Bunny hug, anyone uploaded by szen volta.
Sara Dickerman has an interesting article in Slate about why it is that pork tends to capture the imaginations of those writing about some of the ethical issues behind meat-eating more than any other meat. After hashing over some various issues, including the religious taboos against eating pork, she comes around to what strikes me as the obvious reason that pigs capture our imagination. Simply put, Pigs Are Us.
Among regularly eaten beasts, pigs are probably the closest to human. They’re intelligent, social, relatively unfurry—and they resemble us on the inside. When Pollan looks at his dead pig in the woods, he is swept with revulsion. “I’d handled plenty of viscera in the chickens I’d gutted on Joel’s farm, but this was different and more disturbing, probably because the pig’s internal organs … looked exactly like human organs. Which is why, as I recalled, surgeons hone their skills by operating on pigs.” Indeed, the boundary between human and porcine seems uncomfortably blurred in folk and literary traditions across the centuries: Odysseus’ gang was turned into pigs by Circe, a baby turns into a piglet (shown here on a baby tee) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and chef-pig statuettes are a not-insignificant category among kitsch collectibles.
Eating pork is uncomfortably close to cannibalism. From what I understand, human flesh tastes pretty pig-like. Baby pigs are unbearably cute. And of course, there’s the fact that pigs are smarter than dogs. I suspect that the religious taboos against pork were a reflection of these facts, especially since the taboos crop up in a series of dietary laws that broadcast the general idea that the people who have this diet are more civilized than other people. If you’re going to restrict people from eating a meat to show how civilized they are, then I’d imagine you’d start with the animal most like us. Dickerman hints at this in her article, but these things that make pigs more human-like make their presence in factory farms even more despicable—pigs become horribly neurotic being raised right on top of each other and will chew on each other in desperation. In other words, by cramming pigs into factory farms, we are driving them mad. Under the circumstances, continuing to eat pork that’s made in factory farms because it tastes good makes as much sense as kicking dogs to death and justifying it because it gives you pleasure.
Anyway, I bring it up because it adds an interesting wrinkle to the ever-contentious issue of vegetarianism. Ezra had an amusing post up yesterday about K-Lo getting all pissed off when she read this study showing that IQ correlates to vegetarianism, in that the higher the IQ, the likelier you are to be a vegetarian. The discussion in comments was interesting, too, because people actually managed to avoid dragging out hoary old stereotypes about vegetarians, such as the idea that we spend all our time glaring at people for ordering meat in restaurants or whatever. In fact, the opposite—it’s noted in comments that a lot of the time, the scary vegetarian judgementalism is nothing more than making people feel guilty by just eating. Sort of like how people feel guilty if your dinner companion eats a salad while you chow down on the fettucine alfredo.
K-Lo is almost surprisingly hostile to this study, which doesn’t actually establish causation, as Ezra points out. She titles her post, “PETA Propaganda!” Her hostility is pretty par for the course for adamant anti-choicers like her, though god knows PETA is such a vile organization that all people who actually care about animals and the environment need to avoid them and call them out constantly. Hostility towards animal rights is de rigeur for anti-feminists—a good example is at Hugo’s where his stance against animal testing made his anti-feminist commenters go nuts in a way that they usually reserve for when he claims women have rights. I don’t agree with Hugo’s stance, but the general principles behind it strike me as sound. Naturally, the issue of abortion came up in the comments at Hugo’s, which fit well into what a commenter at Ezra’s bemoaned.
Why does every discussion of vegetarianism seem ultimately to end up as a discussion of abortion?
The short answer is that anti-choicers, who are actually operating from the principle of male dominance, shot themselves in the foot when they tried to craft an argument against abortion rights that appears to be derived from egalitarian principles. They want to define fetuses as deserving of rights, and in doing so, they decided that they’d seek to use sentience as a way to define whether someone deserves rights or not. It was a stupid decision, because while the vast majority of fetuses that are killed in abortions couldn’t have sentience under even the most flexible definition of the term, animals undoubtably do. And now every person who points out that animal suffering is deserving of human concern inadvertantly demonstrates how full of shit anti-choicers are, since their hand-wringing about the suffering of silent ones only extends to the ones that don’t actually have the nervous system to suffer. Thus, anti-choicers lose their shit when presented with animal rights arguments or even arguments pointing out certain inconvenient facts. In the comments at Hugo’s, for instance, when we were discussing Peter Singer’s ideas, I commented:
What’s frustrating to me is that while I think the infant euthanasia thing probably has to be avoided due to slippery slope issues, from a logical point of view, it makes perfect sense. But regardless of the real world applications, I think a lot of people would benefit from admitting that a full grown cat or dog or pig has more self-awareness and cognition than a human infant, at least a newborn.
Against infant euthanasia, mind you—I think that when “life” begins is pretty arbitrary, but when a person is actually no longer a part of her mother’s body, which is when she is born, then her legal rights kick in. My point was more that people would do well to face up to the fact, however inconvienent, that animals are sentient beings, because you should make your decisions based on all the available evidence, not by editing out stuff that’s true but you wish wasn’t.
Naturally, an anti-feminist flipped shit on me, losing what little grip he had on basic reason altogether.
How so? What would be the benefit of that admittance (assuming it’s true…)?
He tried to back out of it later when it was pointed out that his comment only made sense if you think that facts are subservient to ideology, but he was shutting the barn door after the horses got out. Speaking of, the latest issue of Bitch mentions in it that PETA tried to court anti-choicers by trying to draw parallels to their “right to life” arguments, which is just more evidence that PETA is a morally bankrupt organization.
The larger reason that there’s a hodge-podge of feminist issues that come up during discussions of vegetarianism is because there’s a lot of interconnection between the ethical systems there. Vegetarianism is linked to environmentalism, which is linked both to feminism and to efforts to limit overpopulation. While the horrific cruelty of factory farming is a big factor in my vegetarianism, I’m also seriously worried about the environmental impact of overconsumption of meat. I’m not really too concerned about the Singer argument that says eating meat is wrong by definition, for reasons I won’t go into at length, but I think that people eat way, way too much meat, which is why we have these horribly cruel, polluting factory farms in the first place. And until this nation gets our meat demand below a level where it can be met completely with grass fed free range farming, I don’t feel right eating meat. Over-fishing has led me to conclude, sadly, that everything but basically catfish is out of the question as well. I realize that non-complicity is all too often substituted for real action, and I agree whole-heartedly, but in this one case, I think there’s value in combining the two approaches.
As to why feminism and environmentalism are so often linked, it’s not really because women are inherently more caring or anything like that. Most male feminists I know are environmentalists as well. There’s no doubt that environmentalism is coded as feminine in the popular imagination, but that’s because it’s a cheap way to discredit and mock environmentalists. I think it’s more that feminism really trains a person to see how the personal is political, in that it trains you to see how the oppressive system is reinforced in every way, right down to your personal life. Once you really open your eyes to that, it’s easy to see how society is organized on every level to keep people from demanding that we save the planet, even if some corporate profits are lost to do so. For example, it’s easy to see that the reason the oil interests get away with denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is real is because they’ve bought everyday Americans’ complicity by making us dependent on our cars. Feminism can help open your eyes to other issues like this.
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“It isn’t so strange, Mr. Brown, when you think of it, that vegetarianism and conscientious objection should go together….One day you refuse to have an innocent animal butchered for your pleasure, and the next—it takes you by surprise, perhaps, but you turn away in horror from kiling a fellow-man.”
—Graham Greene, “The Comedians”
I didn’t know you were vegetarian! You should write more about that. You really help to dispell the stereotype of the humorless judgy vegetarian. Also, PETA sucks, but it’s not all that’s out there. Have you read The Sexual Politics of Meat? And check out Feministing if you can, they have an interesting post (scroll down) about meat and masculinity.
Humans can also sometimes benefit from transplanted pig bits. There’s a fairly high chance that I’ll need an aortic replacement at some point, and chances are that I’ll get a pig aorta if that happens. (And as freaked out as I am at the prospect of open heart surgery, I’m pretty stoked at the possibility of being able to bill myself as part woman, part pig. I’m perverse like that.)
I actually think that there’s a much stronger ethical argument to be made for banning meat than for banning animal testing. And I’m certainly much more willing to cut back on meat than to cut back on medicine.
For what it’s worth, I think there was a lot going on in that thread at Hugo’s other than anti-choice MRA bullshit. I don’t think Hugo had any idea how much people in the disability rights world revile Peter Singer, and therefore I don’t think he really grasped how his anti-research stance plus his apparent (and apparently pretty ignorant) respect for Singer was going to read to people who essentially consider Singer an apologist for genocide. I think that in general Hugo has an annoying tendency to claim the moral high ground for things that he’d hypothetically do, such as forgoing abortion or denying treatment to his father, while acting superior to those of us who are dealing with those issues non-hypothetically. A lot of people have a very strong personal investment in medical research, either professionally or because we’re pinning hopes for our own or our loved-ones’ future health on it. I just think medical testing takes the usual vegetarian battles and ramps up the stakes exponentially, and it’s bound to get pretty fraught.
Vegetarianism is linked to environmentalism, which is linked both to feminism and to efforts to limit overpopulation. While the horrific cruelty of factory farming is a big factor in my vegetarianism, I’m also seriously worried about the environmental impact of overconsumption of meat.
That’s what finally did it for me. It’s been a week since I had meat, and even then it was catfish. I don’t buy into the “meat is murder” argument, and I won’t make a big deal of my choice–if I’m invited over to a friend’s home and they’ve fixed it, I won’t insult them by refusing to eat–but there’s too many reasons for me to not eat meat and too few for me to continue. In the meantime, if I’ve absolutely got to have a slab of something, it’ll be free-range and organic.
The latter part of your post made me think of “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature” by Val Plumwood. It draws the connections you make between environmentalism and feminism (basically it highlights how the different types of oppression all stem from the same philosophical structure). Plumwood’s an ecofeminist really, which some readers might not be into, but it’s a great book.
Erm, aortic valve replacement, not the actual aorta. Brain not functioning at the moment.
I guess I’m kind of the other way around, coming to feminism from an environmental viewpoint.
Is it really a surprise that vegetarianism correlates with IQ? Not so much that smart people become vegetarians, or vegetarians produce smart children, but that vegetarianism is linked with intellectualism, and there’s really only support for it among the upper, educated, classes (or certain immigrant groups that place a great emphasis on higher education).
I mean, crap, my ex-BIL’s working-class dad had enough of an issue with him going to college (aka “lazy school”); god knows how he would have accepted Jim becoming a vegetarian. Hell, given that Jim served on a submarine, it’s unlikely he could have been veggie anyhow.
As to why feminism and environmentalism are so often linked, it’s not really because women are inherently more caring or anything like that. Most male feminists I know are environmentalists as well.
That may have something to do with appreciating the fact that there’s a world out there apart from yourself, that you’re part of it, that you can affect it and that it will go on without you. Once you get the concept that, hey, those maddening creatures with the tits and pussy are actual *human beings* Just. Like. You. then it’s difficult to continue on as a chauvanist. And once you get the concept that the world gets better or worse, in part because of what you do, then it’s difficult to ignore the environmental issues.
Feminism (or perhaps “equalism”) and environmentalism are signs of adult thinking. Republicanism is a three-year olds morality combined with the viciousness of an adult.
Yeah, medical testing on animals is sometimes necessary, but I fail to see why testing of cosmetics on animals, sometimes making them go blind, is still allowed. When it comes to frivolous things like fur and makeup, I think there’s little excuse not to go cruelty free.
Shameless plug (not my website) check out veganessentials.com if you want makeup, cleaning products, etc, not made with animals or tested on them.
Sally, agreed on the animal testing vs. meat thing. For one thing, it’s a sheer numbers argument, which is why Singer is easier on testing. A massive number of animals suffer to supply us meat. Relatively speaking, not true with medical testing. On the whole, I think that testing is more valuable than the lives of the animals lost to it. In fact, compared to the issue of meat, testing is bullshit, which is why I get so frustrated with animal rights activism aimed at testing—they like it because it gets attention. They need to take all that energy and aim it at Big Agra, which would be more useful
I do have to wonder if disability rights activists vs. Singer is just overblown—I mean, by his own measures, anyone with the brains to say they don’t want to be euthanized and says so has the right to live, right? Infant euthanasia for babies that are both going to die anyway and will never have a moment without pain is a lot different.
“Pigs Are Us”
Totally. Pigs & humans/human ancestors have been ecological competitors since the Dawn, as opportunistic social omnivores often sharing habitat. Guts are so similar that we can both host certain nematode-worm parasites, and teeth are so similar that fossil pigteeth have been mistaken for fossil h/ha teeth many times (ask an old-school Creationist). Also, for whatever reason, pig skin is quite similar to human, making it a preferred animal model for skin-wounding and -healing research.
Not so much that smart people become vegetarians, or vegetarians produce smart children, but that vegetarianism is linked with intellectualism, and there’s really only support for it among the upper, educated, classes (or certain immigrant groups that place a great emphasis on higher education).
Interestingly, one of my sisters-in-law, who’s a hick from Tennessee with a high school diploma, is a vegetarian and is basically raising my nieces and nephew as vegetarians. The rest of us upper-class family members are still meat-eaters.
Sally, not to hijack this thread, but on the subject of what makes Hugo tick (and occasionally, really annoying), I think it has a little more to do with his addiction to moral and behavioral absolutes than it does with an addiction to self-righteousness. He likes rules and extremes and has come around to find the kinds of extremes that are okayed by his religion, his society, and his peers. I don’t think of this so much as a personality flaw but just a characteristic, but that’s the Hugo Theory I work with.
That discussion devolved all to quickly into the same old tired “either your for medical research as it stands or your against it and therefore you want kill my cousin/wife/daddy” argument.
What’s wrong with discussing alternatives to animal testing? Why are so many people so adamantly defending animal testing as the only way in the world to test drugs or other products? Can’t we come up with more humane and possibly more effective research methods? It’s been done in the past.
And why no discussion on the vast majority of animal testing, which has nothing at all to do with crippling diseases? (thank you, anna!)
I’m curious to know how many of the posters on that thread are regulars. Seems like whenever issues of animal welfare come up, a whole bunch of never -seen-before posters suddenly crop up to call pro-animal people accomplices to murder.
Can someone please come up with a link about this Singer-vs-disability rights people thing? I’ve never heard anything about that, and I’m fairly into disability rights. Granted, there are an awful lot of really freaky people on the fringes of that discussion (I’m not one), the kind of people who argue that, say, screening for genetic abnormalities is tacitly approving genocide, or deaf separatists, or whatever.
On topic, I’m not a vegetarian because I can’t eat either eggs or dairy products, and maintaining an almost-entirely vegan diet at this latitude would cost far more labour and money than I’m willing to put into it, especially since my brain insists that tofu is egg, and that all the soy cheese products I’ve seen contain casein (in other words, I can’t eat them anyhow). That said, I don’t exactly live on nothing but meat and pemmican, either; the majority of my diet is still vegetables and legumes. I also, admittedly, like the taste of some meats. *sigh*
My homeboy Frederick Grant Banting would never have discovered insulin without animal testing; that alone buys a lot on credit to me.
Interesting post, but I have two minor thoughts on it.
First, its my understanding that, in Islam anyway, that pigs aren’t eaten because of their suppossedly being dirty animals that lie in the muck and whatnot (in Islam there’s a similar attitude towards dogs).
Although that might come down to a negative attitude about humans as creatures that like in the muck, I guess. Also, there’s the nifty side benefit of not getting trichinosis (which is probably not spelled that way, oh well).
Second, I’d be interested to see the correlation between vegetarianism and income/class. There are a lot of neighborhoods in this country where things like produce are not accessible, so you are kind of required to eat McDonalds. Although technically I guess you could still be a vegetarian and eat at McDonalds.
This seems like a very complicated issue…
Interrobang,
“Jettisoning the traditional distinction between humans and nonhumans, Singer distinguishes instead between persons and non-persons. Persons are beings that feel, reason, have self-awareness, and look forward to a future. Thus, fetuses and some very impaired human beings are not persons in his view and have a lesser moral status than, say, adult gorillas and chimpanzees.
Given such views, it was no surprise that anti-abortion activists and disability rights advocates loudly decried the Australian-born Singer’s appointment at Princeton last year. Indeed, his language regarding the treatment of disabled human beings is at times appallingly similar to the eugenic arguments used by Nazi theorists concerning “life unworthy of life.” Singer, however, believes that only parents, not the state, should have the power to make decisions about the fates of disabled infants.”
http://www.reason.com/news/show/27886.html
A pretty good q&a follows the introduction. Worth a read if you’re not familiar with Singer.
The first year I was a vegetarian (I am not anymore, but when I was), I asked my mother to cook an extra vegetable or two for Thanksgiving dinner. Even though she knew I was a veg, she was incrediulous that I didn’t plan on eating the turkey.
“You’re going to make everyone sick!” she exclaimed.
At dinner, my plate laden with vegetables, I watched everyone pick flesh from the carcass of a dead animal and wondered how *I* was the one who was supposed to make everyone sick.
Bizarre, but then again, my mother is not really a feminist, either.
I’m in the midst of reading a book on the spice trade, in which the author mentions that in medieval times, particularly in the northern parts of Europe, pigs were favored because they could forage for themselves during the winter instead of having to be fed with surplus grains that early farmers just didn’t have.
If you’re going to restrict people from eating a meat to show how civilized they are, then I’d imagine you’d start with the animal most like us.
Mary Douglas’ structuralist argument on pork prohibition in “The Abominations of Leviticus” in Purity and Danger still works for me. Rather than looking for any empirical rationale for the prohibition of pork–whether the pig’s resemblance to human in behavior or in anatomy*–the rationale should be sought in logic internal to the alimentary system itself. Douglas looked at the distinction between cleanliness and uncleanliness in Leviticus. The distinction seems to have been drawn on the ideal behavior/morphological characteristics of certain groups of animals. Herbivores should have cloven hooves and chew the cud. Pigs don’t, so they’re anomalous, and hence taboo. Fish should swim; but lobsters crawl; so they’re anomalous and hence taboo. There have been refinements of Douglas’s ideas since then, of course, and Douglas doesn’t do much to explain why the pork prohibition should have become the sine qua non of Judaism c. the Maccabees, but what I like about her approach is that it cut away the dross of centuries (dating at least since Maimonides and ranging at least to Marvin Harris) of bad explanations for the Mosaic food laws that hoped to find some natural, objective, rational explanation for them. The Mosaic alimentary codes are rational, of course, but it’s a system-dependent rather than world-dependent reason. There’s no good, prediscursive reason for the pork prohibition, in other words.
But neither is there a good discursive reason for the pork prohibition that doesn’t refer to Leviticus itself. Cleanliness vs. uncleanliness works. The “animal most like us” argument doesn’t, since it would seem to imply that pig-eaters (or dog-eaters, for that matter) might be thought less civilized. This isn’t to say you’re totally on the wrong track, AM. Certainly alimentary strictures aim to distinguish civilized from non-civilized people (this especially the case with prohibitions of horseflesh in the early Middle Ages), but the point is the prohibition itself rather than the animal prohibited. I’m pretty sure that comparative anthropology demonstrates that any animal works just as well for this purpose.
* Something noted as long ago as Aristotle, but also commented on frequently by medieval anatomists, who often resorted to the porcus/corpus (pig/[human] body) pun.
This Q&A with Singer is more specifically geared towards animal rights. Sorry about the commercial they’ll make you wait through and my long&lazy URL
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/08/singer/index.html
Zuzu - interesting. I’m a budding cultural anthropologist, and one of my favorite groups is the Dani from New Guinea who do something similar, letting their pigs roam in their sweet potato patches, providing natural fertilizer and tilling the soil.
I believe that pigs were designated as taboo, or “unclean” animals in non-Christian Abrahamic religions is because when pork etc goes bad or isn’t cooked properly, it is far worse than other meat– same goes for shellfish. It’s simple practiciality– you tell your people that god wants you not to eat the meats that are most likely to make you sick.
That makes sense, Karl. I guess I was thinking about how prohibitions mark one group of people as superior to others and figured it was sort of an expansion of the taboo against cannibalism. In fact, the reason I think that is because I was sort of relating it to the way the incest taboo has expanded past just immediate family to cousins and how people point to not having a cousin incest prohibition as a sign that a group of people is inferior. But you know, just guessing around.
Karl the Grouchy Medievalist already mentioned Mary Douglas’ work, which provides one interesting explanation for the pork ban. The other explanation (also from a cultural anthropologist) is that pigs, unlike cows and goats, eat the same part of grain as humans since they only have on stomach and don’t chew cud. In desert societies, where Judaism and Islam developed, food was relatively scarce, so it didn’t make sense to keep animals that would be in direct competition for food, whereas cows and goats eat part of the grain that humans can’t digest, so no problem. Also, my understanding is that pigs overheat really easily, so a desert is probably not the best place for them. So perhaps that ban on pork is directly related to environmental concerns.
My mother’s explanation of the reasoning behind dietary laws in Judaism is that by having complicated dietary laws and complicated laws that govern every aspect of your life, people are constantly thinking about their relationship with god.
My limitations are basically: would I be willing to kill this animal for food with my own hands? If yup, down the hatch it goes….
Of course, after you’ve had all the trees in your back yard eaten by an overpopulation of deer Yet Once Again you stop thinking about Bambi so much and more about roast venison. And rabbits? Arrrgh…there IS no such thing as a rabbit-proof fence.
And you should have heard what my father said about the stupidity of domestic turkeys. (He grew up on a farm.) I feel that an animal that is so idiotic it can drown in an ordinary rainfall isn’t deserving of much protection.
I do agree with those who think we eat far too much meat, however. Use it for taste, get most of my protein from eggs, tempeh, and milk. Canned sardines, some salmon. Do endulge in eggs from free-ranging chickens. Aside from any moral point, they simply taste better.
My mother’s explanation of the reasoning behind dietary laws in Judaism is that by having complicated dietary laws and complicated laws that govern every aspect of your life, people are constantly thinking about their relationship with god.
I always interpreted Leviticus as a set of rules to guarantee that the essentially useless to society priest class was well taken care of (if you don’t believe me, go check out the list of minor infractions require one to slaughter an animal and bring it to the temple - fresh meat for the priests).
Therefore, I side with Beppie in thinking that the dietary rules were to keep the producing members of the tribe healthy (and the sex rules were to make sure there was a steady supply of healthy, productive members).
Also, my understanding is that pigs overheat really easily, so a desert is probably not the best place for them.
Version of the Marvin Harris argument, I think. But there are a lot of microclimates in the Middle East. It’s not all desert. Pigs would be fine in some places, in other words. A good resource for some of these debates is Frederick J. Simoons Eat not this Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present. 1961. 2nd edition. U of Wisconsin P, 1994.
But I got to thinking: you know what sucks? People who read a blog regularly and comment only when they want to leap in and be know it alls about their pet subject. Apologies. I love this blog, but I just haven’t been commenting much lately.
Oh, and I’d always heard the ban on pigs (aside from the fact that they really do need water and shade since they can’t sweat and are not very good in a Mid-eastern climate) was due to trichinosis.
Lifted from Wiki:
“It has been suggested that trichinosis may be one of several factors that led to religious prohibitions against eating pork products, such as in the kashrut dietary laws. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides advocated such a theory in his Guide for the Perplexed.”
I also note that trichinosis can also be caught from wild game. I guess Bambi in the Backyard is safe from me for some time yet.
Relatively speaking, not true with medical testing. On the whole, I think that testing is more valuable than the lives of the animals lost to it. In fact, compared to the issue of meat, testing is bullshit, which is why I get so frustrated with animal rights activism aimed at testing—they like it because it gets attention. They need to take all that energy and aim it at Big Agra, which would be more useful
I’m not so sure. One of my three degrees is in History of Medicine and another focused on epidemiology, and over the years I’ve noticed that the major advances always seem to come when medical research is done exclusively on humans. It’s not coincidental that the “improvement” in cancer is an illusory statistical artifact, but that AIDS has only been around for 25 years and we have sustainable long-term treatments for it. SIV is related to HIV, but they’re substantially different at the molecular level. Consequently, you can’t really use monkeys for HIV research. Further, thanks to 1980s LGBT activism, the FDA changed its policies and let AIDS patients take experimental medications in a way that cancer patients could not. It’s not always a question of money or effort — sometimes it’s a question of whether you’re working on rats or people.
Why? There are two issues. The first is understanding how treatments work in terms of single systems is completely different from understanding how treatments impact the body as a whole. Yes, we know everything about rats — but we still can’t accurately predict whether a drug designed to treat a problem in one system will destroy another seemingly unrelated system and kill the rat. The second concerns cross-species problems. Yes, we may know everything about rats — but we don’t know everything about how rat systems correlate to human systems. Because that lack of knowledge likely results in treatments that would work in people being shelved because they killed rats, medical research on most animals probably hurts more than it helps. (The notable exception is chimps.)
I think it’s a shame more money isn’t channeled into bioinformatic systems research, which would solve problem #1 in people, making problem #2 moot.
Secondly, I see the choice between attacking research or ConAgra as a false dichotomy. If anything, attacking both simultaneously is symbiotic. People have been used in medical experiments against their will — but humans haven’t been raised, caged, milked and killed for food. Consequently, it’s frequently substantially easier for some people — especially for those who live in rural areas or come from immigrant families with a farming background — to initially empathize with research animals than with farm animals.
Plucky punk, the book I’m thinking of is Spice: History of a Temptation by Jack Turner.
Another book that provides an interesting view of diet and religion is Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which shows that the Norse Greenlanders starved to death among rivers full of fish because early on, they had decided that Christian Greenlanders didn’t eat fish, the Inuit Greenlanders did.
My mother’s explanation of the reasoning behind dietary laws in Judaism is that by having complicated dietary laws and complicated laws that govern every aspect of your life, people are constantly thinking about their relationship with god.
I don’t think all Jews see it this way, though. Although I’m a bad Jew, most of my observant relatives think it has more to do with reminding themselves of their identity as Jews. It’s related to constantly thinking about G*d, but it’s not exactly the same.
Incidentially, my siblings and I won the vegetarian debate with our grandparents when we were kids by pointing out that vegetarianism was automatically keeping Kosher. When we pointed out that it was a lot easier to be vegetarian than to install two dishwashers, an extra set of cabinets, and four sets of plates, they were a lot more sympathetic. We were keeping Kosher and being fiscally responsible — they wished they had thought of it when they first came to this country.
The piglet on cute overload was pretty cute. So was all the squeeing in comments, with ladies saying they wanted to snorgle his snout and other amusing things.
I do have to wonder if disability rights activists vs. Singer is just overblown—I mean, by his own measures, anyone with the brains to say they don’t want to be euthanized and says so has the right to live, right? Infant euthanasia for babies that are both going to die anyway and will never have a moment without pain is a lot different.
I’m not sure what they’re thinking either. I’m guessing that the disability activists are motivated either by some kind of slippery-slope concern, or by a confused sort of identity politics that makes them regard euthanasia of any babies with severe birth defects as an attack on their kind. Of course, maybe there’s some deep moral objection here that I’m missing because utilitarianism has utterly corrupted my soul.
Interesting conversation, but I’d add one thing from the point of view of someone who works in the pharma industry as a person making potential drug molecules…
We just don’t know enough about biology to substitute (at some point in the process) the testing (for safety purposes) on animals and to try to figure out what the molecules will do in a real body with real metabolism. All early testing is now cell-based or even individual receptor protein molecule based, so this has cut out a lot of animal testing (as well as being orders of magnitude faster), but at some point, the cross-reactivity of new potential drugs becomes the only concern and those simply cannot be addressed without putting the molecule in a real animal and seeing whether it hits the “wrong” receptor and causes problems.
A lot of this stuff is actually not loved by the pharma industry because animal testing is very slow and adds years to the development of a drug, but there simply isn’t a subtitute and won’t be for many years because of the complicated inter-relationships in biological systems.
This is completely separate from the cruel animal testing that goes on for a lot of the cosmetics industry that is, in my opinion, mostly or completely unnecessary. I think they test stuff that they have a good idea will be harmful, but they do it anyway just for that one “great new product,” in pursuit of the almighty dollar at all costs.
I do have to wonder if disability rights activists vs. Singer is just overblown—I mean, by his own measures, anyone with the brains to say they don’t want to be euthanized and says so has the right to live, right? Infant euthanasia for babies that are both going to die anyway and will never have a moment without pain is a lot different.
I would imagine the problem is with the statement is with the part that presupposed the ability to say they don’t want to be euthanized.
At dinner, my plate laden with vegetables, I watched everyone pick flesh from the carcass of a dead animal and wondered how *I* was the one who was supposed to make everyone sick.
Your self-righteousness is doing a pretty good job of turning my stomach.
“And you should have heard what my father said about the stupidity of domestic turkeys. (He grew up on a farm.) I feel that an animal that is so idiotic it can drown in an ordinary rainfall isn’t deserving of much protection.”
I have to point out that this isn’t the turkey’s fault: we’ve *bred* them to be huge (so much so that they can’t breed w/out human assistance due to their shape) and stupid. Wild turkeys are much wilier, and harder to hunt.
Factory farm meat becomes less attractive to me as time goes by; I think some of my illnesses in the past are related to hormones, so I stopped using hormone birth control–and eating lots of hormone laden meat. Organic meat is still hella expensive, so it’s a special occasion only type of thing. My son has never had meat because he refuses to eat it (not sure why since he can’t talk yet) and if he never does, I’ll be just fine with that.
I do have to wonder if disability rights activists vs. Singer is just overblown—I mean, by his own measures, anyone with the brains to say they don’t want to be euthanized and says so has the right to live, right? Infant euthanasia for babies that are both going to die anyway and will never have a moment without pain is a lot different.
I would imagine the problem is with the statement is with the part that presupposed the ability to say they don’t want to be euthanized.
Exactly. There are a lot of disabled people with significant communication problems, who nonetheless are quite self-aware. Thseemingly simple measue (anyone with the brains to say they don’t want to be euthanized and says so has the right to live) isn’t so simple when you are someone. or know someone who can only communicate such a wish with great difficulty and aid - either mechanical or human.
For a chilling example, try reading the book I Raise My Eyes To Say Yes, which is the autobiography of a woman who was fully adult before the staff of the institution she lived in realized she could communicate at all. Saying “I don’t want to be euthanized” is a bigger hurdle than most people realize.
Karl the Grouchy Medievalist,
OOH! OOH! You have touched on one of my favorite subjects! (I just hadda say that
Seriously, two points:
First, as someone who ran a listserve, lurkers are a blessing. Imagine what would happen if Amanda discovered “the irresistable topic.” One every one of her 1,000-100,000 lurkers just HAD to comment on. What a mess! We only had 2,500 reraders and I dreaded the day when that occured on our list. I’ll give you it would not be as much of a mess on a blog as a listserve, but it would still be one unreadable post.
Second, on why pigs are traife (unfit to eat). For the Orthodox, the answer is obvious, because it’s in the Torah. But beyond that a rabbi once asked in a drash ((lesson),
Apikoros - interesting, but I would think pigs would be a pretty major source of leather…just a guess. Or maybe I’m just thinking of footballs.
Did anyone read the original study connecting vegetarianism and IQ to see if it breaks down along economic lines as well? (Blogging via phone right now, can’t really look.) Just curious.
I managed to be vegan for a whole year back in my youth, but I was so broke all I could afford were dried beans, pasta, cans of corn, and rice. Which kind of sucked.
I could probably manage vegan now if not for the fact that with a 5 month old you have about two seconds to cook in, so usually I get microwavable crap.
Another perspective on the laws of kashrut : a very observant Jew I knew in college told me (a typical 3-day Jew) that the function of kashrut was simply to give Jews a huge incentive to associate and live mostly with one another, and not with the goyim. That is, as Lily’s grandparents discovered, it’s a lot easier to follow all the rules when you’re in a community where everyone else follows the same rules. And, recognizing this, observant Jews will tend to live and associate with other observant Jews simply to make sure they can do everything by the book without having to spend all double-checking everything to guard against unintended transgressions.
That is, the rules exist to differentiate Us from Them, and that’s all. That explains not only proscriptions against pork, or shellfish, or horses (which, pace the rabbi apikoros mentions, can provide both milk and meat but are trayf ), but also against mixing the wrong fabrics in your garment or against tattoos or against shaving your payess. Differentiation is its own justification. It also, as samba00 points out, gives the priests something to do.
Another twist to this is childrearing. My wife and I learned very early on that kids are raised at least as much by their peers as by their parents. Both of my kids have gone to daycare (our daughter is now in 2nd grade), and both of them have picked up information and desires directly from the kids they spend time with. Even if one’s home is vegetarian or vegan or free-range only or whatever it may be, the kids will go out into the world and want to share the experiences of their peers. And whatever limits we set as parents run up against the standards our kids experience out among their friends.
This isn’t to say one never sets limits or rules, or one never swims against the tide. But I need to recognize as a father that those rules also force my kids to pay a price, the price of being the odd one out. It’s very hard to force a child you love into that position repeatedly based on one’s own convictions, not on the child’s. So we have some rules, but we need to be flexible and weigh the price to be paid.
Humans are very social beings, and children have a powerful need to bond with their peers (as strong an impluse, I believe, as the one to push limits with their parents!). And just as kids can all learn whatever language they’re exposed to as kids, they can learn to love whatever foods their peers are eating growing up, and to find other kinds of food revolting. Food is more than a matter of nutrition, or agricultural production — it’s one of the bases of how we form community. That’s why debates over food habits (esp. at the holidays, David B.!) are so incredibly emotional.
Dealing with food is one of the more humbling tasks I’ve dealt with as a parent.
plucky punk: Yes, but you get leather from goats and cows also, and that wasn’t mentioned in that list. The distinction is that you don’t kill a goat to get its milk or its wool, but you do to get its skin. The skin of an animal would fall into the same category as its meat, in that argument.
“What would we get from pigs?
Meat. Just meat.
It is immoral to herd an animal strictly for slaugher.”
I think you are correct. I do know someone whose daughter raises goats and from what she has said her daughter treats the goats like pets…I mean she gets products from them, like milk, cheese, she make soaps, etc., from the milk…but I somehow have the feeling she would be reluctant to kill them for food.
I mean an animal can, in theory, live a full life on a farm, be productive and die of old age or natural causes…not so if it’s a pig, as they are only raised for slaughter…
Fortunately since being diagnosed with diabetes a few months ago I’ve gotten more into eating vegs…and staying away from the meat. The problem for me is I love starch the potatoes, bread, cereal, pasta, etc., all the things that probably made me diabetic to begin with and if you can’t substitute those for meat, you’re kind of left up the creek w/o a paddle…
Oh well, interesting post.
“The distinction is that you don’t kill a goat to get its milk or its wool, but you do to get its skin. The skin of an animal would fall into the same category as its meat, in that argument.”
Well not if you wait until they die a natural death to take their skin…you don’t have to kill them for it…not that I’d want their skin after keeping them around for the ten years or so of their life span…I’d have probably gotten attached to them and certainly the ‘ick’ factor would come into play here if I had to walk around wearing their skin after that…
Mirirose - good point.
Still, though, if you’re making the distinction about not slaughtering an animal just for its meat, then using the skin for leather I think would count.
Im suddenly interested in the idea that it seems the further away from the actual slaughtering a society becomes the more repelled by it we get. I don’t know of vegetarians amongst the Dani or the Hiwi or the Ache. (I don’t think so.)
The connection between animal rights (or at least humane treatment) and feminism is actually *first-wave* feminist. Many of the suffragettes were also anti-vivisectionist, and visa versa. Here’s an article about the “brown dog” statue, for instance, which gives some sense of the overlap between the two movements. Here is another about Descartes, vivisection, and feminism.
My reading of that period (puts on Historian of Science hat) is that first-wave feminism overlapped with humane-treatment-of-animals issues (not just vivisection, but the sort of maltreatment depicted in “Black Beauty”) because both women and animals were treated as subject to male power, as creatures who were oppressed just because they *could* be. Both were considered the Other, mere bodies on which the real people (=men) could act as they saw fit.
The environmentalist connection to feminism came much later, historically, and from a different direction — the early environmentalists were Manly Men (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt) and hunters, not necessarily feminists at all.
“This isn’t to say one never sets limits or rules, or one never swims against the tide. But I need to recognize as a father that those rules also force my kids to pay a price, the price of being the odd one out. It’s very hard to force a child you love into that position repeatedly based on one’s own convictions, not on the child’s. So we have some rules, but we need to be flexible and weigh the price to be paid.”
This is one reason why you also have to be strict about leaving your child with someone other then yourself when they are very young. I noticed today a lot of my grand daughter’s friends eating nothing but cereal and milk all the time…
This is standard fare, and the only vegs most will touch is corn. Very sweet and starchy.
Starting kids on cereal too early is being looked at as a source of later diabetes. Additionally other people watching your kid are just as happy to plunk them down with a bowl of cereal or something similar to eat, instead of doing the hard work of introducing their palate to a range of differing tastes.
I have also observed babies from about the age of 9 month or so being stuffed with cereal constantly…they are sitting in their carriages eating it by the handful from baggies…it’s just easier for babysitters to hand that to your kid then to introduce them to a vegs…
So you have your work cut out for you…I actually didn’t realize this myself until my second child…since they were 11 years apart, my oldest grew up with very starchy and limited eating habits, but my second child I was more aware then and made sure the people who minded her for me were made aware as well…
So don’t be afraid to speak up about what your kid is eating. These habits last a lifetime.
To clarify, those are all modern hunter gatherer groups that do a good deal of hunting.
“Im suddenly interested in the idea that it seems the further away from the actual slaughtering a society becomes the more repelled by it we get. I don’t know of vegetarians amongst the Dani or the Hiwi or the Ache. (I don’t think so.)”
Many groups in India are against slaughtering animals, although they will use their milk and egg products.
I think the Jains are so strict about this that they actually wear gauze masks to stop themselves from possibly killing a bug when they inhale…
I believe I read that Alexander the Great was very impressed with them when he reached India…but it could just be another myth…
As for Pete Singer: I think he’s one of the greatest of living philosophers, someone who *really* does the philosopher’s job: think things through. He’s not trying to find out what is Good and True, he’s trying to lay out what the logical consequences of a particular set of beliefs are.
I am very frustrated with disability rights activitists & others who argue with Singer’s conclusions, saying he’s a horrible man because his conclusions are outrageous or repulsive. What they need to focus on is arguing with his *premises*, because no-one is better than Singer at showing which conclusions logically follow from a particular set of premises. His work is extremely valuable because if you don’t like his conclusions (and I don’t agree with all of them myself), that tells you to examine his premises, because that’s where the problem is going to lie.
IMHO, Singer’s work exposes the weakness of his “God’s eye view” premise: that a wrong occurring far away is just as wrong as a wrong that you see nearby. This is a correct premise for an omnipotent God, but it is not a good premise for finite, fallible human beings. But I do not fault Singer for choosing a less-than-perfect premise, because that’s not his job: his job is to think things through.
I’m not so sure. One of my three degrees is in History of Medicine and another focused on epidemiology, and over the years I’ve noticed that the major advances always seem to come when medical research is done exclusively on humans.~~Lily
As a lurker with a “pet subject”, I’ll note that the major advances which led to the discovery & developement of Insulin to treat Type 1 Diabetes were done extensively through the use of dogs, cows & pigs. In fact from the 1920’s until the 1980’s, all of the Insulin used to keep people alive actually came from cows & pigs. Advancements in genetic engineering have allowed for the gradual phasing out of animal based insulins, but they are still used.
We just don’t know enough about biology to substitute (at some point in the process) the testing (for safety purposes) on animals and to try to figure out what the molecules will do in a real body with real metabolism….there simply isn’t a subtitute and won’t be for many years because of the complicated inter-relationships in biological systems.
I’m not doubting this. However, I addressed it point #2: it is precisely these interrelationships that makes animal testing worthless for humans. I think it’s why history demonstrates that advances occur very, very quickly in areas where animal research is an impossibility — even with far fewer resources and greater social stigmas.
And while we can’t completely switch to bioinformatics yet, we’re a lot closer than American scientists think. Part of the problem is that the math most biologists and medical researchers are comfortable with are statistics — not the non-linear fields that constitute the bulk of bioinformatics. Part of the problem is also that most of the research is being published in mathematics journals, so biologists and medical researchers aren’t even aware that it exists. Finally, part of the American scientists ignore scientific research occurring in the rest of the world. (Unless, of course, foreign researchers publish it in an American journal.) This makes sense — for the second half of the twentieth century, America really has been the juggernaut of scientific research. And while it still is, it’s not the juggernaut in every field. Most of the research on bioinformatics — at least the bioinformatics that touched on my research — is being conducted in Japan. Although the papers were published in English, they were published in Asian and Australian math journals that Americans tend to ignore.
I’m a feminist and a vegetarian with a mild disability.
What would that make me, in the eyes of Peter Singer? :/
Plucky,
Obviously, I’m with Mirirose to an extent. Also, leather is a byproduct. See L. Sprague DeCamp’s “Lest Darkness Fall” for a good example.
The idea that distance increases the repellency of slaughter is interesting. We raised chickens (50-100 on a small farm) when I was a child and slaughter was an integral part of the management of the flock. It isn’t pretty with chickens and I cannot imagine that it gets prettier with larger animals. After I moved out of my parent’s house, tho, it did damn near turn me vegetarian. Not for the obvious reason but rather because after you have eaten a bird raised on a small farm, eating a store-bought bird is disgusting! Beieve it or not, the thigh-bone on a chicken is supposed to be *STRAIGHT*! Not S-curved from the growth hormones bulking the muscle faster than the bone grows, but straight. Chicken bones are supposed to be white, not black. Worst, chicken is NOT supposed to be tasteless!!!!!!!! The chickens we raised tasted completely different and much better than anything I’ve had since, even tho I was eating retired layers, which are as tough and stringy as you would ever want. At the same time, I have no interest in going back to feeding chickens twice a day and mucking out the chicken coop once a week, neither can I afford so I settle for store-bought
I can argue both sides of this. Until the last 50-75 years animals were part of an integrated farm. The “factory” approach began to take hold in the 60s/70s and meat today is mostly raised that way, but this is not the historic way it happened until the 20th century. There is no doubt that an animal raised on a small farm, heirloom vegetables weeded by hand (NOT roundup-ready!), and hand-crafted pickles, cheeses, and sausages are amazingly good.
At the same time, the counter is that if you want meat every day it is affordable; you have probably never experienced a bread shortage; and if you want a fresh avocado for breakfast tomorrow (X knows why
, then you can pop over to the 24-hour grocery and buy it. I was at a presentation by a “slow food” advocate who wanted everyone to enjoy (whatever hand-crafted delicacy). After the talk, I went up and said, “I love your product and I represent (some major restaurant chain), Can we get a million portions tomorrow? and every day thereafter?” Producing 75 million pounds of meat and 150 million pounds of vegetables per day (what 300 million Americans eat), every day, without fail, is not going to happen on family farms. We are locked into a very complex web of production, distribution and sale. Mucking about with that web should be approached with great caution.
Karl:
If I’m understanding you, you’re saying that the Hebrew pork prohibition really kicked into high gear during the Maccabean period. Wasn’t a hallmark of that period the resistance against Hellenizing influence. And since pork is a pretty prominent part (whoah, sorry for the alliteration!) of the Hellenic diet of the period, could an especially strong aversion to pork eating have come to signify Not Hellenized? A lot of cultural taboos, after all, seem to spring from a desire to distinguish oneself from neighbor/rival/oppressor cultures.
Many groups in India are against slaughtering animals, although they will use their milk and egg products.
Well, yes, but the groups I’m talking about are hunter-gatherers, not people who live w/in the fully agricultural society of India. Think National Geographic, clothes optional sort of thing.
OT, but amusing, was when my Anthro professor, who was rather old and I think pretty WASPy-conservative, had to explain to the class exactly what the Dani penis gourd (which you can see in action here) was for. And I’m pretty sure he did it without mentioning the word “penis.”
He definitely says that once you can say you don’t want to die (and maybe a bit before then), you can’t be killed. But I don’t think he’s just in favor of infant euthanasia for babies who are going to die anyway, at least not in any sense other than the one in which we’re all going to die anyway. He thinks that it’s possible to make a determination about how good one’s quality of life is likely to be and how much one is likely to contribute and then to measure that against one’s costs to one’s family and society. If your cost is going to be more significant than your benefits and your quality of life, then you should be killed, even if you’d likely live to a ripe old age. Since it’s hard to measure costs and benefits, whether to kill your or not should be up to your parents, as long as you meet some nebulous standard for disability. (If your existence would cause your parents pain for some other reason than disability, it’s not ok to kill you. Disabled babies occupy a special, disposable category.) And the fact that many, many seriously-disabled adults have told him that they enjoy their lives has not made a dent in his belief about this. Fundamentally, the entire argument hinges on his belief that disabled people contribute nothing meaningful and have lives that aren’t worth living. He considers the miserableness and worthlessness of disabled lives self-evident, something that underpins his argument.
To be honest, I really don’t see why people have so much trouble wrapping their heads around this. Try really hard to think about how you’d feel if an eminent ethicist made the argument that, while of course it would be bad to kill you now, certainly the world would be better off if no one like you existed. And surely your parents would have been better off if they’d had the opportunity to eliminate you when they knew how grotesque and useless you were going to be. Do you really think that people would be encouraged to respect disabled people and agitate for their rights if they knew that the society had endorsed the idea that they were so worthless that the prohibition on murder didn’t apply to them?
Here’s an article from Ragged Edge magazine, which is fairly radical. And here’s the thing that most people are familiar with, an article from the New York Times Magazine by Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disability rights advocate. Here’s a statement from the chair of the National Council on Disabilities, a mainstream government agency.
Oh, man, my amusing Anthropology anecdote is awaiting moderation.
Lemme try again, with leet-speak:
Many groups in India are against slaughtering animals, although they will use their milk and egg products.
Well, yes, but the groups I’m talking about are hunter-gatherers, not people who live w/in the fully agricultural society of India. Think National Geographic, clothes optional sort of thing.
OT, but amusing, was when my Anthro professor, who was rather old and I think pretty WASPy-conservative, had to explain to the class exactly what the Dani p3nis gourd (which you can see in action here) was for. And I’m pretty sure he did it without mentioning the word “p3nis.�
Oh, sorry link is actually here
.
Doctor Science–many thoughtful disability rights theorists and advocates don’t just dispute Singer’s conclusions but go after his premises too. I love me some Singer, mostly, and in my humble opinion where he goes wrong is where many of us go wrong in our presumptions about life with disabilities: Singer too quickly assumes that life with disabilities cannot be a flourishing life. Philosophically put, his problem isn’t his utilitarianism but his flawed understanding of the potentially good lives available to persons with disabilities. A person can consistently accept his animal rights arguments while holding a more nuanced understanding of disability.
plucky punk, the distinction made in that drash is between the meat and other things we get out of the animal, but between things that the animal has to be killed for (meat, leather), and things that you gain from it while it’s alive (milk, wool).
That said, I don’t think that’s a good explanation for kashrut, since horses can also give milk yet aren’t kosher. I think that more likely reasons are a) to make a normal, daily activity infused with religion/holiness and b) to discourage social mingling with other peoples. Actually, the laws about wine seem to be completely about the latter of those reasons, to a degree that makes me uncomfortable, given that I live in a modern, well-integrated society.
(Disclosure: I sort of keep kosher, and have been a vegetarian for most of my life)
I always thought Marvin Harris’s explanation for the pig taboo was pretty persuasive. IIRC, pigs are forest creatures who have difficulties regulating their internal thermostats in hot exposed areas (they can’t sweat, hence the muck-rolling when they’re hot and can’t find shade). During the shift to agriculture in the ancient Middle East, the entire region was extensively deforested. Prior to that shift, pigs were a useful source of protein, but as zuzu mentioned above, once the forests were gone, they competed with humans for the same grains.
Harris noted that societies tend to develop taboos to resolve the longterm cost/benefit confusion that might confront individuals, who in this case might be tempted to raise the tasty critters without fully realizing how much precious grain they would consume. I doubt pigs’ native intelligence had much to do with this.
What would we get from pigs?
Milk, Leather, truffles, hours of amusement…
We get lots from pigs.
Also we wil lsoon be able ot grow human organs on their backs, which will be both decutify them and also make them more useful.
has anyone done the “piglets adopted by a tiger, with teh little piglets in a littel tiger patterneed jackets sleeping onto of a captive bengal tiger while it slept” piccie yet?
MiriRose - gotcha. Thanks for explaining.
R.Mildred: Pig milk?
I’m a feminist and a vegetarian with a mild disability.
What would that make me, in the eyes of Peter Singer? :/
As a hedonic utilitarian myself, the answer would seem to be ‘A good person.’
Also, according to a generally-reliable high school teacher…just as pig meat is called pork, and cow meat beef, human meat is called long pig. FYI.
nobody gets between me and my blt’s
“Producing 75 million pounds of meat and 150 million pounds of vegetables per day (what 300 million Americans eat), every day, without fail, is not going to happen on family farms. We are locked into a very complex web of production, distribution and sale. Mucking about with that web should be approached with great caution.”
I wonder how much we could cut down on that overproduction if Americans could be taught early not to eat such large portions…most people appear to eat about 400 to 500 hundred more calories a day then they need, many eat more.
Of course some of us work out a lot so it doesn’t impact our weight…but it seems wasteful to eat more calories then you need to thrive, especially considering how much effort goes into producing food…then to just work it off, which produces nothing useful for society other then human sweat
I once listened to a very good person going on about how they ate almost a 1,000 more calories daily then what they needed and ran it all off…they didn’t seem to understand how unethical that was…
I, myself eat about 400 more per day then I need…but I walk a lot so burn off 200…if I could cut the excess 200 I’d be at my perfect weight…
People citing the climate thing for pigs: please see my comment above about microclimates. The Middle East is not all deserts. At any rate, as Philip Wagner objected in responses to Diener and Robkin’s efforts to explain the pork prohibition, “One glaring inconsistency of Harris’s argument seems to escape these critics: if, as Harris alleges, pigs cannot possibly flourish under Middle Eastern climatic conditions, why should Islam have bothered to prohibit them? Would natural adversity not virtually annihilate them.” Strikes me that prohibiting pork flesh in the Middle East, if the Middle East were all desert, would make as much sense as forbidding polar bear meat in Death Valley…ergo, ME is not all desert.
Per trichinosis, and some other reasons, Moses did not prohibit the meat of cattle, sheep, and goats, which are transmitters of several diseases, such as brucellosis and anthrax, that cause human death at about the same rate as trichinosisâ€? (113). As for explanation as cultural identity, well, “many of the same foods were prohibited both by Moses and by the Israelite’s hostile neighbors [and] meat from cattle, sheep, goats, and other animals was in fact eaten by bothâ€? (114). (from Farb, Peter and George Armelagos. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980, which is way out of date on anthropophagy, but otherwise seems okay to me: although I’m not an anthropologist). Simoons, cited above, also points out that trichinosis not current in the near east prior to the 13th century.
Leviticus, by the way, is a pretty late, dating either to the exile or afterwards, so make your surmises based on that.
Apikoros: still strikes me as an ex post facto effort to rationalize something by another system. There is a real distrust of killing animals in Genesis (killing animals required God’s special permission, and God still reserved the blood–the life, that is–to himself, in Gen 9:2-4), and there’s that bit in Deut about not killing the young of a chick with its mother, or something, but I don’t see that the rabbi’s explanation works all that well. What about fish? Don’t use them for herding.
Feathers: sounds good to me.
By the way, Claudine Fabre-Vassas’s book on Jews, Christians, and Pigs, The Singular Beast is quite good….
Many of the things that people attribute to Islamic culture, meaning Arabic culture generally, actually comes from the Turks…
Could this be the same thing????
I mean I know that people are always rambling on about “Arabian” horses for instance. When it’s very clear that horses are not indigenous to any of their countries. The horse is a plains animal and the Turks are the most associated with them, as they should be. They are really the ones responsible for a lot of the cultural veneer over much of Arab society today…it’s not even been 100 years yet since the fall of the Ottoman empire (1918-20s or thereabouts) so a lot of that influence would still exist…
I’m just wondering if this thing about pork could be part of the same thing. The Turks were a nomadic peoples that herded horses, goats and sheep…I guess pigs just don’t thrive in herds so no herding cultures bothered with them, nor sure how they feel about pork in Turkey however, so it’s just a wild guess…
Harris’ argument in the book “Good to Eat” (which I’m not linking to because I don’t want to go into Moderation Limbo) is not that pigs can’t flourish in the Middle East, it’s that in the ME pigs eat the same things as humans. That is, the pigs of the wealthy compete directly with the poor for food. In Europe pigs traditionally are sent into the forest to eat wild foods (nuts, etc.), so they aren’t taking food out of human mouths.
The test of this hypothesis would be in traditional Chinese and Polynesian pig-rearing, about which I do not know enough to say. But the basic idea is that domestic animals that eat “people food” are suspect because they are (ecologically speaking) parasites, and because they point up or symbolize the essential parasitism of the upper classes.
Humans have been eating meat pretty much since we came into being and our bodies are adapted to a carnivore diet. That’s why we have one stomach, pointy canine teeth and eyes in the front of our heads (easier to hunt that way). I’m fortunate that my locally-owned supermarket has a decent selection of organic meat and produce at reasonable prices–even more reasonable if you get there when they open and hit the thrift bins to fill up your freezer–but I’m also fortunate that I live in an area where such items are available.
And there’s definitely a correlation between healthy diets and income/class–if you’ve ever been in a market in the inner city, you’ll find that decent meat and produce are scarce, but boy, do they push the canned and processed crap and hawk Mickey D’s and Burger King.
I’m fortunate that my locally-owned supermarket has a decent selection of organic meat and produce at reasonable prices–even more reasonable if you get there when they open and hit the thrift bins to fill up your freezer–but I’m also fortunate that I live in an area where such items are available.
Industrial-organic foods certainly have some advantages over factory farmed foods. But as Michael Pollan shows in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (easily my favorite book of 2006, fwiw), industrial-organic food production still leaves a lot to be desired, especially, in terms of animal welfare. For example, that “free-range” chicken that you buy in your grocery store is likely to have been raised in a huge barn with a tiny, unused exit that theoretically allows it access to the outdoors, but that virtually no chicken actually uses. Compare this to chickens that are actually raised on small farms in the outdoors, scratching for a diverse diet….it’s a whole different ballgame.
Although I am far from perfect in this regard, I’ve been trying to switch over to consuming meat and poultry produced in such local, small-scale operations. Here in central Oklahoma, we have a food buying coop that sells many such foods. There’s probably one wherever you live.
The other reason that insulin from pigs can be used in the human body is that the insulin metabolic pathway is very old, biologically speaking.
Of course, after you’ve had all the trees in your back yard eaten by an overpopulation of deer Yet Once Again you stop thinking about Bambi so much and more about roast venison. And rabbits? Arrrgh…there IS no such thing as a rabbit-proof fence.
I respect people who hunt more than people who think hunting is cruel and then munch away at factory farmed meat like it was no thing. By leaps and bounds, in fact.
Secondly, I see the choice between attacking research or ConAgra as a false dichotomy. If anything, attacking both simultaneously is symbiotic.
I’ll believe that when I see people camping out by factory farms to protest them the way they go after animal researchers
There are a lot of disabled people with significant communication problems, who nonetheless are quite self-aware. Thseemingly simple measue (anyone with the brains to say they don’t want to be euthanized and says so has the right to live) isn’t so simple when you are someone.
Has Singer suggested euthanasia for people with self-awareness? If so, that’s a strong violation of his own rules. In fact, the reason he says animals shouldn’t be killed is that they have an interest in not being killed beccause of self-awareness. My fault for badly wording his arguments, but please don’t take my bad wording for his arguments. If someone can’t speak and would very much like to live, their suffering counts in Singer’s book.
Seriously, the amount of alarm that people are showing makes it seem like he’s advocating putting people down for broken legs. It doesn’t make sense from any of the principles he lays out. He’s primarily about reducing suffering and has a pretty strict view of how much suffering, etc., and I doubt he claims disabled people don’t fear death.
That said, the issue about him brushing off enjoyment of life factors is pretty compelling to me. In fact, in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan showed that Singer’s overemphasis on certain anti-suffering principles made him somewhat blind to constrasting it with enjoyment of life factors for animals. It’s not that he discards it completely, it’s just that he seems to forget it. The dialogue Pollan tries to set up between Singer and Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms was fascinating. In the emails Singer sent him, it seemed clear that he hadn’t thought completely through the fact that Salatin’s animals were not just Not Suffering but they were in fact happy.
On the whole, I wish that Singer was better about the human life thing, but I do get the impression that he uses it to shock people out of their complacency about animal life more than anything. That said, there are some real world applications of the utilitarian view of animal rights that have real world good effects. For instance, communities that respect the idea that a cat has an interest in not being killed moved away from the model of stray cat control that involved rounding them up and killing them to the catch, spay, release model. Turns out the latter model actually works better at reducing the stray cat population over generations. Which means that there’s more resources for the existing cats and each cat has a better quality of life. Fascinating, really. And really influential on my view of the place of birth control in making life for humans better.
R. Mildred: http://letsbefriends.blogspot.com/2004/09/tiger-and-piglets_09.html
The rest of the blog is mighty squee-worthy as well.
On another note, why is it that during any discussion of ethical eating/animal rights, there are inevitably several meat-eaters who chime in with some really stupid one-liner, like “I like cheeseburgers” or “Animals are tasty.” Really?! WOW! Hold up, everybody debating the philosophical nuances of consumption; Person X has announced that s/he thinks meat tastes good. Isn’t that just so insightful?
Seriously, could you look like more of an arse who puts zero thought into your lifestyle habits?
Humans have been eating meat pretty much since we came into being and our bodies are adapted to a carnivore diet.
Strictly speaking a carnivorous diet is really unhealthy for you, we’re omnivorous by nature, which means we’re really good at coping without meat because some days you wake up and you just don’t feel like stabbing a deer in the throat, you know?
Fascinating, really.
I’d ahve said “you gotta laugh so you don’t cry”, because you realise that means that stray cats have free access to birth control? Government funded birth control and no crisis spaying centers to be seen, and all for the sake of stray cats.
My thought on the whole vegetarianism debate is that basically yo cannot escape the system in modern america unless you raise all your own food. Factory vegetable farms are the cause of millions of animal deaths, and have a huge environmental effect from fertilizer runoff. So basically, yes, I agree that it would be wonderful to be able to not contribute to environmental damage by the food we eat, but until the way food is made in america changes, that is not going to happen. So might as well eat meat.
We are omnivorous, but before agriculture what did our ancestors eat? Meat, with berries and nuts and wild plants when they could be found. It’s often pointed out that before “civilization” Eskimos ate pretty much nothing but meat, fish and fat and were pretty healthy. Straight Dope addresses this issue–type in “eskimo diets” in your search engine of choice for the link to a couple of studies.
Like it or not, humans need protein and the best source of protein comes from animals. You can choose not to eat meat, but the eggs and the dairy have to come from somewhere and unless you’re fortunate enough to have access to a local farm or another organic source you’re getting it from the supermarket just like everyone else.
But the best thing is that we never have to worry where our next meal is coming from. There are billions of people who don’t have our luxury of choice.
I wonder whether the remake of Charlotte’s Web is going to lead to a bunch of kids declaring vegetarianism. And handwringing articles about that, of course.
You can choose not to eat meat or dairy. And while local versus non-local food makes a big difference in terms of energy, it does take less energy to prodcue vegetarian food than meat because vegetarian food is more direct-you don’t eat the chicken that ate te corn, you eat the corn. It’s more environmentally sustainable.
Except, Max, the meat eats those vegetables. So to eat meat, you are doubling up.
Patricia, if that’s true, that you need animal proteins to survive, then are vegans cheating? Because them seem survived to me. I barely eat eggs, but I have a weakness for cheese, but I will go days without touching a dairy product. Protein from vegetable sources seems to work. That people used to eat X, Y, or Z doesn’t mean we were designed for it. Omnivores by definition are flexible eaters.
“It’s often pointed out that before “civilizationâ€? Eskimos ate pretty much nothing but meat, fish and fat and were pretty healthy. Straight Dope addresses this issue–type in “eskimo dietsâ€? in your search engine of choice for the link to a couple of studies.
”
And meditaranian people ate not so much in the way of meat and tended to be very healthy as did Japanese people who tended towards eating fish and rice.
Humans are adaptable as evidenced by the recent spread of lactose tolerance.
“And there’s definitely a correlation between healthy diets and income/class”
Yes, I’ve discovered that now that I’m diabetic…the amount of food I buy, is less but the cost has almost doubled. As the same amount of frozen or canned vegs costs much more when they are fresh. I guess because they can’t store it fresh very long, so you have to factor in transportion costs every couple of days.
Not to mention the time involved in shopping and prep work to eat every day…as I have to shop more then once a week these days to get fresh things. As again, fresh doesn’t last very long so you have to continuously resupply…I think we might be better off with the ‘victory garden’ concept. Where everyone who had a small patch of dirt or a terrace planted their own vegs. so the nation could focus on resupplying the war effort…
I’m not so sure about the replacement of meat with dairy and starch however, as many diary products, even low fat milk has quite a bit of sugar content in it…as for rice, potatoes, bread, pasta and cereal (even the very good ones) they have a TON of sugar in them…
So the best diet for humans is still open to debate…as more and more low income people with a lot of starch in their diets become diabetic we might have to accept the fact that we evolved as meat eaters & can’t replace that so easily with starch products.
Maybe, just a thought (which I hate as I would love to envision a world without us having to eat meat)…
In China, most of the rural poor can’t afford meat unless it’s once or twice a year in connection with a holiday(usually the Lunar New Year).
We are omnivorous, but before agriculture what did our ancestors eat? Meat, with berries and nuts and wild plants when they could be found. It’s often pointed out that before “civilization� Eskimos ate pretty much nothing but meat, fish and fat and were pretty healthy.
Ammong hunter-gatherers, there’s a rough correlation with latitude — people like the Inuit ate mostly meat (the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego probably get the prize for narrowest diet — almost nothing but guanaco), but closer to the equator they ate proportionately more plants. So for example the majority of the traditional diet of the Juhoansi in Botswana was mongongo nuts, and meat was an occasional treat.
Amanda, thanks for the link. My feminism and my vegetarianism certainly are linked, for many of the reasons you suggest. If the personal is political, then my personal choices need to be seen as political acts. And if I am against using women for my own pleasure, then it follows (for me) that I need to see other living creatures as having similar rights — the right not to have their lives lived for me and my needs.
I’ve heard numerous times that frozen vegetables are the way to go because they are frozen shortly after harvest, whereas a lot of produce hangs out for a while so to speak.
And no, Amanda, you don’t need animal proteins, but they’re still the best source as far as the amounts they contain compared to vegan options.
Again, considering that billions don’t get the amount of choice we do and whose heads would probably explode were they dropped in your average American supermarket, the carnivore/vegetarian argument is kind of pointless.
I don’t think so. I think that one of his fundamental premises is that the whole concept of “the sanctity of human life” is pseudo-religious gobbledegook that has no place in rational discourse. I think he gets to his animal rights stance from that premise, rather than vice versa.
I think that what’s so scary about him is that he’s absolutely sincere. He really does believe that his argument about killing disabled babies makes perfect sense and that it would be accepted by everyone but religious zealots and delusional cripples who can’t admit how miserable they are. Once society rids itself of lingering religiosity and of politically-correct absurdities like the belief that disabled people are as good as everyone else, we can get down to the business of culling the herd for the benefit of all of us. It would bother me less, to be honest, if I thought he really was just scoring points for animals at the expense of disabled people, although that would also be reprehensible.
I don’t see a huge difference between advocating putting down people for Down’s Syndrome and advocating putting them down for broken legs. And if a baby isn’t a person, then he should be much more widely accepting of killing babies, it seems to me. Why only disabled babies? Why not any other baby who you don’t want and who would have trouble finding adoptive parents?
For the average American, “best” isn’t all that relevant, since most of us get more than enough protein. It shouldn’t be a big challenge to get plenty of protein from plant-based sources. And I bet that if you counted amount of protein per dollar, rather than for ounce, legumes would be better. I don’t think protein is a big problem for vegetarians.
(Iron, on the other hand, would probably kill me if I tried to go veggie. I don’t understand how anyone gets enough iron from plant-based sources.)
This just makes no sense to me. Because other people don’t have the opportunity to be as wasteful as us, it’s ok for us to be really wasteful? How exactly does that make sense?
Again, considering that billions don’t get the amount of choice we do and whose heads would probably explode were they dropped in your average American supermarket, the carnivore/vegetarian argument is kind of pointless.
I see variations on this argument all the time, the notion that it’s somehow wrong to scale down your consumption because your ability to do so is predicated on privilege, and I really don’t get it. To me, privilege means that my obligations to give back are more, not less. Most of the time, people agree, but when it comes to food, all of a sudden the argument that other people don’t have the privilege of a vegetarian diet somehow means that I’m to abandon mine. It doesn’t follow, from my point of view. I can better afford clothes that weren’t made in a sweatshop. But it very clearly helps no one if I continue to buy clothes made in sweatshops on the theory that I’m flaunting privilege to buy more humane clothes.
The carnivore/vegetarian dichotomy is incorrect anyway. Most “carnivore” humans are omnivore humans and eat plenty of veggies.
I suspect, too, that if we run out of the oil that our heavily subsidized, meat-heavy diets rely on to keep moving, then the poor are the ones that will starve when we suddenly start having food shortages. I’m not interested in symbolic solidarity with the poor if my willingness to use less resources helps keep those resources around a little longer.
Makes sense, Sally, but I think you can retort him without leaning on fallacies like the sanctity of human life. Simply put, the argument that the disabled enjoy their lives sews it up for me. Again, I’ve never seen a statement by Singer about putting down anyone that’s not a baby. From the perspective of a privileged American, it’s pretty harsh to say that a retarded baby should be euthanized, but on the other hand, if you’re making an argument about baseline ethics, you have to think about ALL people and for people that are desperately poor, it’s hard for me to judge the same.
I mean, to make it clear that I’m not at all saying that disabled people are lesser or anything like that. For instance, I’m a huge feminist and I can say that it’s hard for me to judge someone who is poor and lives in a developing country and who kills a female infant. If we don’t like that, we need to remove the structures that encourage that desperation.
Most vegans take iron supplements (you can even get them in gelatin-free capsules.)
Two things:
1. This discussion reminds me of why I was so heartbroken to not be able to sign up for “Anthropology of Food” next year. I find food and all of its politics, issues, ramifications, etc., to be utterly fascinating, and this thread is no exception.
2. I’m trying to come up with my food related resolution for next year, and so far I had come up with “No food from any building with a drive-through”, but I’m thinking of amending that to “No meat, period.”
That’s why there are so many religious and cultural taboos against eating apes and monkeys.
By what definition of intelligence? Do you have some studies to show support for this hypothesis?
While I don’t want to be in a relationship with a vegetarian, some of the important characteristics I do look for in a partner correlate with vegetarianism. It’s a paradox. Fortunately for me, it’s merely a correlation, not a guarantee (equally fortunately, I’m in a relationship with an omnivore and so hopefully won’t have to worry about it anymore anyway).
In Leon Kass’s book, The Hungry Soul, he provides a small section explaining why he doesn’t like vegetarians. Here’s an excerpt — not sure how common his attitudes are, but they’re certainly *cough* interesting:
The first tribe are nomads; the second have no houses. The former eat raw flesh and kill their own to eat them (the killing is in the service of the eating, to prevent disease from spoiling the meat); the latter eat boiled wild seed and grass and kill nothing ensouled. The first kill the sick early, eat the dead, and sacrifice the old to their gods, afterwards eating their flesh; the second neglect the sick and dead and give no burial. Both these extreme carnivores and these extreme herbivores copulate shamelessly in public like the beasts, suggesting–despite their polar differences regarding killing–a common lack of shame, and thus of humanity.
How are these vegetarians like these cannibals? The crucial point is this: Both deny the difference between man and animal, and therewith the importance of form. The Padaeans, pure carnivores, treat even their best friends as good meat: They homogenize men and animals, in mind and deed, on the principle that flesh is flesh no matter what the form. The nameless vegetarians, at first glance preferable because less brutal, turn out to be homogenizers: Vitality is vitality, no matter what the form. They also assimilate man to the animals: Both are seen as equally inedible because both are equally ensouled. Their implicit insistenc on the supremacy of life, health, and sentience denies not only their humanity and dignity of speech and consciousness, They also fly from necessity and also mortality , as manifest in their indifference to burial. They close their eyes to the bittersweet truth about life itself–that to be life, life must live with and against necessity. They wish instead for a different world, absolutely free of necessity and harshness–a world of ease, pleasure, and comfort–in which the lion will lie down with the lamb and all will eat seeds, delicately boiled in their shells, and graze away indefinitely. These men lack even the dignity and nobility of the ild animals; at least in this respect they, too might be said to number if not among the worst then at least among the lowest of the animals–nameless, godless, spiritless, and living the life fit for cattle.
I won’t try to pick this craziness apart on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis (although if Amanda did so, I’m sure she’d have me gasping for breath, choking from laughter), but I will say that it never occured to me (before reading Kass) that some might see moral equivalency between humans and cannibals. People like Kass just think in a manner completely alien to, say, me. To him, suffering comes as it will, and it’s futile to stop it, but people must mantain category distinctions. To me, category distinctions arise when they’re useful, and have little moral content but are a practical necessity for thought and communication, but suffering sucks and should be reduced as much as possible.
I don’t think the Kassian perspective is very widespread (there’s a reason he lost his bioethics commission job, after all), but I wonder to what extent it explains any anti-vegetarian sentiment.
Arggh… the nested blockquotes worked in the preview, but not in the post. Anyway, it was supposed to have a quote of Kass that starts with “Subhuman Eating” and ends with “fit for cattle.” Then, Kass’s quote of Herodotus starts with “eastward of these Indians” and ends with “like the brute beasts.”
I think that in general Hugo has an annoying tendency to claim the moral high ground for things that he’d hypothetically do, such as forgoing abortion or denying treatment to his father, while acting superior to those of us who are dealing with those issues non-hypothetically.
…Which is actually one of the things–perhaps the thing underneath it all?–that pisses me off so much about Singer. His moral dictates are inhumane on more levels than one: they only make sense to him when they don’t involve his life.
On the whole, I wish that Singer was better about the human life thing, but I do get the impression that he uses it to shock people out of their complacency about animal life more than anything.
This would be disgusting even if it were true, given the amount of casual violence that has been perpetrated against people with disabilities. It’s like arguing against factory farm conditions by pointing out that we wouldn’t suffer human beings to be confined. Or, I suppose, by arguing against prison labor by saying that we’d never buy clothing that we knew was made by exploited, suffering workers. Most of the people who go “Whoa!” when they read Singer are disability-rights activists, and that’s because these things aren’t modest proposals to them.
But it’s not true. He’s arguing that the life of a disabled person may be held up against the life of a person without disabilities and considered lesser. This rests on the idea that people with disabilities are objectively less happy and the idea that people with disabilities are more socially expensive–both profoundly ableist premises.
“I’ve heard numerous times that frozen vegetables are the way to go because they are frozen shortly after harvest, whereas a lot of produce hangs out for a while so to speak.”
Actually I’ve discovered it’s the same with frozen vegs as far as hanging out for a while. Depending upon the consistency of them, you can see they’ve been frozen and unfrozen a few times…
So I just decided to go with the fresh…
Also I think that’s true (I don’t recall who said it however) about many people in China not being able to afford meat…Also many can’t afford anything but rice to eat…at the doctor’s I went to there were magizines all over the place featuring Chinese adults and children who were diabetic. I was a little surprised as I know they don’t use sugar there, but honey (and up to that point I still believe diabetes was caused by eating too much ’sugar’)
Now I know it’s caused by a diet high in starch. So diabetes is spreading in China due to too much rice consumption. This has major implications for the entire food supply of the world actually…as many people are dependent upon grain and cereal crops (cheap starch) for most of their calories…
If we have to switch to a mostly protein and green vegs diet (which you need more vegs to fill yourself up) it could mean a lot of starvation…those cheap starches are keeping millions alive, but the cost is the insulin resistant form of diabetes type II…
So I don’t know what the answer is…
To clarify the whole protein thing: proteins are made up of amino acids, ten of which we can’t synthesize ourselves. These ten are the “essential” amino acids, and we can synthesize the remaining amino acids from them, but we can only get them from dietary sources. If we eat meat or dairy, then we get all ten and in the correct proportions, but not so much with vegetables; most vegetables don’t have all ten (that we can access), so vegetarians have to mix it up a bit and can’t survive on tofu alone. (Interestingly, a lot of cultures have dishes that correct this discrepancy — like corn chips and bean dip, red beans and rice, etc.)
Another issue with the increasing prevalence of diabetes in the United States: people with acromegaly/gigantism (i.e., excess growth hormone) are virtually guaranteed to develop diabetes. I’m no endocrinologist or anything, but my understanding is that growth hormone and insulin operate along a similar pathway. According to this article “GH is one of the glucose counter-regulatory hormones, rising in response to hypoglycaemia, it has both intrinsic hyperglycaemic actions and causes insulin resistance.” I’m curious if the use of growth hormones in livestock is increasing the rate of diabetes in meat-eating Americans (I think Canada and the EU have banned the use of growth hormones in their livestock), but so far I haven’t seen any studies on it.
Something to think about: some Native American people are going back to eating more meat, less carbs due to the community’s rise in diabetes and obesity. I am a mixed person and have gone from being a strict vegetarian to eating some meat. I figure that I grew up eating venison and I was not overweight then, nor did I have PCOS, so maybe it’s an intolerance of my vegetarian, carb-heavy diet.
I see nothing wrong with hunting for food, and I feel that the deer has a good life, unlike a factory-farmed cow or pig. I have been putting effort into growing some of my own food, though I am not able to hunt to supply some low-fat, low-carb protein for my diet. I would prefer to avoid getting diabetes when I get old.
I’m very surprised that I’ve come back around to this P.O.V., but I’m also tired of feeling unwell. To me it seems that vegetarian means high-carb, and high-carb is not healthy.
Bridgetka, I seriously doubt it, as GH wouldn’t survive the acidic environment of the stomach or the rest of the digestive process, and you’d expect to see the other effects of GH(acromegaly, as you point out being one of them) in the population as well.
Also, GH is species-specific, so even if some bovine or porcine GH did somehow manage to make it into the bloodstream from the digestive tract, it wouldn’t work as well(or perhaps not at all) compared to human GH.
According to one source I googled:
and
Link
That’s not just any bunny, by the way. That’s Max, of Sam and Max, Freelance Police by Steve Purcell. He is not a vegetarian. I am.
Amanda: Eating pork is uncomfortably close to cannibalism. From what I understand, human flesh tastes pretty pig-like.
Prosciutto or bacon, to be specific.
can i get a set of instructions that you think should govern the humane slaughtering of animals.
please need them for school!!!!