Meat is sustainable. It grows.

I have no guilt toward you or meat.

What about a balanced diet?

I was under the impression that something like 90% of e.coli cases came from underwashed vegetables and fruits and unpasteurized juices.

“My wife’s carnivorous…”

Wow, so you eat no meat, and she eats only meat? It’s like the nursery rhyme Jack Spratt…

Awful, annoying, joyless, rude, and ultimately, let’s face it, superstitious and self-righteous people, those moral vegetarians. And here in Japan? There is virtually nothing that doesn’t have bonito flakes in it somewhere.

And if you don’t drink, on top of it? Why are you even at my house? Go sit in your house and sip chai and weave baskets or whatever. Don’t come suck the joy out of me and my guests because you have to construct your identity out of negatives.

People come in all shades, all types. Your conclusion — that anyone who avoids meat for moral reasons is “crazy” — well, might that be a tad simplistic? Sure some people get militant about vegetarianism. And some people get militant about eating meat. I come across them in roughly equal proportions. Self-righteousness is not attached so much to any one idea as it is found in the human population at large. Always has been, always will.

Do you think your negative experiences with vegetarians so far might be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy? If you’ve already labelled the entire group as “awful, annoying, joyless, rude, and ultimately, let’s face it, superstitious and self-righteous people” then you’re kind of setting yourself up for a bad encounter.

Think Chik-Fil-A can work this into their ads somehow?

Personally, I think that the reason many meat eater’s react so negatively toward vegetarians is that they feel some sort of guilt.

It’s largely recognized that a diet heavy in meat eating is not a healthy diet.

What is it with people who get all outraged whenever someone mentions vegetarians? No one even brought up morality, made any suggestion that you’re less worthy, marvelous, and fragrant because of eating meat, and you’re attacking this phantom horde of self-righteous smug vegetarians.

Is there some crew of vegan thugs who follow you around and heckle you when you order at restaurants or something?

I’ve honestly never heard anyone behave anything like you describe. Of course they ask whether a dish has meat in it, when it’s not obvious. If you get all shirty when someone dares to ask about the ingredients in a dish, it’s no wonder you take a dim view of vegetarians – the hooligans, they keep taking an interest in what htey eat! They’re as bad as those goons with celiac disease, all asking whether there’s flour in the soup and bombing grain elevators!

I know most people were raised to believe that USDA regulation is saving them from The Jungle, when actually it’s simply incorporating government sanction and obfuscation into an national scale version of “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”.

Back in the good old days, when GOV actually regulated industry and food was safe, “downer cattle” were assumed to be unsafe to slaughter and trucked off to the rendering plant to be made into dog food not people food…

Now we just assume that our food is polluted because we have allowed the Republicans to win the war against government and regulation

Lower taxes anyone?

Enjoy the journey

WarLord

I was served an undercooked burger at a local fair last September. I got good and sick, but not as sick as I could have. As it was, I lived on probiotics and rice gruel for three weeks and even though I’m much better than I was, my guts still aren’t right.

Imagine my horror when I learned that massive amounts of beef infected with E. coli 0157:H7 had been released for sale. This is nothing amusing. I got sick, but this can kill people. Or it can mess people up so badly for the rest of their lives that they wish they were dead.

After I got sick, I read that 22 million pounds of infected beef had been recalled. And I figured there would be massive pressure on the meat packing industry to clean up their act. But no. I got on the USDA mailing list, and the recalls kept coming and coming and coming. And the public just doesn’t care. I wonder what the deal with that is? One batch of contaminated spinach and folks have sworn off spinach for life. But fecal burgers? Oh hey, yummy!

There’s an interesting book by Nichols Fox about the first famous E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak about around 2000. It’s worth a read.

I imagine it’s a trade-off between the need for meat and it’s economic production.

I imagine there is constant pressure from both sides (animal-lib and the meat industry) and when we see people getting prosecuted for cruelty etc., it’s a small victory for the animal-libbers rather than signs of a backward policy.

Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think it’s a balance easily (or yet) acheived.

I didn’t really get irritated until I moved to Japan. There literally is next to nothing that doesn’t have fish stock in it. Add to this that I’ve never known a proficient Japanese speaker vegetarian, and what you get is them asking me what is in everything. It falls to me to find something that they can eat that doesn’t trigger their psychosomatic illness “’cause I can’t even digest meat anymore, man” that only seems to affect them when I tell them that the miso soup they are enjoying is made of smoked fish flakes, for example. If I smile and lie when they ask if X, Y and Z have meat in them, they’re happy as the clams in the broth they’re drinking.

But even back in the states, it irritates me if I’m hosting. I’m hosting. There’s going to be meat on the menu. You are more than welcome to bring something else, but I’m not cooking something I don’t want to eat just because you grew up in a city and didn’t know hamburgers came from cows until you were 20 years old.

It’s largely a Western eating disorder, vegetarianism is, and I don’t see why I should accommodate it.

(Actually, that is a pretty damn funny thought.)