Being vegan/vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean healthier eating. I'm not sure where you got the 3% obesity rate for veggies, but just through personal observation, there seems to be a higher percentage than that. You have to be much more conscious of your diet if you cut out meats to ensure that you do get proper nutrients and vitamins that are now eliminated from your diet. I would indeed like to cut out meat from my diet, more for environmental reasons than for health reasons.
Minimally, and more realistically, (once we can afford it) we are going to move towards organic meats and free range meat sources and just try to cut back a bit in general. Not as a cop out, but with my super duper fast matabolism, it would probably be ill advised for me to cut meat out completely.
I'm actually downloading the movie and then will watch it and I'll comment more specifically on the documentary once its through. I don't ever agree with excessive violence or flagrant brutality, but the truth of the matter is that death is intrinsic to food production, even a vegetarian one. Wild animals don't typically have nice peaceful deaths either, but I do disagree with placing unnecessary pain/distress to animals.
My problem isn't so much with their deaths ... after all, most deaths are unpleasant, including human ones ... but with their lives. Animals being kept in dirty, over-crowded conditions, never once in their lives seeing the sky or breathing fresh air, baby animals separated from their mothers soon after being born, force-fed hormones and drugs and chemicals and things they would never in a million years choose to eat, such as cows being fed beef by-products ... that's the stuff that bothers me. I have no intention of ever eating meat again, but if for some reason I did, I'd have to do some research and find an organic farm that still raises animals the way they do in children's books ... cows grazing in the field, chickens roaming in the yard, pigs slopping around in their outdoor pens.
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." ~ MLK, 1963
My problem isn't so much with their deaths ... after all, most deaths are unpleasant, including human ones ... but with their lives. Animals being kept in dirty, over-crowded conditions, never once in their lives seeing the sky or breathing fresh air, baby animals separated from their mothers soon after being born, force-fed hormones and drugs and chemicals and things they would never in a million years choose to eat, such as cows being fed beef by-products ... that's the stuff that bothers me. I have no intention of ever eating meat again, but if for some reason I did, I'd have to do some research and find an organic farm that still raises animals the way they do in children's books ... cows grazing in the field, chickens roaming in the yard, pigs slopping around in their outdoor pens.
I agree with you completely. This is why I am moving towards organic/free range meat. Do you have any ethical issues if raised without drugs/hormones and free range? I don't really have any problems with that in this case with the exception of the environmental problems of course, but hopefully I can also find some local meat. I also hope to go hunting at least once in my life.
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