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.
