Meat eater, vegetarian or vegan?? Which are you?

Meat Eater, but I try to limit the meat. I was a vegetarian for 3 years.

Life is too short to spend it eating food I hate. And I hate the taste of the vast majority of meat. I remember cutting ham into small enough pieces that I could swallow it like pills when I was a child. Pork is so monumentally disgusting.

I don't understand why anyone would want to eat a dead animal, but then again, not everyone shares my love of pickles or mustard. Different strokes. I just hate when people act like I'm some freak of nature, or come to my home and eat the from scratch meal I slaved over only to throw a temper tantrum about the lack of meat.

I'm a vegetarian but I eat a lot of vegan alternatives as well.

Vegetarian

Meat eater who can't stand Vegans, sorry, I mean no offense, but every Vegan I have come in close contact with is so militant about it I just want to plant my fist square in their holier than thou throat. I'm sure not all vegans are like that, but there are enough out there to give the rest of you a bad name.

Oh, and I eat meat for the ethics and morality of it too.

Rigger

I think my favorite part of this post is "I can't stand vegans, no offense".

Meat eater, but I aspire to be a vegan one day. Seriously. Vegans are a step above the rest of us on the evolutionary scale of ethics and morality.

Wow I've actually never heard an omni admit to that!!

After reading The Vegetarian Myth I'm not sure how true this is

Watch out how much you trust that book; it cites Wikipedia multiple times and says a lot of things that are downright not true. Not saying everyone should be a vegetarian or vegan, but that particular book is not the height of reason.

I think it her overall points about grain production and how eating grains isn't good for yourself or the environment and couldn't be a solution to world hunger are valid.

You couldn't feed the world on a vegan diet without grain, and you especially couldn't keep the whole world healthy on a vegan diet without modern supplementation. So if it doesn't work on a worldwide scale how does it make sense ethically?

And if some people simply cannot be healthy without animal products (the amount of ex vegans that tried and failed are testament to this) does that mean they are allowed to not be vegan in the perfect non animal using utopia that is presented as the world ideal? Or should they just die off to save the animals?

It just doesn't make sense and it seems like a naive notion.

As a personal dietary decision, fine. Go for it. You live in the modern age where you can probably do this without serious damage to your health, at least for some time. But from an ethical standpoint? It doesn't quite stand up.

I could never pass up my meat.

vegetarian

I follow a Pollotarian/Flexitarian diet.

No beef, pork, or cow's milk, but I do eat poultry, eggs, cheese, Greek yogurt, almond milk, and sometimes tuna, etc...

Grain is not the only plantfood that can be produced in high yields, that doesn't even make any sense. I agree with you that grain is not the most nutrient-dense food in the plant kingdom and should not be eaten in excess for optimum health, but where is her evidence that there is no way to sustain a world of vegans? Vegan permaculture exists; there does not have to be an animal food industry for vegetables to be able to grow.

As for those ex-vegans, Lierre Keith in her book strongly implies that her vegan diet was very low fat. As some vegans will attest to (including Ginny Messina on her blog The Vegan RD - check out her review of the Vegetarian Myth), a very low-fat diet is destructive and can cause some of the very symptoms that she suffered from. For example, low omega-3's will increase one's susceptibility to anxiety and depression. Increasing your fat intake is likely to solve a lot of the problems that she dealt with. I cannot say definitively that she would have been just fine had she done this since she NEVER made it public what she ate on a daily basis -- but I can say that she gave no real evidence that it was what caused her health to fail, just that adding meat (which is a complex food group with MANY different nutrients and vitamins and could indicate anything about her previous diet) seemed to fix it. She also says numerous things in the book that are just not true, such as that there is a dietary requirement for saturated fats. This is false.

If veganism was shown to be unsustainable, you are certainly right that it would not make sense globally and it would be most reasonable for people to simply limit animal consumption to a reasonable and sustainable quantity. I am open to this idea; however, I do not think Keith provides sufficient evidence that this is the case. Alongside the lack of peer-reviewed resources (only an estimated 8% of her sources are peer-reviewed; she even used Google Answers as a source once) it is hard for me to agree with her position. I am open to the idea that meat is necessary, though. It just hasn't been shown in a convincing way yet.

What other food can be produced with in high yields without an agricultural system that damages the soil? And can this be produced in places that have poor soil but can sustain animals like goats who eat scrub? If not how can we get them to these people without just causing more problems in their societies?

I have read about vegan permaculture and I am interested to see if this would work, since the system we have used for so long is based on animal fertilizer to create a rich soil. I'd be really interested to find out if it is actually sustainable long term without any animal products or fossil fuel based fertilizer because I do suspect that eventually the soil will get depleted from nutrients only found from animal sources. But I could be wrong about this. I would like to see some information that doesn't have a vegan bias.

I'm not just talking about Lierre Keith though. There have been many prolific vegans that have had their health fail and had to include animal foods in their diet, and I think for every vegan who leaves veganism loudly, many others will leave it quietly. Do you think every single one of them were just doing it wrong? Didn't try hard enough? Liars? If it was that easy to be vegan I cant see why so many people would have to stop.

On a global scale it just doesn't make sense to expect people to be vegan when it seems to require such careful planning and also supplementation (which obviously not everyone is going to have access to) to not get sick on it when you could just be eating animal products to avoid these risks. If so many people living in rich developed countries, with ample access to any food they could need as a vegan and all the information they need to be a vegan and a huge community of vegans to help them, still manage to cultivate poor health on a vegan diet I'm not sure how the rest of the world is meant to fare with limited access to food or land that can grow food.

I agree that Lierre Keith doesn't have all the answers but she certainly opened my eyes to some ideas that I had never thought of before. I'm not taking her entire book as gospel but it was a very interesting take on how veganism as she and many others know it, does not have all the answers.

I have read studies that suggest that most people could not thrive on a vegan diet (most relating to vitamin B12 deficiencies). I don't think I've seen a single study that shows long term abstinence from animal products improves your longevity. (I have seen studies that show more plants to be beneficial and REDUCTION in the consumption of animal products to be beneficial, but complete abstinence? I've not seen anything)

I think there are some people, a few people, that can survive for quite some time, maybe the rest of their long disease free lives, on a vegan diet but I absolutely do not believe that everyone can, neither in a physiological sense or a practical sense. And if everyone cant live on a vegan diet then, in my opinion, the entire ethical construct falls down on itself because it asks humans to sacrifice their own health for another species