Are you a Vegetarian?

You will get varied answers ranging from “Of course, I am a vegan” to “I am an eggetarian” to “I don’t eat red meat”, all the way up to “I love animals, they taste really good” and “I can eat anything that moves or once moved”. Where the person is in this huge spectrum depends on a lot of factors, broadly categorized into a handful of buckets.

Religion

A vast majority of folks refrain from meat or at least some types of meats because of their religious beliefs. Muslims, for example won’t eat pork while Hindus typically don’t eat beef. It doesn’t stop there. Some Hindus are supposed to not eat any type of meat, whereas others abstain from meat during a portion of the year, which typically coincides with the rainy season in India. This is not surprising as the digestive capacity of humans during those days may not be the best. Indian diaspora also follows this practice during the same time period although the weather during those months in that part of the World they are living may be sunny and mild!

Health

The second biggest reason you will find is related to Health. Folks cite that many studies have shown vegetarian diet is healthy and justify their departure from meat eating habits. On the other side, people start eating meat to get extra proteins.

Unless otherwise instructed by a medical professional, you should continue to eat the type of food, meat or otherwise, that your previous generations had been eating. There is no point adopting a food habit contrary to your ancestors, as suggested in https://anishenators.blogspot.com/2014/11/safe-foods.html.

Regardless of what you consume, make sure the meat you are eating is not antibiotic or growth hormone laden nor the vegetables are pesticides laden.

Environment and Food Supply

A friend of mine was a little skeptical about articles explaining global climate change caused by non-vegetarian diet. He asked me a pointed question “What if all the human beings in the World turn into vegetarians? Where will we get that much grains and vegetables?” 

I presented him a simple Math ==> One ox killed provides a day’s supply of food to 500 people (https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-meat-can-we-expect-beef-animal mentions consumable quantity of beef per ox). The same ox during his lifetime eats 3-4 times the food a normal human eats everyday (cattle keeps on grazing and grazing throughout the day). If the average lifespan of a slaughtered ox is 3 years, he would have eaten 3 (years) x 365 (days) x 3 (times – calves eat less, if given their mother’s milk) or roughly 3000 humans’ worth of food, while his meat feeds only 500 people. Does that mean 2500 humans would have gotten a day’s supply of meals if one ox was not raised for slaughter or in other words, 5 humans would be hunger free for 3 years if 2 oxen are out of livestock? Poof goes the World hunger! 

Extrapolate it to pigs and chicken and you have fed the entire human population over and over!

Conscience and Compassion

While religious beliefs have roots of compassion, there are many more people who refrain from meat on compassion grounds, not specifically because of religious beliefs. 

Food goes through multiple stages before it is served on the table. This includes raising animals, killing them, extracting meat out of them and then finally cooking. It depends on individual’s conscience as to what (s)he is comfortable with. In general, if you visualize the stages and can perform these operations without any remorse, you are fit to consume that food. A few people may be completely fine with these stages for cattle and pigs, while some others may be comfortable only with chicken and a few others may not be able to even break open an egg, let alone killing an animal, big or small. 

This does not mean you are good or professional at carrying out these stages; the question is whether you can do these tasks without any remorse. Mark Zuckerberg had spent one year eating meat of the animals he had killed, he wanted to go through the experience of carrying out these steps first hand.

While most people are comfortable planting a tree, plucking its fruits and leaves, some may not want to uproot the plant itself for food. Fruit by far is the least unconscionable food item. You are actually benefitting the environment by eating the fruit and throwing the seed in the soil.

Mental Block

A lot of no-meat eaters however have a reservation against eating parts of a dead body. The fact that it was part and parcel of a living body at some point in time with its blood and other bodily fluids flowing close to if not through the piece they are eating, makes them uncomfortable.

Closing Remarks

Having said all this, human life is the most precious thing. So when it comes to survival, none of the reasons mentioned above makes any sense. Granted, a vegetarian person may not be able to survive if the only possible food available around is animals (by the way, what would the animals eat?); but would a meat eater survive if (s)he never killed an animal or took its meat out? It is a different thing to eat cooked meat than to hunt an animal, extract and cook the meat. 

Eating meat for the taste however is left to individual’s conscience and habits.