This article was published in the 2011 Spring Southerner News Magazine.
Meat:
Written by Stefan Lund
Vegetarians confuse me. The choice not to eat meat and the reasons behind it are perplexing. There are those who are raised vegetarians and who never developed a taste for meat and that I can understand, but someone who would willingly give up such delicious foods as hamburgers and salami sandwiches is, in my opinion, woefully misguided in their decisionmaking. I have heard too many arguments making the case for vegetarianism, almost all based on a sense of morality that completely eludes me. To me, this is a common sense issue. Humans evolved to eat meat, and there’s nothing wrong with eating it.
One of the more common arguments I have heard in favor of vegetarianism, is that the killing of animals is “immoral.” The issue with this argument is that animals are just that: animals. They aren’t human, and most animals that are consumed en masse by the American public don’t come close to rivaling the average human in intelligence. It is natural that a omnivorous species that has a physical or mental advantage over another species, should kill the weaker one for food. We have a mental advantage over the animals that we kill for food. We kill them using our naturally developed skills as a species. It is only because the same brains that give us this ability, also have conceived of the concept of ethics, that we believe this to be wrong.
It is those ethics and sense of “morality” that are one of the major impediments to a completely omnivorous society. But again I would argue that just because we have the capability of thought to believe something is wrong, doesn’t mean that it is. Our species has evolved the capability to eat meat. Every part of our digestive system, from our teeth to the enzymes in our stomachs has been fine tuned from millenia of omnivorous diets to extract vitamins and calories from the flesh of animals. There is no issue with eating an animal because it is an animal. If that was somehow “wrong” then our bodies would not have developed the ability to do so, over thousands of years of evolutionary trial and error.
Still others might argue that it is not the act of killing animals is wrong, but how they are killed. Many people take issue with the way that many animals are mass produced for slaughter and eventual consumption. Now I don’t mean to say that the way we treat our livestock is great, but not eating an animal that was raised in a cramped feedlot is not gonna help the animal. Once it’s dead and sitting on the supermarket shelf, you aren’t doing it any favors by passing it up. You can’t help the dead animals in the meat section of your local grocery store, there’s nothing wrong with eating them.
As far as I am concerned you’re welcome to eat whatever you want and I’m no saint when it comes to healthy eating. All I’m saying is that vegetarians continue to perplex me, and I have yet to hear a compelling argument in favor of their diet.
Not meat:
Written by Nathan Fantauzza
I grew up on hamburgers and chicken, admittedly delicious foods, but I’ve grown to see more and more how disgusting of a practice meat eating really is.
Let me say that vegetarianism is not a practice of 100% righteousness, and that anybody who tried to push this idea is silly. However, eating meat is no longer a necessity for many humans. We are the more intelligent and developed species on this planet, therefore we have the ability to formulate completely healthy diets without the killing and consumption of animals.
In this age of colliding morals and overflowing cups of social unrest, it seems strange to me that we are still trying to justify killing. It’s a very clear bottom line to eating meat: to do so, a life had to be ended. To say they are just animals has absolutely no standing, as we ourselves are animals. To argue that our higher intelligence gives us the right to kill animals seems to pull social Darwinism into the picture; if this is true, then why don’t we also kill two month olds?
How is it that the image and sensory experience of biting into a hamburger can be so pleasant yet the idea of biting into human flesh so barf-inducing? Displace the modern meat industry from animals to humans and this becomes an unarguably heinous and disgusting story. One where entire lives are drawn out inside of spaces barely bigger than the bodies inhabiting them, floors coated with feces, and furthermore diseases, and one where an animal can hardly even find peace in death, as animals are sometimes failed to be killed before their bodies are cast into skin boiling processes. The meat industry has even concocted disgusting genetic modifications that create animals larger than their bone structures can even support. Hooray, modern industry.
This alone should be enough to make anybody question their meat eating, but then one takes into account the effects on humans. The face of good ol’ Farmer John has long been a staple of American culture, but the modern meat industry has long since forced farmer John into a choke hold. A few large corporations run the greater majority of the meat industry, leaving struggling farmers with hardly any viable stock in selling cattle. Many of our neighbors just to the West in North Dakota are farmers, yet it’s okay to watch them fall?
Millions of animals are killed in slaughterhouses every day. Before they are killed, these animals need resources. To get less 2 and ½ pounds of beef, it takes 100,000 liters of fresh water, according to an article published by Cornell University. Add this to the fact that our fresh water resources are slim and rapidly decreasing, and you get a scary picture. Furthermore, the industrialization of the meat industry has simultaneously created a vat of disease through which they create food. By trying to create more efficient processes the meat industry has actually created a new strain of E. Coli, as well as various other contaminants and outbreaks in our foods. To provide that dollar cheeseburger at your local fast food chain, lives, both human and animal, had to be exploited. As innocent of an act as it may seem, buying that cheeseburger is actually killing America.
So why do we continue? Because it’s natural? Meat eaters might as well argue that we shouldn’t be using such unnatural things as computers and air-conditioning. Think about the way the meat industries have clearly demonstrated a total disregard for the people of our country, the consumers, the workers and the animals. Lastly, think about all the other tasty foods there are for us to eat.