Myself I don't have much to say on the New Republic.

Doubting as I do in both radical truth and saintly anything I suppose the intersection might well be empty and so it goes.

Gah, the stupid, it burns.

BTW, I think I've recommended it before, but it bears repeating: All Flesh is Grass is a terrific book.

Klein's follow-up post does specifically talk about "the brutality of Confined Animal Feeding Operations". And yet, the farm from the Palin video was a small free-range poultry farm, not an "industrial farming operation" of the sort that Klein is talking about. So some confusion was natural.

Which doesn't excuse Chait's "very seriously" comment, a concise classic of the I'll dismiss you as a nerd for actually caring about issues genre.

I faced this when I visited the ancestral farm in Italy and realized that the chicken we were being served every night as a feast meal were related to the chickens we saw in the yard before dinner.

There is a distinction between being too fastidious to eat meat and being too fastidious to eat meat that's raised in a way that's not only gratuitously cruel but unhealthy.

I don't expect Jonathan Chait, of all people, to be able to grasp it. Judging from his work, he has difficulty making distinctions when people are dying.

There is no operational necessity for meat to be raised and sold the way it is now. There are all sorts of ways in which animals could be better integrated into the whole food chain (the movie theater where my son works sends tons of unsold popcorn to the landfill every year, which cows would relish if they were allowed it as a pasture supplement) except for weird legal requirements ( the theater would need a license to resell the popcorn, for instance; we were going to buy the left-over solids from a local microbrew operation, only the City of Olympia required whoever took the spent hops and malt to also handle the sanitary waste and greywater).

I used to have this argument (over issues like racism) with my parents when I was in college. They'd say, "One person can't change the world!" and I'd say, "No, but I can change the little part of it that touches me -- and if enough of us do that, then the world will change." Sounds like the classic conservative/liberal argument, n'est-ce pas? The conservative saying that we have no choice but to accept the status quo, and the liberal saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

But he's got national syndication and television appearances, and we have blogs, so he must be doing something right. Right?

One I once knew wouldn't eat certain things on account of what he knew about how they were made. But if you're particularly sensitive about that sort of thing you're probably not going to be doing that kind of job in the first place.

JESR@9:There is no operational necessity for meat to be raised and sold the way it is now.

Apart from price, alas.

Lee @ 10
Margaret Mead's quote has long stuck with me. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

That's the argument I always make to my veggie friends: By providing a demand for ethically-grown meat, I'm doing more to end factory farming than simply not eating meat would do. They seem unconvinced.

clew @ 8: "We don't often listen to radical truths spoken by those who do live lives of saintly renunciation, either; they get dismissed as wierdos, or people for whom it's easy, or the scapegoats who make up for everyone else's sins."

Yeah. Humans have come up with any number of very clever reasons not to listen to people telling them things they don't want to hear. It's why ad hominem exists.

'As you exit the lecture hall, you will note a Rolls Royce parked on the street in the midst of this working class neighborhood. This illustrates perfectly the issue I've discussed of the contrasts between wealth and poverty. And please don't damage that Rolls Royce in any way. Its mine.'

And, yes, some of the regulations on using waste are ridiculous. "Brewer's grains" have been a recognised cattle feed for a long time. Nobody in the UK is stupid enough to insist they can only be bought with the other waste, including the sewage.

Though we have out share of silly rules, when some things might be better classed as by-products, traded for centuries and suddenly encumbered by regulations on waste.

2) Why should I care what he thinks about anything?

Sometimes I think that the people who don't are people who feel guilty about eating meat -- who don't want to know where it comes from, and who would prefer that the production be kept hidden, under cover, and as far away from them as possible.

It's true that humanely-raised animals are less likely to have the sort of lesions that render them un-kosher[*]. However, when an animal is slaughtered in a kosher fashion and it turns out to have those lesions, the carcass is just sold to a non-kosher vendor for processing. So even if humane farming practices could reduce the reject rate from, say, 30% to 20%, the cost of instituting those practices does not make up for the benefit.

Kosher consumers interested in humane farming practices might want to check out Mitzvah Meat.

(Disclaimer: I am not a customer of Mitzvah Meat; they're out of my price range. I deal with the ethical issues by just not eating very much meat.)

[*]An animal that would have died in a year had it not been slaughtered is considered neveilah, one subcategory of not-kosher; the rabbis consider lesions on the lungs as one sign that an animal is a neveilah, so animals are inspected for this problem after slaughter.

I try not to conflate the ethical and health issues around raising and slaughtering meat animals, in much the same way I try to keep separate the ethical and pragmatic issues around torture. It's harder to be clear if you mix your arguments, and easier to be refuted by reference to false or debatable implications resulting from the conflation. Changing slaughtering methods in the industrial meat industries wouldn't make a dent in the problems of pollution, fostering of germ resistance, and contamination of our food chain with biologically active chemicals. Conversely, cleaning up the healh and public safety problems won't make the slaughter any more ethical.

I eat meat, but I agree that we need to solve both those ethical and health problems, and the first step is probably to remove the subsidies that make it so easy and cheap for agribusinesses to ignore the problems*. I try to buy meat from smaller companies that don't use BGH and massive applications of antibiotics; I have, but don't routinely (and should, but it's inconvenient for me), bought meat from local butchers who buy the animals from local farmers. As more people turn away from the factory meat, and it becomes less profitable, more stores will provide meat from ethical, health-concerned growers.

* Also, let's remove the subsidy that lets ADM flood the food chain with sugar, and strike a blow against diabetes.

Quite. Accused of having moral qualms about CAFOs ? exactly what the problem is with that, I cannot see.

We buy mostly meat from animals we've met.. there's a growing number of organic/grass-raised lamb and beef suppliers here in CO. It's more expensive, but it ensures I'm not feeding my children that witches' brew of antibiotics, hormones, and ground-up cow corpses, that the feedlot animals get.

1) They spent a number of years disearning it, workin' hard at it. By now the odds are simply against them having anything to say worth hearing, and if they did, the next upteen items would make up for that, in a negative way.

2) The people who work there were recruited and remained employed at a highly disonest and disgusting rag. If that becomes a career injury, rather than a steppingstone, it might lead to a better mass media.

There are a number of prominent vegetarians, including Mollie Katzen, who have come to the same conclusion and have changed their activism (and diet) accordingly.

Turns out not to be the case, about that cost thing.

If you have direct or nearly direct distribution -- your butcher buys meat from these five guys, who have farms, and a long term reputation/business relationship with the butcher, and sells it to you -- the price is about the same and the quality is impressively greater.

Most of what gets sold now goes through cartelized (or naked monopoly) distribution systems, where the interests of the cartel are reflected in the entire operation. (And they've been acting to secure control for a long time; it's not about food quality, and it's not even mostly about profits. It's been about strangling all competition for ages.)

For instance, some clever scientists have been trying to figure out for some time what, precisely, is used to create a fast food hamburger; their results indicate that it's pretty much purely corn. Which is a stupid choice, but it feeds into a pattern of concentration in agribusiness and a pattern of established subsidy.

Best thing an individual can do, short term, whether or not they eat meat, is to find somebody who is selling via direct ("I grew this!"/"My mom grew this!") or nearly direct ("I been buying cabbage from dat guy these thirty years") distribution, and to pay attention, politically; there are all sorts of efforts to shut down direct food distribution channels. If you find one, grab every political lever you can.

Medium term, the whole SLOW (Sustainable, Local, Organic, Whole) food thing is a good idea and could use some legislative support.

Eating meat, well, if you weren't planning to eat them, why did you feed them?

"Why are wingers all like that?"

Because being "like that" is part of our definition of "wingers"?

(Mind you, the association I have with "wings" at the moment is the turkey wings (and neck & giblets) that are simmering to make broth for the gravy (& soup, later) that will accompany the rest of the bird, now placidly being zapped in the microwave oven, and the dressing (packaged corn-bread type, with added onion, carrots,celery, & mushrooms), mashed white potatoes, and yams. These items, along with (tinned) cranberry sauce, and (supermarket) pumpkin pie, squash ('Delicata', this year), bean soup, and hominy, compose the short-shrift Thanksgiving feast characteristic of my living-alone last few decades.)

Oh, hear hear. Did anybody notice how damned hard it was this year to find a turkey without a "solution" in it which, upon further inspection, invariably contains sugar?

Answer: in Ponce, Puerto Rico, there were none. None. (Well, one brand at Wal-Mart didn't have sugar, but by this week they were all gone, leaving only sugary turkeys. Our freezer is only so big -- no room for a turkey.) So we had turkey breast baked with pork chops, bacon, and sausages instead.

In our case, it's not diabetes -- our daughter has Crohn's. Or, rather, had Crohn's. Thanks to our dietary modifications, she's been symptom- and medication-free for over a year now. We are firmly convinced that the ubiquity of sugar in the American (and now European) diet is killing us all.

So why can't they sell turkeys without sugar? Even last year it wasn't this extreme. Definitely one place where things are still getting worse.

I spat out my maiden mouthful of Krispy Kreme doughnut in shock & disgust – revoltingly oversweet. A terrible disappointment after years of anticipation.

Barry, #29: I have never forgotten the TNR cover article about "evidence for the existence of higher spatial dimensions" which proved, on reading, to include as one of its examples "the curious experience of architect Quintus Teal."

After I stopped boggling, I had the unshakable mental picture of the author of the article being unbearably pompous about his theories at a faculty cocktail party somewhere in California, and some smartass young assistant professor saying, "Hey, that might explain what happened to this friend of mine..."

Epacris, #34: I am SO with you about Krispy Kremes! They don't even count as "donuts" IMO, being nothing but fried air, cornstarch, and sugar held together with a little gluten.

You're welcome.

I'm an approximation of a farm kid; we ate really well when I was a wee lad, and I know what the good stuff ought to look like. (Also, taste and texture.)

Some things are expensive; buffalo is expensive because they're savage and semi-domesticated and you need a fence like a tank trap. (Also, you're competing, price-wise, with the high end restaurant trade.) Ostrich is expensive because it's relatively new and, dude, hundred-fifty-kilo chickens. Wild boar is expensive because, dear god, wild boar, plus a real shortage of guys named Obelisk to do the wrangling.

But elk? Elk is in the same price bracket as the organic beef; the regular decent grass-fed Bruce County beef is the same price (sometimes less!) than the supermarket version, only, you know, food. Venison is cheaper than elk. (The elk and the venison are both ranched; you can't sell hunted meat in Ontario, which is why I can't get moose.)

Unwatered Danish-style side bacon is about eight bucks a pound of late, but, well, it's not actually going to shorten my life. The sealed, wet, nitrated, over-salted glop they've stuck a bacon label on, that will.

Pork is amazingly cheap; between four and five bucks a pound for loin. (Butterfly chops, rolled roasts...) That's CDN, and the minimum wage is 8.75 in Ontario. So roughly 1/2 hour for a pound of top grade pork.

Now, to get this, I had to make a concerted effort to find a good butcher shop, and Toronto has transit, and all, but the idea that direct or near-direct distribution, or SLOW food in general, is inherently more expensive, is just not well supported by the facts.

The only trouble is, I have to master from-scratch fruit fillings by this coming Purim, because my mom always made hamentaschen with canned pie filling; I used to do the same, but they taste funny now.

Michael at 33: it's fascinating that your daughter's Crohn's symptoms went away when she cut sugar out of her diet. I am curious: what did her doctor(s) say about that?

Right wingers can't complain about moral decline of Western Civ and in the same breath, accuse their opponents of being moralistic. Oh wait, they do, don't they?

In addition to Quintus Teal, it also refers to the experience of one Gottfried Plattner.
Suspect it may not be entirely serious.

We get an increasing amount of our food through Locally Grown; the ordering software was written by one of our local guys, but he's been exporting it widely, so some of y'all might have something similar in your neighborhood. (Note: LG is taking Thanksgiving week off, so if you get a "temporarily unavailable" on the link, you can look here.)

Graydon, re ostriches, the USDA-recommended method of egg collection is amusing. (Get inside a plywood box. Scootch over till you're next to the egg. Lower your box over the egg and pick it up so the male won't see you. Scootch away again.)

Cheap pork gets paid for in some pretty scary ways, including the possibility of new diseases. Thing is, small-scale pig farming still produces very cheap meat, but just not the quantities that factory processing demands. It's the processing and marketting section of the process that's the biggest problem in local sustainable meat/dairy/eggs and poultry production. The local cheese plant which was the market for the last couple dairy farms in my neighborhood was closed down because they couldn't get a permit to discharge their waste water into Puget Sound- the unacceptable contaminent being salt. They were asking to put salt water at the same temperature, pH, and salinity into the saltchuck, and couldn't. One of the farms is a housing development now; the other one raises dairy replacement cows.

I should be asleep, and since the ibuprofen I got up to take should be safely dissolved, I'm going back to bed before I get maudlin about the necessity of a healthy farming community in the production of healthy food. I'm going to have to get up in three hours and ready myself for a trek across town on Black Friday to attend a going out of business sale at the only independant art supply store in thirty miles or so. It's hard for me to separate out my feelings about food, good paintbrushes, and the current economic clusterfuck (viz Jon Stewart) right now. Diversity equals stability, and all that jazz.

Can they really match the price of battery chicken? I'm not saying anyone should eat that stuff, but AFAIK quite a few people are looking for the cheapest animal protein they can afford.

I'm courageously taking a stand for important values and principles. You're moralising.

(But yes, they do. And not just in the USA- throughout the Western World.)

moralistic
Function: adjective
Date: 1865
1 : characterized by or expressive of a concern with morality
2 : characterized by or expressive of a narrow moral attitude

Hmmm, lemme think for a few minutes. I'm sure something will come to mind.

In Canada? They can beat price of battery chicken.

This is because dirt and transport are relatively cheap; you can free-range chickens for very little, whereas the battery guys have a substantial capital investment and operating costs.

The battery operations are not -- fundamentally -- price driven; they're driven by consistent schedules and volumes, because the guys making McNuggets have very specific needs and do not want to deal with eleventy-many independents. The needs of large institutional customers, like the guys making McNuggets or the folks buying for a large grocery distributor, completely drive battery farms, and they have almost no interest in food quality as such nor consumer prices. (Prices other batter operations sell at, yes; prices paid by the consumer are more or less invisible to them. That's not true of the guy doing direct or near-direct distribution.)

I could get free-range chicken for about 2 CAD/pound if I was interested in being as cheap as possible; that's in one of the Chinese markets, feet still on. Organic free range chicken's price varies by season, but last I checked was something like 6 CAD/pound. Plain old free range is less than that, and a willingness to buy just legs is less than that still.

JESR@48 --

Cheap pork in Ontario isn't quite what it is in, say, the Carolinas; all farming in Ontario is pretty heavily regulated. Not quite in the ways I would best prefer, but there is very substantial oversight, including for waste storage.

We also simply don't have the maize lobby the US does; it's never much better than a marginal feed crop up here.

Exactly; there are places where sugar is a good thing (tea) and even places where it is a necessary thing (lemonade, cookies, cranberry sauce).

But I do not like living in a world where I need to check the ingredients lists of canned vegetables to make sure that they contain un-sugared tomatoes or green beans or whatever.

Generally:

I am a college student and cannot really afford to buy free-range meats more than occasionally. I wish my budget better let me back up my morals with actions.

But at the same time--it seems to me that while ethical meat production is inherently more expensive, a lot of the reason "good" meat is so much more expensive is because it's sitting on the wrong side of the supply/demand curve. It seems to me that, ultimately, regulation driving the meat industry in the direction of CAFO will not make meat prices rise that much; lowest-common-denominator products can't charge specialty prices, even if the lowest-common-denominator is raised by regulation.

Read the sections on kosher slaughter and you may not be quite so confident that kosher necessarily equals humane (that it should is mostly not in question, the problem is that in practice it doesn't always). The recent Agriprocessors expose showed serious mistreatment of both animals and workers at a large kosher slaughterhouse, but that's not the only problem; some kosher slaughtering is still done by hoisting the animal first, which is painful, may break their legs, and of course induces panic. Upright slaughtering using a knife seems to be as humane as the captive bolt method, assuming both are done with care.

I actually found the book and the writings on her site made me feel a little better about eating meat, which is something that causes me a lot of guilt and which I have a very hard time defending. But what she had to say is that there are ways of treating animals during slaughter that keep them calm, unworried, and kill them instantly without suffering; and just as importantly, that keep workers from having to treat animals inhumanely. Many slaughterhouses already operate by those rules. I'd like to see them instituted uniformly - clearly they can be done and remain commercial competitive, so as with so many things it's just laziness and "we've always done it this way" that keeps plants from converting. If we could be sure that all meat produced here met those minimum standards I'd be much happier.

Setting a higher standard for treatment would also prevent things like the chicken farmers who used a wood chipper to kill thousands of adult chickens but couldn't be prosecuted because a USDA vet had approved it. Setting standard practices for all cases where animals need to be killed would mean no such impromptu methods could be used. (This is distinct from the use of very high-speed macerators to kill male chicks, which is viscerally repulsive but is probably as painless a method as any.)

There's a workaround, but it requires capital and organization. You can buy a live animal, and have it slaughtered. That doesn't require a USDA licensed slaughterhouse. There are many more slaughterhouses available. If you do that, though, the cost of pasture-raised beef is about the same as beef from the grocery store.

(Or, you can do what I do and kill what you eat. That isn't recommended for city people.)

*There is some exception for poultry, which is why pastured poultry is so important to the small and local farm movement. Getting a similar exemption for larger animals would be huge help.

I'd actually be happier if we could get rid of the subsidy that lets them flood the food chain with HFCS, and get back to sugar.

You're right that ADM's contribution to our diet is HFCS, and that it appears to be the worst ingredient our national diet from the point of view of inducing diseases like diabetes. But even in foods that don't have HFCS in them, some other form of sugar is often added. I believe that in many cases this is a deliberate attempt by the manufacturers to make the food at least somewhat addictive, to increase sales. Even if not deliberate, it has that effect on many people.

I'm really angry these days about the way that so many industries have become, one way or another, addictive drug pushers.

Krispy Kremes, yuck.

In fact, for people who have been farming the same land for a couple-three-four generations, everything which makes a viable direct-to-consumer high value operation is prohibitively complex (in the US, in my state, in my experience). Getting organic certification when one is burdened by decisions made fifty or eighty years ago, when there has been no break in the ownership chain, is nightmarish because of record-keeping requirements; just changing course when one already has a herd of cattle and a suite of barns, sheds, and fences is like trying to turn an ocean vessel in a river channel.

Howver, when medical opinion recommended that people here in the UK cut back a bit on eating meat - say, not eating any a couple of days a week - there was a huge outcry from farming representatives. Funny, I thought that what they ate as alternatives was also likely to come from farmers...

If we went back to raising animals mostly on land not suitable for growing crops, and using grain for feeding people rather than converting it inefficiently to beef, and returned to fertilising land with manure instead of artificial (highly subsidised) fertilisers, and used more locally-grown produce, I think most people (and the environment, and small farmers) would be better off - but big agribusiness would not - and they are the ones with clout.

I wish there were a way to compare nutritional labels from, say, 20 years ago to those out there now, just to see how sugar and sodium levels for some of these things have changed over time.

That's not to say that processed foods are low in salt/sugar/hfcs, or that they could be beaten by well cooked fresh ingredients, because of course, they aren't and they can.

But the other way we preserved things was in the freezer - and that meant that green beans, peas, etc., didn't have extra salt or sugar.

And speaking from personal and recent experience - when I make jam, I control how much and what king of sugar goes in - and it is possible to make completely sugar-free jam.

Salt in canned vegetables is another case of old tech carrying over into the pressure cooker era: the most dangerous pathogen in canned food is Clostridium botulinum, which is not effected by salt. Green beans are notoriously the worst offendors, and are, in addition, nearly impossible to salt properly once they've been cooked, so the misconception that proper canned beans are salty for food safety reasons came about.

(Once I've given a 4-H demmonstration on any set of information, it's never going to go away, is it? 44 years, and I could still stand up and recite all that and more, but I'd miss my flip chart.)

Partly tongue in cheek? He ends with a story about coming across a hypercube in a Chinese curio shop, deciding that $12 is too much to pay, being unable to find the shop later when he changes his mind, but continuing to search: "When I do, I shall certainly buy the thing and bring it to Washington. There I'll make an offering of it to Mrs. Clinton as a sort of seed or crystal around which American society, politics--and indeed life--can be reconstituted along four-dimensional lines, for a truly millennial millennium."

My guess is that he had to be treated for a perforated cheek after that, unless it was a sprained tongue.

I would guess this is the same Jim Holt who wrote an article in the Oct 2, 2006 New Yorker entitled "Unstrung: In string theory, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Is that really all we need to know?"

Any meat that is not kosher, as well as the hindquarters of mammals (which can be made kosher, but with a lot of expensive labor, so it's generally not done in the US, where meat is plentiful), is sold then to non-Jews.

What constitutes "humane" slaughter is subject to a lot of controversy. Jews maintain that kosher slaughter (razor-sharp knife cutting the neck, which severs the carotid artery and jugular vein, thus instantly draining the brain of blood BEFORE the nerves react with pain impulses) is the most humane method; most US state laws state that stunning before slaughter is more humane. Kosher operations generally have to get a specific exemption, often on a per-session basis, to state slaughter requirements.

When I say "per-session", I mean that once a month, a group of slaughterers and butchers hired by a kosher meatpacker will rent a processing facility, clean it, spend a day killing and packaging animals, and go away again. Many kosher operations work like this.

Regarding Chait/Klein - sounds like my brother. He has been veg (although he eats eggs/milk/fish) since 1991, when he drove across country to grad school (UC-Davis, entomology) and was shocked by the amount of land given over to feed corn. Now, it turns out, that in the past year or so he has started to eat meat. It started with eating "organic" meat, that is, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, chickens that he grew himself, etc. But he realized that a) he likes meat, and b) it's a slippery slope from ethically pure meat to regular meat. So he has been sliding down the slope, and doesn't seem to mind that much. He had never insisted that his wife & kids eat veg, which may influence things - he does a lot of the cooking, and the rest of the family eats meat.

In re Hebrew National, believe it or not, they don't actually sell kosher meat anymore. At least, not in any supermarket I regularly check. There's not a single hecksher of any description on their packages.

Which is disappointing, especially given that Best's Kosher is now out of business, so if I want to buy hotdogs my kosher-keeping family can eat at a summer barbecue, or whatnot, I have to make a special pilgrimage into a kosher-keeping enclave neighborhood hours from my house -- because there are currently NO brands of hecksher-marked franks (beef, turkey, or whatever) available in the mainstream supermarkets I frequent.

I live in Chicago, btw.

Call them up if you want to make sure that they're supervised, even if they don't have a mark on the package.

Full disclosure: I eat vegetarian most of the time, but occasionally satisfy a craving for a slice of bacon, a bowl of pho, or some crab.

What about the "swill-milk dairies" that cartoonist Thomas Nast crusaded against?

[1] Movie reference.

Also, hormone additives etc... make me very wary of meat suppliers. How does a Tysons chicken manage to move around with such disproportionately large breasts?

Abi @84 - there are real fruitarians. I've known a few - one a homeless guy who was always so hungry, he'd eat a juice mix of every bruised fruit donated to Food Not Bombs that week. And there was a famous US comic who was fruitarian and wrote a book about it. Dick Gregory, maybe?

The fruitarian rule is "only the ripe fruit that comes off the plant and leaves it living." So it includes things like berries, nuts, tomatos, garlic scapes (but not bulbs), tree fruits, kiwis, etc.

Abi @84 - there are real fruitarians. I've known a few - one a homeless guy who was always so hungry, he'd eat a juice mix of every bruised fruit donated to Food Not Bombs that week. And there was a famous US comic who was fruitarian and wrote a book about it. Dick Gregory, maybe?

The fruitarian rule is "only the ripe fruit that comes off the plant and leaves it living." So it includes things like berries, nuts, tomatos, garlic scapes (but not bulbs), tree fruits, kiwis, etc.

Since there are no specifically kosher egg facilities (all chicken eggs are kosher, unless they have a blood spot), this was about standard battery farming.

Also, since milk comes out of the cow and leaves it living, are there ovo-lacto-fruitarians?

My view is, at some point you're going to have to accept that you're an animal and must eat living or formerly-living things to survive (that is, if you don't do so, you won't in fact survive). (Until the invention of genuinely synthetic food, and then it's just really expensive to not eat living things.) Given that fact, one line is as arbitrary as another, so why moralize about it?

There's a large logical gap in your argument: that you must eat living or formerly-living things does not imply that all lines are equally arbitrary, any more than the need for money to buy food and fuel means that rules against armed robbery are as arbitrary as a policy against wearing pink shirts to work.

That this is nonsense is easily demonstrated when one draws the line, ad absurdum, past killing and eating one's fellow humans. Still an arbitrary line? If not, why not? Got to eat living things to survive, innit?

Filed under "Another County Heard From": I never could buy the argument that "having a nervous system" or "having a face" meant "having a greater right to live."

* Or whatever variation thereof they have chosen to follow. I've heard a lot of diets called "vegetarianism" by those who practiced them; some even included eating fish, shellfish, or chicken. My personal opinion is that if you eat meat (or meat products), no matter the source, you are not a vegetarian; conversely, ovo-lacto seems perfectly within the range of philosophical vegetarianism to me because the animal is still alive afterwards. But there are those who disagree, and I don't feel strongly enough about it to want to argue.

"It's made with people!"

I do, in fact, think the taboo against eating humans that are already dead is arbitrary (aside from the health concerns, which might be alleviated by adequate cooking if anyone was willing to try). I happen to share it, and would probably extend it to other sentient species if we knew of any, but I still think it's arbitrary.

There's a sense in which any moral judgment is arbitrary, but I think that "don't kill humans without a darn good reason" and "don't eat humans even if they're already dead" are on different levels of arbitrariness: a society that lacks the former is dangerous to the living, while a society that lacks the latter is only "dangerous" to the dead.

P.S. If there's anyone here who *does* think that killing cows is equivalent to murder, is hitching horses to your wagon/plow equivalent to slavery and neutering your cat and keeping it indoors equivalent to mutilation and false imprisonment? And if so, isn't that a position incompatible with any human society, past or present, civilized or non? And one which is clearly incapable of supporting anything like the present human population of the Earth, and would therefore require the deaths of billions of humans in order to attempt to implement it? This seems to me like a slight snag that is rarely, if ever, addressed by people who claim a moral equivalence between sentient and non-sentient animals.

I've heard that same argument from several disparate sources, not all of them actual fruitarians, but I don't know where *they* got it from - it may be a Rasta idea, or one from somewhere in the Black Nationalist subculture, because those are the people I've gotten that explanation from (I met a fruitarian in the UK but he was doing it for health reasons.)

And isn't the definition of fruit that it has seeds? I'm pretty sure all fruits are a plants tactic to spread seeds through being eaten.

One of the things that bugged me about Gur Png Jub Jnyxrq Guebhtu Jnyyf was the protagonist's big secret. The guy was already dead, why did it matter that they ate him? Similarly, Stirling's Dies the Fire et seq. includes people who start killing for the purpose of cannibalism, which is rightly condemned as unacceptable--but he assumes that anyone who ate another human's body was irredeemable, whether or not the body was already dead when the eater got to it, and that I don't get. We are not ancient Egyptians; dead people don't need their bodies...

If there's anyone here who *does* think that killing cows is equivalent to murder, is hitching horses to your wagon/plow equivalent to slavery and neutering your cat and keeping it indoors equivalent to mutilation and false imprisonment?

I have been in an argument (I don't think it was here, but I can't remember where it was) with a woman who said precisely that--that keeping cats and dogs as pets was slavery. That the "freed" animal would sit on the porch whimpering in frightened bewilderment was "proof" that it had adopted a slave mentality.

Some search terms: Kuru. Mortuary cannibalism. Prion diseases.

My reasons for that diet have varied over the years, but actually I don't think anyone's reasons for following a particular diet are anyone else's business. If they're ADVOCATING it, that's another story, and then you get to say things like "well, fruitarian, the cow is still alive after you take milk from it, so why isn't milk included?"

That said, I will say that I believe I have a geas (personal behavior restriction that comes from the Otherworld) that forbids me to eat the flesh of animals (including sea creatures). I consult no authority but my skin, my bones, and my heretic heart (aka my "inner light" or what have you) on this. Some years ago some friends asked me if I would eat pasta that had been colored with squid ink; I searched my feelings for a moment and came up with a weak no.

Was that based on my surmise that they probably got the squid ink by killing the squid? No. It was because my geas manifests itself in my feelings, and my feelings say "No, don't eat squid ink."

Now, as I said above, geasa are personal (in the sense of being different for every person), and I have no way of knowing what anyone else's geasa might be. If someone I know eats meat, is it because they're not listening to their inner voice, or because their inner voice is saying different things than mine? How arrogant would I have to be to impose my geasa on them? Well, I don't know, but I'm not, in fact, sufficiently arrogant, so I don't do that.

As a consequence of all this, I don't think I particularly have any more right than Patrick does to object to cruelty in the raising of meat. People might listen to me more, but that's because of their prejudice (in my view), not because I really have more moral standing. I understand and have some sympathy with people who are vegetarians because meat animals are treated cruelly (and it's virtually impossible to get humanely-raised veal, for example, in this country).

However, I draw the line at people who don't eat meat because "it's wrong to kill animals" under any circumstances. I will always ask why it's not wrong to kill plants in that case, and what gives an animal so much more "right to live" than a plant. If I had to kill either a 500-year-old redwood or a chicken, I would kill the chicken without hesitation (call me a treehugger if you want). If you want to have that argument with me, I warn you that I've heard a LOT of arguments for the privileging of the animal kingdom, and didn't buy any of them.

So the moral stand that it's wrong to kill to eat is one I generally will listen to only from someone who has achieved photosynthesis, and can teach it to anyone who wants to learn. I guess the fruitarians have some moral standing in that regard too, but I've found them to be vanishingly rare.

Also, everyone draws some line between things they'll eat and things they won't eat, usually based on being too close to human for them. Everyone sane excludes human flesh from their normal diet, and includes at least some food of some kind. Not all lines between those two extremes are equally arbitrary, but I believe people have a right to be as arbitrary as they want; I once knew a guy who wouldn't eat the flesh of anything that had eyes when it was alive (so he'd eat some mollusks but not others, and no, I don't think he'd eat beef if you bred an eyeless cow). He didn't tell anyone else that THEY should, so I have no problem with that.

I can has earworm! Thanks, Xopher! ;-)

Well, they should be unconvinced. That's not to say that your stance has no impact--it does, and it's valuable. But to say that the decision to not eat meat is somehow less impactful that demanding a certain kind of meat is a bit strange. It might keep animal-killing operations from abusing the animals on the way to the killing, but since the killing of the animal is the ultimate abuse anyway, the abuse-diminishment seems slight, if the animal-killers even pay attention.

That said, I spent thirty-six years (enthusiastically) eating meat, so I can hardly condemn others for that.

The last paragraph reminded me of something in Diane Duane's "The Book of Night With Moon" (the first novel of the "Feline Wizards" sequence).

The main viewpoint character Rhiow notes that some cats were of the opinion that those cats associated with humans are inherently prisoners and need to either be freed from "captivity" or at least convinced that they are prisoners.

(Rhiow understands this opinion but doesn't agree with it. Among other things, she happens to like her particular humans.)

I am reminded of the fact that it is healthier to be vegeterian in India than to eat the same nominal diet in England. There's enough contamination be it only chiten and insect parts to give a little B12 to the diet in India - in the UK not so much.

I've long tried to distinguish killing and murder in assorted contexts and I have real issues with slaughter as a form of murder - as does e.g. Temple Grandin who considers herself an obligate carnivore - she doesn't feel quite right without meat. I'm not sure how I would feel about dealing with the folks who free their animal slaves by turning them loose into a poorly suited ecosystem - a gerbil into the piney woods on a wet and snowy day for instance or just cats and dogs in the country - but I'd be tempted to express a value choice.

Obs SF Deep Range.

The moral logic I see here is:

1) Humans need food.
2) Any action taken to fulfil a need is permissible. (implied)
3) Therefore, it is permissible to eat animals without any regard for their welfare, because it fulfils a need.

The problem being that, simply because one has a need, it does not follow that absolutely any action taken to fulfil that need is permissible, especially when multiple alternatives exist to satisfy that need.

I do not think that being willing to eat meat, but not wanting food animals to suffer unduly, is arbitrary. Animals do not have rights (no obligations, no place in society), and thus no right not to be killed, but their welfare is nevertheless of value (or is it okay to torture them?). The line between "raising animals in great pain and distress, then killing and eating them" and "raising animals in comfort and security, then killing and eating them" is not the divide between "killing animals" and "killing humans", but it's there and it's not arbitrary. The difference is whether you care about hurting animals unnecessarily.

Xopher #104: ovolactovegetarian

I'm reading that as "vegetarian who eats eggs and milk", is that correct? I've heard the same term as a substitute for "vegan".

That's correct.

I've heard the same term as a substitute for "vegan".

No, a vegan is a vegetarian who consumes no animal products of any kind.

No, a vegan is a vegetarian who consumes no animal products of any kind.

right. "vegetarian" is a vague term on its own, so the "ovolacto" designates what kind of vegetarian, it doesn't denote a different group from the understood term "vegetarian."

whereas "vegan" is a rather specific term (although vegans have varying views on, e.g. wearing leather, consuming yeast, or buying gelatin-print photographs), & i don't know why someone would need a longer, more confusing way to say it.

I suspect he is referring to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. I don't know much about it personally - my sister's colitis responded to it well, but that was likely because she was an undiagnosed Celiac and it removed most of the sources of gluten from her diet.

I'm sure Michael can help you more, but at least you can poke at Google in the meantime.

Asking a vegan how they feel about charred bones is not something I'd prefer to attempt without an exit strategy.

well, you just have to have a drink prepared that you can spill on your chest (/crossthread). maybe a drink with milk, so that they won't be tempted to mop it up for you.

ARE there any drinks with cocktail weenies or similar in them?

Please make a note of it.

Was FG before or after FvnFY? Though the military context of the former is much closer to GPjJgJ than the sacred cannibalism of Fgenatre.

Correction: <a href="http://www.example.com/">example</a>

example

If you want angle brackets to show in your comment, use the HTML entities for 'less than', &lt; (<) & 'greater than', &gt; (>)

For a working link, apart from quotation/ditto marks, it's important to remember the http:// section of the URL inside them. In the recipe at the bottom of the comments page, the only permissible substitutions are the contents of www.url.com and Linked text

In 1999 a team went up Mount Everest specifically to search for the body of George Mallory, lost on the mountain in 1924. They succeeded, and buried him at 27,000 feet. They might not have considered it a sacred duty, but it was a real risk for the sake of this essentially symbolic act.

[House]
One bit of my comment was for those others who don't yet know how to show the angle brackets;

The other was to emphasise the need for the http://

It's like the "s, people look at the example you give them and just don't see them, saying “we put it in just like the example”.

I'm still worried I didn't specifically note the ;s at the end of the entities are also necessary.[/House]
Should sleep now.