| SvennoJ said: I don't doubt there is plenty animal cruelty in the world, yet locally all the farms around me look very well cared for. Nice open barns, no closed doors or anything, with plenty of farms letting the cows wander around outside. They seem pretty relaxed, lying around in the shade. Chickens are a different story. Long factory sized buildings with huge fans on either end, no windows or anything. Better off eating steak and dairy products than chicken and eggs. Just buy locally sourced and fresh foods whenever you can. You'll be helping the environment plenty already not having to process or freeze or haul the goods halfway over the world. |
I'm all for locally sourced foods. Where I live, almost all locally sourced foods are vegetables, which works well for me. :)
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hershel_layton said: While I do feel empathetic for the animals, I realize that the food chain exists for a reason. Only thing I'm against in the meat industry is animal cruelty. |
The food chain is killing us now, as metals and toxins accumulate up the food chain. Pollution has made the food chain not our friend. The best way to escape it is to eat way down the food chain, which for the most part means eating plants (and insects, for those who're into that).
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hershel_layton said: What vegetables do you eat for protein? I typically have Spinach or broccoli. |
I don't primarily eat vegetables for protein. I eat a seed blend (hemp hearts, sesame seeds, flax seeds, chia, and buckwheat) that's full of fibre and protein. I don't doubt there's protein in the vegetables I eat too, and I do eat both spinach and broccoli. But people don't need that much protein anyway, and my seed blend alone has me covered.
| thranx said: I think its beast to still eat some meat. just not necessarily at every meal, or in big portions. And more fish and chicken and less red meat. Balance is best. |
Why is it best? I agree that balance is best, but every nutrient that's in meat can be had in edible vegetation as well (that's where the animals get their nutrients from, after all). But eating vegetation reduces our risk of a raft of diseases. So why is it best to eat some meat?
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Luke888 said: Your argument about canines is simply wrong, Dog caninens differenciate from the human ones because we are different species, them, revolving their diet mainly on meat need sharper teeth otherwise their main source of nutrition would be too hard to get for the species to survive, on the other hand our evolution making us omnivores that eat primarly vegetables and derivates had us not needing enormous canines. Gorillas are Omnivores, just like any other money-like animal they counsume insects in large quantities while alterning them to vegetables of course (since it's the easiest food for them to find in their habitat). Cholesterol and other "bad things" contained in meat are easily avoided simply following a diet that contains the right ammount of meat needed, which most americans don't follow, hence why I find the data from ncbi to be meaningless: in one of the countries with the highest rates of obesity in the entire country aswell as an high amount of consumption of meat it's clear that people following a diet that eliminates meat consumption will result healthier, especially given the quality of the meat in the US. Many of your sources' pages don't work hence I can't answer them but of those I could see there are no proves against eating meat: the Ikarians documentary for example never stated that they don't consume meat, but made a list of herbes extremely common in the diet of everyday (at least here in Italy) again pointing at the problem beeing that the only problem of meat consumption resides in the quantity and the quality, which are wrong in the US.
I feel like you are taking a bit too seriously the diet of everyone here, it almost feels like you want to force everyone to become vegan when you clearly can't. Even if meat was indeed remotely as bad as you make it seem to be the vegetable output of the farmers around the world is nowhere near to beeing capable of meeting the demand of over 7B people, if in one night every person on earth became vegan milions of people would die of starvation because of the lack of offer frrom the farmers... |
You articulate some potentially valid arguments (though I don't know why some of the pages didn't resolve for you, they all resolved for me). It's potentially legit for two people to look at the same data and come to two different conclusions. I could easily quibble about how human canines are too short and nowhere near sharp enough for rending raw meat, or about how our jaws aren't off-set meaning we can't break bones, or how our throats are small like a herbivore, or how we can move our jaws back and forth like a herbivore. But I'm hugely distracted by your final argument, which appears to skew off towards crazy town.
The main thing standing in the way of people starving is animal agriculture. When we feed chickens to get eggs, we feed them 38x as much food as we get out of eating the eggs. And chicken eggs are about the best case scenario as far as animal agriculture is concerned. When we feed cows to get beef, we feed them as much as 500x as much food as we get out of eating the cow. About one third of the world's grain goes to feeding animals. About 45% of the world's ice-free land is dedicated to supporting animal agriculture. I don't know what it's like in Italy, but in North and South America there are vast tracts of farms full of animals, and other vast tracts of farms making corn and soy and other crops for feeding animals.
If we gradually returned that 45% of the world's ice-free land over to feeding and housing humans, instead of feeding and housing food animals, you bet that would go a long way to ending homelessness and starvation. I can't think of any argument to the contrary, and "vegetable output of the farmers" isn't one when so much land that could be making vegetables is instead making food for animals.
I also think you might be projecting when you talk about my motives. I was only inspired to contribute to this thread, after lurking on VGchartz for years, when I saw some real misinformation in it. And I've kept my focus on the misinformation component, except when someone asked a direct question. Why is it so important for you to not only reply, but to question my motives for replying? It seems thou doth protest too much.
But, yeah, there's no threat to feeding the world from veganism. There is a severe threat to feeding the world from animal agriculture, though.
