I’m a very conflicted omnivore. It’s quite simple.
When I see this:
I think about this:
My broad exposure to animals creates a conflict I that leaves me feeling guilty and hyper conscious when I eat meat or even think about it. If I spend more than a few minutes with a wee little calf, and he licks my hand there's little chance I'll be able to look at a steak and without thinking, "Oh poor cousin of Mr. Twinklypants!"
I’ve tried all manner of mental tricks to eat meat, and tell myself lies. The most effective lie goes like this:
“Mr. Twinklypants was born delicious. He wants to be eaten, it’s his destiny.”
This doesn’t always work. Sometimes I can’t separate how tasty he is from my deep belief that he’s a being, no different than me, that deserves to live a long healthy life. But nature isn’t like that. Nature is violent, unfair and some creatures are the top of their food chain. My science and philosophy are at odds on this topic, and it’s a conflict that I’ll probably never fully resolve.
When I see this:
I think about this:
My broad exposure to animals creates a conflict I that leaves me feeling guilty and hyper conscious when I eat meat or even think about it. If I spend more than a few minutes with a wee little calf, and he licks my hand there's little chance I'll be able to look at a steak and without thinking, "Oh poor cousin of Mr. Twinklypants!"
I’ve tried all manner of mental tricks to eat meat, and tell myself lies. The most effective lie goes like this:
“Mr. Twinklypants was born delicious. He wants to be eaten, it’s his destiny.”
This doesn’t always work. Sometimes I can’t separate how tasty he is from my deep belief that he’s a being, no different than me, that deserves to live a long healthy life. But nature isn’t like that. Nature is violent, unfair and some creatures are the top of their food chain. My science and philosophy are at odds on this topic, and it’s a conflict that I’ll probably never fully resolve.
I just wish they didn't taste good. Why do they taste good? It's unfair: my morality and taste buds are at odds.
I probably eat red meat (cows, sheep and other assorted adorable mammals) about once a month. Eating meat reminds me that I’m a predator, whose capable of terrible things, and so are all of the beings in my species. I consider eating meat an act of violence, and I do it anyway. But I don’t eat meat very often, because when I think about it like right now, it makes me feel like a murderer.
(Tasty Murder on a Plate)
I think that’s why people pray before they eat, it’s like calling for an absolution for the terrible thing they are about to do. I feel a lot better about eating it, when I thank the animal.
Thank you Mr. Twinklypants
For giving your life to become part of this tasty steak salad
While I appreciate this gift of protein
I’m also delighted to be on top of the foodchain.
Amen.
Then again, humans aren’t really on the top of the food chain. Ask anyone who has had a unarmed run in with a Tiger or Burmese Python. I’ve met some seriously bad ass predators, with fierce canines designed to rip flesh form bones. If I’m really no different than them, I guess I have to hope if I’m eaten by a crocodile, while he’s ripping off my legs that he finds me tasty too.
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Jonathan Wolfman
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Comments
No beef or pork eaten here for over 30 years now. Doctor said I have to eat at least chicken or fish. When I see a truck drive by with those cartons of chicken going to slaughter, I am very conflicted too.
Sweet photos. I love that baby cow.
Alligator is pretty good too, first time I had it, it was like chicken tenders!! What? The damn thing had a gun, I had to show the other animals in the park I was the top cat!! ;)
Linnnnnnnnn - Sorry this didn't make you feel better. The thing that has made me feel better about eating meat is thinking like a survivalist - if my life depended on it, I could eat anything. Then again, when I'm sitting at a restaurant and have hundreds of choices, why would I ever eat a cow? I wish I had an answer.
You inhabit an omnivorous body. If in the future you have the opportunity to experience chronic hunger for an extended period or be required to work your body to the very limit for an extended period, all these conflicts will be nicely resolved.
Just an opinion for what it is worth.
R
Not necessarily. I have a very vivid memory of visiting Puerto Rico when I was four years old and for the first time seeing someone wring a chicken's neck, plucking it, cleaning it and serving it for dinner. And I ate it. I guess I wasn't a very sensitive kid? Of course I wasn't actually killing it myself, but I did clearly see the connection between live animal ----> drumstick.
I'm not so sure you guys will ever turn me vegan again. From 18-24, I was one of those scary, anemic vegan girls. I don't have the normal vegetarian option, as I'm allergic to wheat, eggs and milk. It's either vegan or nothing.
Most people who know me still think of me as a vegan, anyway, that is until they see me eye-ing their bacon in a lascivious manner.
The frugivores (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and other primates) have intestinal tracts twelve times the length of the body, clawless hands and alkaline urine and saliva. Gorillas and orangutans are completely vegetarian, whereas the diet of other primates is mostly vegetarian, occasionally supplemented with carrion, insects, etc.
Linnaeus, who introduced binomial nomenclature (naming plants and animals according to their physical structure) wrote: "Man's structure, external and internal, compared with that of other animals shows that fruit and succulent vegetables constitute his natural food."
One of the most famous anatomists, Baron Cuvier, wrote: "The natural food of man, judging from his structure, appears to consist principally of the fruits, roots, and other succulent parts of vegetables. His hands afford every facility for gathering them; his short but moderately strong jaws on the other hand, and his canines being equal only in length to the other teeth, together with his tuberculated molars on the other, would scarcely permit him either to masticate herbage, or to devour flesh, were these condiments not previously prepared by cooking."
In The Natural Diet of Man, Adventist physician Dr. John Harvey Kellogg observes:
"Man is neither a hunter nor a killer. Carnivorous animals are provided with teeth and claws with which to seize, rend, and devour their prey. Man possesses no such instruments of destruction and is less well qualified for hunting than is a horse or a buffalo. When a man goes hunting, he must take a dog along to find the game for him, and must carry a gun with which to kill his victim after it has been found. Nature has not equipped him for hunting."
According to Dr. Kellogg, "The statement that man is omnivorous is made without an atom of scientific support. It is true the average hotel bill of fare and the menu found upon the table of the average citizen of this country have a decidedly omnivorous appearance. As a matter of fact, man is not naturally omnivorous, but belongs, as long ago pointed out by Cuvier, to the frugivorous class of animals...
"The bill of fare which wise Nature provides for man in forest and meadow, orchard and garden, a rich and varied menu, comprises more than 600 edible fruits, 100 cereals, 200 nuts, and 300 vegetables—roots, stems, buds, leaves and flowers...Fruits and nuts, many vegetables—young shoots, succulent roots, and fresh green leaves...are furnished by Nature ready for man’s use."
Dr. Kellogg further notes that "the human liver is incapable of converting uric acid into urea," and this is "an unanswerable argument against the use of flesh foods as part of the dietary of man. Uric acid is a highly active tissue poison...The livers of dogs, lions, and other carnivorous animals detoxicate uric acid by converting it into urea, a substance which is much less toxic and which is much more easily eliminated by the kidneys.
"Flesh foods are not the best nourishment for human beings and were not the food of our primitive ancestors," observes Dr. Kellogg.
"There is nothing necessary or desirable for human nutrition to be found in meats or flesh foods which is not found in and derived from vegetable products.
"The human race in general has never really adopted flesh as a staple food," explains Dr. Kellogg. "The Anglo-Saxons and a few savage tribes are about the only flesh-eating people. The people of other nations use meat only as a luxury or an emergency diet."
Although writing in 1923, Dr. Kellogg’s words confirm a recent statement by the American Dietetic Association, that, "most of mankind for most of human history has lived on vegetarian or near vegetarian diets."
Flesh-eating animals lap water with their tongue, whereas vegetarian animals imbibe liquids by a suction process. Humans are classified as primates and are thus frugivores possessing a set of completely herbivorous teeth. Proponents of the theory that humans should be classified as omnivores note that human beings do, in fact, possess a modified form of canine teeth. However, these so-called "canine teeth" are much more prominent in animals that traditionally never eat flesh, such as apes, camels, and the male musk deer.
It must also be noted that the shape, length and hardness of these so-called "canine teeth" can hardly be compared to those of true carnivorous animals. A principle factor in determining the hardness of teeth is the phosphate of magnesia content. Human teeth usually contain 1.5 percent phosphate of magnesia, whereas the teeth of carnivores are composed of nearly 5 percent phosphate of magnesia. It is for this reason they are able to break through the bones of their prey, and reach the nutritious marrow.
Zoologist Desmond Morris makes a case for vegetarianism in his 1967 book, The Naked Ape: "It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient feeding patterns."
In The Human Story, edited by Marie-Louise Makris (1985), we read: "...recent studies of their teeth reveal that the Australopithecines did not eat meat as a regular part of their diet, and were mainly peaceful vegetarians, rather like...gorillas. The popular image of the murderous ape is now as extinct as the Australopithecines themselves."
Dr. Gordon Latto notes that carnivorous and omnivorous animals can only move their jaws up and down, and that omnivores "have a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth, a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth--showing that they were destined to deal both with flesh foods from the animal kingdom and foods from the vegetable kingdom...
"Carnivorous mammals and omnivorous mammals cannot perspire except at the extremity of the limbs and the tip of the nose; man perspires all over the body. Finally, our instincts; the carnivorous mammal (which first of all has claws and canine teeth) is capable of tearing flesh asunder, whereas man only partakes of flesh foods after they have been camouflaged by cooking and by condiments.
"Man instinctively is not carnivorous," explains Dr. Latto. "...he takes the flesh food after somebody else has killed it, and after it has been cooked and camouflaged with certain condiments. Whereas to pick an apple off a tree or eat some grain or a carrot is a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; they don't feel disturbed by it. But to see these animals being slaughtered does affect people; it offends them. Even the toughest of people are affected by the sights in the slaughterhouse.
"I remember taking some medical students into a slaughterhouse. They were about as hardened people as you could meet. After seeing the animals slaughtered that day in the slaughterhouse, not one of them could eat the meat that evening."
Author R.H. Weldon writes in No Animal Food:
"The gorge of a cat, for instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man can take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with a carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his mouth water, and even in the absence of hunger, he will eat fruit to gratify taste."
As far back as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that: "A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions." More recently, William S. Collens and Gerald B. Dobkens concluded: "Examination of the dental structure of modern man reveals that he possesses all the features of a strictly herbivorous animal. While designed to subsist on vegetarian foods, he has perverted his dietary habits to accept food of the carnivore. It is postulated that man cannot handle carnivorous foods like the carnivore. Herein may lie the basis for the high incidence of arteriosclerotic disease."
Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), responds to the argument that killing animals for food is natural:
"This is quite an admirable argument. It explains practically everything; why we do not eat each other, except under conditions of unusual stress; why we may kill certain other animals (they are, in the order of nature, food for us); even why we should be kind to pets and try to help miscellaneous wildlife (they are not naturally our food). There are some problems with the idea that an order of nature determines which species are food for us, but an examination of human history indicates the broad outlines of just such an order, though inhibitions against eating certain species may vary from culture to culture.
"The main problem with this argument is that it does not justify the practice of meat-eating or animal husbandry as we know it today; it justifies *hunting*. The distinction between hunting and animal husbandry probably seems rather fine to the man in the street, or even to your typical rule-utilitarian moral philosopher. The distinction, however, is obvious to an ecologist. If one defends killing on the grounds that it occurs in nature, then one is defending the practice as it occurs in nature.
"When one species of animal preys on another in nature, it only preys on a very small proportion of the total species population. Obviously, the predator species relies on its prey for its continued survival. Therefore, to wipe the prey species out through overhunting would be fatal. In practice, members of such predator species rely on such strategies as territoriality to restrict overhunting and to insure the continued existence of its food supply.
"Moreover, only the weakest members of the prey species are the predator's victims: the feeble, the sick, the lame, or the young accidentally separated from the fold. The life of the typical zebra is usually placid, even in lion country; this kind of violence is the exception in nature, not the rule.
"As it exists in the wild, hunting is the preying upon isolated members of an animal herd. Animal husbandry is the nearly complete annihilation of an animal herd. In nature, this kind of slaughter does not exist. The philosopher is free to argue that there is no moral difference between hunting and slaughter, but he cannot invoke nature as a defense of this idea.
"Why are hunters, not butchers, most frequently taken to task by the larger community for their killing of animals? Hunters usually react to such criticism by replying that if hunting is wrong, then meat-hunting must be wrong as well. The hunter is certainly right on one point--the larger community is hypocritical to object to hunting when it consumes the flesh of domesticated animals. If any form of meat-eating is justified, it would be meat from a hunted animal."
The myth that humans are naturally a predator species remains popular. "The beast of prey is the highest form of active life," wrote Nazi philosopher Oswald Spengler in 1931. "It represents a mode of living which requires the extreme degree of the necessity of fighting, conquering, annihilating, and self-assertion. The human race ranks highly because it belongs to the class of beasts of prey. Therefore we find in man the tactics of life proper to a bold, cunning beast of prey. He lives engaged in aggression, killing, and annihilation. He wants to be master in as much as he exists."
The fact that predators exist in the wild does not imply man must automatically imitate them. Cannibalism and rape also occur in nature. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his book In the South Seas, noted that there was no difference between the "civilized" Europeans and the "savages" of the Cannibal Islands.
"We consume the carcasses of creatures with like appetites, passions, and organs as our own. We feed on babes, though not our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
Studies indicate flesh-eaters have less endurance than do vegetarians, while vegetarians have two to three times greater stamina and recover five times as quickly from exhaustion. Most kinds of cancer, as well as heart disease, osteoporosis, kidney disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, hemorrhoids, diverticulosis, arthritis, gallstones and gallbladder disease are all preventable and/or treatable or a vegetarian diet.
In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:
"Killing an animal is in itself a troubling act. It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians. There may be exceptions to that general rule, but it is true that most people prefer not to inquire into the killing of the animals they eat.
"Very few people ever visit a slaughterhouse; and films of slaughterhouse operations are rarely shown on television...Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.
"If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"
Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that "by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too."
In his 1987 Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Diet for a New America, author John Robbins writes:
"We do not usually see ourselves as members of a flesh-eating cult. But all the signs of a cult are there. Many of us are afraid to even consider other diet-style choices, afraid to leave the safety of the group, afraid when there isn't any evidence that might reveal that the god of animal protein isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. Members of the Great American Steak Religion frequently become worried if their family or friends show any signs of disenchantment. A mother may be more worried if her son or daughter becomes a vegetarian than if they take up smoking."
Dr. Milton Mills' "The Comparative Anatomy of Eating,"
www.vegsource.com/veg_faq/comparative.htm
and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,
www.pcrm.org ,
argue persuasively that the optimal diet for humanity is a vegan diet. However, even if humans really were omnivores and not frugivores, the diet of natural omnivores is mostly (80 percent) plant food.
Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, hunt, kill and eat other animals, including antelopes and baboons. They enjoy meat just like we do.