most efficient food animal. The least efficient is beef cattle where you need 30x land units to feed one person for a year. People are starving so you can eat a Big Mac and it is not good for you to boot. Seven billion people are on the planet right now, expected to crest at ten billion. Growing meat will mean starvation.
5) 3+4=Environment. To grow all this meat we learned in the Eighties, beef farmers were pushing Brazilian farmers off their land to grow cattle. They farmers had to survive and went to farm on cleared rainforest land, which became unusable quickly; whereupon it was bought up as pastureland for beef farmers and the farmers moved to newly cleared rainforest lands. I suspect that this might not be true anymore, because it sounds utterly horrid, but that also makes it seem all to true too.
6) The kicker is that in the West, this does not matter. We grow nutrient intensive crops on the best land year in and year out to feed livestock. The crops have to be fertilized heavily which uses a lot of fossil fuels, so we are mining the land and the environment to produce crops that feed a fraction of the people the land could feed to feed people with meat.
7) When is the last time that you heard a food recall for vegetable product? I heard of one recently, the food was contaminated by nuts. When was the last time that you have heard a meat recall? All…the…time. Processed meats that have deadly bacteria, deadly prions in meats and let us not forget mislabelled food stuffs, horse served as beef and cheap fish sold as expensive fish. Nuts can be deadly too, you say. And I agree, but only to someone who has a strong allergy and strong allergies are very rare for nuts; milk allergies are far more common. Meat is recalled because prions and bacteria will kill whoever eats them. Meat is processed in bacteria friendly environments, that it does not happen more frequently is amazing. Prion diseases like 'Mad Cow Disease' are passed on to humans when a diseased brain of a cow is eaten by other cows. If you did not know already, we feed our cows processed cow to make them grow faster. We eat cannibals.
8) Because most of our meat is grown in factory farm: close quarters, massive populations and sedentary lifestyle, with little circulation, disease can be rampant. To keep animals alive, antibiotics were proscribed. It was then noticed that animals on antibiotics grew bigger and faster, so all animals were given antibiotics in their food every day. The result was larger animals, more profits and antibiotic immune bacteria and diseases, which have jumped to humans in the past.
I know, vegetarianism may not be the solution that you will choose, but you can see that it is a better choice for the planet. Granted some people who are raised on farms that allow their livestock to go to pasture and range free will say that a lot of my points do not apply to their farms, but you will also know that I am not really directing my gaze there as I believe that the most productive vegetable farm has a more symbiotic relationship with animals. I would however point out that productive land used to grow cattle is misuse of the land unless the land is currently in fallow rotation.
We should, as a species, farm the arable land responsibly and use the marginal land for animal production, for milk and eggs and other meat products, because it makes sense and damages the world less. There is another reason to be a vegetarian, the most common reason:
9) Cruelty to animals. Meat production hurts animals. I do not see this as a valid reason, but I am a cruel heartless man. I know that there is pain in the world and that when we die; we die in pain, unless we are drowned or suffocated. We die in distress in any case. I know that the veal industry and the milk industry are tied; sometimes newborn calves are harvested for veal so that their mothers produce milk for longer, not always, but sometimes. Life is death, to live something must die, it is the only truth in the world. Plants die for me. Plants and animals die for you too.
10) religion. Some religions demand that people be vegetarians.
ReplyDelete11) the worst reason, and why I am a vegetarian, to piss my dad off, because for a person who has never rebelled, there is always a first time.