Vegeteria

It's all about reducing your load

If you haven't seen Safe, you might be missing my point. The load lightening concept from Safe explains my main reason for maintaining my vegetarian status.

I know I'm paranoid, but I just don't trust meat. I come into contact with too many things I can't control that may or may not be dangerous. I think meat is dangerous enough to warrant not eating it at all. As it happens, I also think that the meat industry is cruel to animals and extremely hard on our environment. This is enough to keep me away from meat forever.

There are so many arguments in favor of vegetarianism, it's hard to know where to start. First of all, there's the big fallacy of the USDA recommended diet. I've done a lot of reading, but David Siegel has compiled the data and debunked the Protein Myth. I think he's right about this, and some day, maybe I'll bring myself to give up Calcium and Dairy too.

If one likes animals at all, I think that beef is easy to give up. While I admit that all of my favorite meat products came from a cow or a pig, cows are cute, dammit, and pigs are finer creatures than they are given credit for. chicken Well, I honestly never liked it anyway. I used to like shellfish. Then my father pointed out to me that shellfish are merely insects that live underwater. That pretty well grossed me out, but then I started giving some thought to where they live and what *they* eat, and that was the end of that. Fish was the last thing to go. I didn't eat much of it to begin with, so that was no great loss. For my reasons, see the meat link or read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac.

Obviously, I'm not a PETA person. I admire what they are trying to do, but I feel their militarism works against their cause. I do very much admire their tenacity. For some USENET fun, there are two main veggie groups. The first, rec.food.veg is unmoderated and often heated and full of nuts. The second, rec.food.veg.cooking is mostly a place to find recipies or a company selling something you can't buy in your area, like vegetarian Worchestershire sauce or something.

When I'm looking for somewhere to go for lunch or dinner, I often check out veg.org. They've got a very good restaurant guide and information about fast food chains. When I can't think of anything to cook, I look at the Veggies Unite site. Now that I've completely converted, it's much easier, but this is a very good site with some neat bells and whistles. If you're a vegan, it's definitely a good place to check since that's a harder row to hoe than being a ovo-lacto.

It seems that you just can't be enough of a vegetarian enough for some people. My suggestion? Don't worry about it. In the U.S., anyway, it's enough to be any kind of vegetarian. Meat is everywhere, and there are plenty of people who think that *you're* the nut if you're suspicious or soft-hearted. Don't let the extremists scare you away either. Everyone has different reasons for becoming a vegetarian, and everyone has their own rationalizations for what they do and do not eat. As far as I'm concerned, you can be a member of the club if you care enough about your own health, animals and/or the environment to quit eating flesh.

Your body is YOUR temple. Everyone is entitled to make their own decisions about what they will and will not put on that altar. In short, I believe that the flesh of animals and fish contain things that are ultimately toxic to humans and lead to heart disease and cancer. I also believe that we were never inteded to eat animals, except when there was nothing else to eat. I think that we can digest them because we evolved to survive in any climate or geography.

Don't even get me started on my conspiracy theories.