I always find it interesting how closely people guard their diets, as if someone had insulted their mother, lol, food is personal I guess.
I spend a pretty good deal of time thinking about this subject, as my fiance has worked for PETA and is a Vegan, while am not, but am heading in a similar direction.
I love rats. I have 4 of them right now, and they are damn interesting. Every night I have to wake up at least once because they have worked together to solve the problem of escape. Their eating abilities also match our own in terms of wide variety of food they can digest. It was proposed to me in two different places, that it is possible that the intelligence rats and humans enjoy is a product of their versatility, and need. For example, rats like humans can be found on every habitable continent. They can eat almost any organic matter. They must have a large memory to remember the things they cannot eat or that made them sick since they have no strict diet etc.
The rat digestive track is very similar to our own. They have only 4 teeth, which seem neither purpose built for ripping flesh, or for masticating organic material. They spend most of their time foraging, but will kill smaller rodents, and eat flesh when it comes along.
If we had spent our time evolving around plants, we would spend 90 percent of our time looking for continual feeding plots and the rest sleeping.
If we had spent our time evolving around flesh, we would sleep 90 percent of the time, and spend the rest in the super consuming task of hunting.
Lucky for us we have many options. I think a smart individual would notice that almost all of his dietary needs can be taken care of without flesh, let alone flesh processed in the worst industry ever created. In times of need, a bit of animal protein can go along way, last and take a while to digest. If you want to eat meet regularly, I would suggest one meal a day with 8oz or less.
Meet has become a diet staple but it has not always been like that. 3 meals a day do no need meet. The human digestive tract is versatile, we should eat versatile diets.
Morally speaking, I don't think I could bring myself to eat meet that was not killed locally. I am a packaging engineer, have worked in food processing, meet packing, and you don't want that in your body, not unless it came from a real farm and was butchered by a real person.
After seeing what you see in order to keep it quiet from the public, suddenly one has very different
motivations for not eating meet.
Most peoples comfort defending the subject of eating meet comes from their blinders that keep them from seeing the whole meet infrastructure. It is an abomination on life. If you kill your meal yourself, good for you, if you buy from the store, you have no idea what you are buying.
This is an interesting video, hard to watch, so I'm sure most wont.
But this is where your food and clothes come from, 90 percent of the time.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6361872964130308142#Most peoples comfort defending the subject of eating meet comes from their blinders that keep them from seeing the whole meet infrastructure. It is an abomination on life. If you kill your meal yourself, good for you, if you buy from the store, you have no idea what you are buying.