Is Eating Less Meat Better than Eating No Meat?

Agreed. I eat vegetarian probably 75% of the time, and feel that radical anti-meat groups like PETA only alienate the common person. They create a backlash of distrust, scrapping the argument altogether. People (and more importantly RESTAURANTS) need to start educating themselves on meat alternatives, and finding ways to reduce meat consumption. I just think the average person doesn’t consider a meal a meal without cow on the plate. And most vegetarian food does suck, but only because most people just can’t cook and restaurants don’t care.

what you say seems very reasonable to me. However, I don’t understand the vegan man’s mentality – he’s urging everybody to abstain from meat unless they fancy indulging in Italian bicycle holidays? (I’m taking your word for this). 

There’s a food movement known alternately as “Vegan Before Dinnertime” or “Vegan Before 6pm” (VB6) that you might want to consider. The problem I have with it is that I hate my job and need to get out of the office at lunchtime each day, but living in a crappy western exurb, there aren’t a lot of vegan or even vegetarian lunch options.

FWIW, I’m a vegetarian (17 years and counting) who admits cheeseburgers are delicious. And of all the vegans I know, not one denies the entire course of human existence. This isn’t to say the zealots aren’t out there, but they’re not the whole story. Not all of us proselytize; most of us just live our lives.

I have to agree with most of what has been said…cheeseburgers are delicious; very few of us know how to cook vegetarian/vegan food well; Americans eat too much in general…BUT, as an evolutionary biologist, I feel compelled to say that if humans weren’t here, domesticated cows wouldn’t be either.  Also, the amount of inputs required to grow a 2000lb cow could grow several acres of lettuce.  (Although what good is lettuce w/out a burger to put it on)

“I have a hard relationship with vegans and vegetarians [...] partly because I am just not sure I can trust a person who doesn’t like a cheeseburger.” — Agreed. Cheeseburgers are a very nice rule of thumb to determine who to trust.

“Just because we’re currently treating animals inhumanely and raising them in ways that our bad for the planet does not mean that the entire concept is flawed.” — Very solid philosophy. Also, try to substitute “animals” in this sentence with “slaves” or “prisoners”

It’s also obnoxious to hear someone whine about people’s dietary choices and complain about people trying to convince him to do something that they think make his life more good.  —from a vegetarian who doesn’t try to convince anyone what they should or shouldn’t eat

I agree with the point made that trying to guilt someone into making a dietary change is a fruitless effort (no pun intended). However this argument here became flawed the moment the blogger made the grand-sweeping charge that “…vegans seem to deny the entire course of human existence, as if
generations of humans hadn’t raised meat and then ate it and been both
healthy and lived in a clean environment.” Certainly this is not true of ALL vegans and to paint veggie/vegan people as such extremists is very unfair….most vegans I know are not of the mindset that “we are not meant to eat meat” – its not about that. What is IS about for many of us is not wanting to partake in a diet/lifestyle that is abusive to animals, destructive to the environment, and possibly harmful to one’s own health (ex. the links between red meat and cancer).

“But mostly it’s because vegans seem to deny the entire course of human existence”… actually, we’re trying to prolong it, not deny it. the practices used in the current animal-meat industry are cruel and horrific (and destroying our planet). we could EASILY feed everyone on earth if we weren’t raising inedible crops to feed countless mutant animal slaves. and if you factor in carbon hoofprints, it becomes abundantly clear that eating animal flesh is not sustainable. i cannot call the needless suffering and murder of sentient beings delicious. i cannot. i hope for all the animals, and for your colon, and for your grandkids that you do begin to consume less flesh. and that you do more research the next time you decide to open your mouth.

I am not a veg of any kind, but your assailment of these groups strikes me as chauvinist.Additionally, I second the commenter ‘razzing’, above; between this and your post advocating the bombing campaign which killed 1400 Gazans, 1/3 of whom were children, I am completely turned off GOOD.

Hmm, generations of humans outside the polar regions haven’t lived on a western meat-heavy diet until recently, in evolutionary terms. We can sure do it, but it’s not necessarily the best diet for our makeup.

In the USA, Kellog and Post got their start as health food providers, as part of a movement attempting (on initially religious grounds) to change the demonstrably unhealthy breakfast meat gluttony habits of the general American population. From all accounts I’ve read, the gas and flatulence problems were a large enough public menace to be worth fixing on their own account. (Then they discovered marketing to kids with heavy sugar loads, and the last vestiges of health food ideals were surrendered to $$s… It’s Grrrrreat!

Also, just like modern type 2 corn plants, modern cows wouldn’t exist without humans to raise them. The problem with continuing as we have is that cows are a tremendously inefficient way to convert sunlight and fertile earth into food. While we might end up with environmental problems caused by irrigating large crops of beans and rice (not lettuce , those problems are doubled when we grow corn only to lose much of the food energy converting it into beef.

Still, where are these vegans I hear about who attempt to guilt others into not eating meat? I’ve heard tell of them, but I almost believe they’re apocryphal, as I’ve never found one in the wild. All the vegans I’ve met are rather low key. They make their personal choices, and live according to what they believe is OK for themselves and the planet. If you ask very nicely, and are persistent about it, they’ll explain their reasoning.

Often, that’s enough to cause others to think, and make some changes in what they choose. There are loads to consider: grass fed, cage free, fair trade, grow locally eat locally, ride your bicycle, …

I believe someone above me used the phrase “countless mutant animal slaves”, really? slaves? mutants? sometimes it helps listening to yourself and just repeat what you say in your head, so you can realize how ridiculous what you are saying might be.

“we would have environmental problems with irrigating giant lettuce
fields, and so forth.” – that’s your argument against vegans and
vegetarians?”do you know how much water it takes to produce one pound of meat?it requires anywhere from 2500 to 6000 gallons of water while a pound of wheat ( and other vegetables) requires around 60 gallons. please check your facts before making these kinds of generalizations.

Its interesting. I find the most compelling arguments for veganism and other, less radical forms of dietary abstention to be ones not based on “nature,” but rather on the circumstances in which we find ourselves.  So, yes, to claim that eating meat is per se bad for us or unnatural or un-human…well, sure.  That’s a dogmatism that ought to be ignored.  We are pretty clearly biologically omnivorous.  However, to point to our systems of production, etc and say “Hey, we’re doing this poorly and on a systemic level.  We might need to start over and that will mean abstaining in protest until we can weaken those structures sufficiently.  Weaken them so we can tear them down and build new, healthy, intelligent ones in which we can enjoy a reasonable modicum of our dietary liberty.”  That sounds pretty good.Furthermore, I think this strategy applies to other thigns too.  I know so many people who want to point to the problems created for our society by what we eat and very few who pay attention to what we drink…  Yes, eating Cheeseburgers might fuck us in the long run, but if someone is desperately poor because they’ve fallen to drink or drugs…well, they’re going to turn to the dollar menu at McDonalds evertime. And last time I checked, Whole Foods doesn’t sell Thunderbird wine.  As much as factory farming may be a strain on our natural resources, booze (and other drugs) are an enourmous strain on our human resources.  Productivity lost.  Property damaged. Lives lost. Automobile accidents. Crime. Intransigent homelessness. Not to mention all those poor folks who keep dying in Mexico’s drug wars.  What if we dried up the demand for that too?  What if we dismantled THAT cultural structure too, and rebuilt it.  Not on the assumption that “DRUGS ARE BAD!” but rather that we’ve developed a wildly unhealthy relationship to drugs, which (like meat) have been consumed by people all over the world for all of human history to greater or lesser benefit or harm.  I guess I’m just saying we can be a little selective about what the “pressing issues” are, depending on what gets us progressive-points.  If I ask you to give up meat, I’m progressive.  If I ask you to give up your weekend joint, I’m a fascist.  hm….

The arguments posted are entirely anecdotal and rife with logical fallacies. Not only does the author begin by stating a clear prejudice, “the idea of that diet repulses me,” and follow that with supposition, “I am pretty sure that I would need a disgusting amount,” they also create and present unsubstantiated hypotheticals as though they were fact, “it’s because vegans seem to deny the entire course of human existence.”Seriously, try supporting the claims you make with facts that back them up and try learning a little about making a sound argument, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies).In my 20 years as a vegan I haven’t met one person who conforms to the wild and prejudiced claims you make. The only one coming off, “obnoxiously dogmatic” here is you.The funny thing is I agree with your conclusion that, “if everyone started only eating vegetables, we would have environmental problems with irrigating giant lettuce fields, and so forth. The problem goes well beyond what we eat. It’s really about how many of us there are and how much we eat,” but that is despite everything else you’ve written, not because of it.

I mean…I see no scientific facts in this entire thing. There’s a significant amount of affect and an absolute trust in the vague history of humanity’s historical “diet.” If you’ve got an opinion let’s see some statistics and facts Relying on relating to someone over processed foods hinders your ability to un-bias yourself.  Interesting read, but back it up.

“because vegans seem to deny the entire course of human existence, as if
generations of humans hadn’t raised meat and then ate it and been both
healthy and lived in a clean environment”umm… I think the point is that for the entire course of human existence we did not have factory farming and dollar menus. I have never met a vegangelist, but I have met lots of morons who somehow get on a soapbox as venerable as GOOD without a shred of evidence. Even ChaCha representatives have to provide credible sources.

I’d love to see the author’s response to the many criticisms.

Sure. Criticism 1: Where are these dogmatic people of which you speak? Perhaps you’ve heard of PETA, an international organization devoted to, among other things, stopping worldwide consumption of meat. They run national ad campaigns with jarring images designed specifically to make people feel guilty for their dietary choices (one compared eating meat to participating in the Holocaust). You may not personally know any dogmatic vegans or vegetarians, but they are out there, and they’re the ones spending money on advertising.

Criticism 2: You don’t know anything about the course of human existence! Well, in as much as none of us do, I agree. But I have a degree in classical history and spent several years in the field as an archaeologist, so I can tell you this: In 500 B.C., they ate meat. Quite a bit of it. Certainly not nearly as much as we do now, but you turn up no small number of burnt and gnawed animal bones as you dig around in the dirt. Animal sacrifice (which really meant kill a bunch of animals and then have a huge party to eat them), occurred regularly—they had a lot of holidays. They weren’t sitting around reveling in the beans and wheat they were eating as the healthy choice. One ancient sect, the Pythagoreans—who followed the teachings of the guy who figured out the length of the sides of the triangle—practiced vegetarianism and were roundly mocked in Greek comedy, which wouldn’t have happened if vegetarianism was the norm. Similarly, Plutarch, writing a few hundred years after the birth of Christ, completed a sort of philosophical exercise arguing that one should not eat meat called On the Eating of Flesh, which very clearly implies that said eating of flesh was the common dietary practice of the day. Can we extrapolate ancient Greek dietary habits out to the rest of the ancient world? To some degree, certainly. Meat was eaten, though not as much, and often smaller, wild meat (wild birds, rabbits, fish), though farmers did raise, kill, and eat domesticated animals (if you’re really thinking about animal’s feelings, try not to think about how much more painful it must be to be killed by an ancient farmer’s rusty, poorly made iron knife). So, if you are saying that factory industrial farming is the problem, can you identify a time in the history of agriculture when farming was to your liking and commit to eating meat if we ever reform the meat industry to the point that we achieve that state? Or, for instance, I go to the farmer’s market and buy meat from animals that were raised much the same way animals were raised 100, 200 years ago. If your problem is with the current treatment of animals in factory farms, what prevents you from availing yourself of this option, which will only help economically enforce that people want meat from small, family-run farms? This can be expensive, and isn’t a solution for everyone, but if you hate factory farming so much but like meat, why not consider it as an option? If you’re willing to do none of these things, then it seems that you don’t like meat for other, personal reasons, which is fine, just don’t try to impose those reasons on me and don’t try to say that you are achieving some ideal of humanity that our consumer culture of dollar meals has driven from us, because that’s not quite true.

Criticism 3: A whole field of lettuce, you idiot? Don’t you know how bad for the environment cows are? Yes. And I mention that when I say I am trying to eat less meat because it is bad for the environment. And link to a piece we made about how much water it takes to raise cows. So, I think I have that covered. I maintain that the problems associated with the environment and food truly stem not from the food itself, but from the people eating the food. If there were fewer people, we wouldn’t need factories to spit out beef patties the way we do. There are so many people on this earth that to feed them all a satisfactory diet will be bad for the environment, no matter what that diet consists of. We certainly wont be able to do it on small, family-run farms. We’ll need giant, resource intensive fields of food (do you like industrial vegetable production better than industrial cow production?), and then we’ll have to ship that food around the world, where most of the people are. The lettuce itself may have been a poor example, but thanks to the commenter who pointed out rice and beans as particularly resource-intensive crops. We would need a lot of vegetables to feed everyone, is my point, and there will be environmental consequences of that as well. To take care of our skyrocketing population and the planet at the same time is going to take innovations beyond the level of just not eating meat.

Thank’s for the responses. I was the anonymous who said it would be nice to see them. While I appreciate you taking the time it’s again pretty obvious that you don’t know what you’re talking about nor how to formulate an argument.Your responses continue to work off of the red herrings and straw men you put forth in your original post. To that end they are as pointless and valueless as your original statements and only serve to further display your ignorance of the topic.Peta are extremists. Try as you might to put them forth as representative of all vegans they’re not. Throw some well supported peer reviewed numbers behind that claim and I’m happy to eat my non-leather shoes.Denying the course of human existence. That’s one of your straw men. It has nothing to do with being a vegan. Maybe there are a few vegans out there that you personally have met who have put forth that theory but to suggest it’s representative of all vegans would be like me saying all meat eaters support their dietary choice by being ethic-less nihilists. I have met a couple in my years.The lettuce field vs cows is about the only point you have going here that makes any sense but again, that has nothing to do with being vegan; that just comes down to sustainability.Why not amend your original post and clarify that you’re only talking about some vegan zealots that you yourself have encountered? At least then you’re not grossly misrepresenting vegans as a whole.

Just a few points from my corner:

1) There’s good science that says humans ate meat in the era of evolutionary adaptation: “After stone tools appear in the fossil record it seems clear that meat was eaten in increasing quantities, but whether it was obtained through hunting or scavenging remains a topic of intense debate.” Interestingly, Eskimos, because of the ecosystem they live in, have traditionally been almost completely carnivorous. I’d say it’s wrong to suggest that homo sapien is a vegetarian. But I don’t know many vegans who would suggest that anyway.

2) But regardless of what our evolutionary ancestors did, it’s still an open question whether we should eat less meat (see naturalistic fallacy). And Morgan clearly acknowledges that he wants to eat less meat himself. I’d agree. Eating less meat is good for ecological reasons and, to the extent that the meat you’re eating comes from some industrial farm, for ethical reasons.

3) I’m not vegetarian or vegan but I admire them. Like the people who diligently unplug their power strips whenever they’re not in use, vegetarians are, to my mind, going above and beyond the call of duty for our collective good (if they consider it a sacrifice at all).

4) I think Morgan’s ultimate point is that even those people who don’t want to go “whole hog” vegetarian (apologies), and love cheeseburgers, should think about cutting down on the amount of meat they eat. I’d agree.

agreed. i think for some people( well at least for me) the idea of not eating meat at all for the rest of my whole entire life was rather daunting.sure, i’ve seen the animal rights videos and stuff, it’s really repulsive how people treat animals, but being the rather self centered human i am, no meat wasn’t really something i felt that i could commit to. I stuck to a vegan diet for around one and a half months, and ended up lapsing into a carnivorous diet immediately after.  NOT good.Now, i’m sadly still not a vegan but i make it a point to eat less meat. toufu with soy sauce is a great substitute and i dont even have to cook it. i try to buy free range/ farm reared poultry as much as possible, and i’ve replaced milk with soy milk I think small changes in our lives that we can live with in the long term would reap more benefits as opposed to dramatic changes that only last short term but if you’re one of those people who have the ability/ determination to stick to vegan-ism, why not?

Good- I’m disappointed with the quality of this article. It would have been nice to see the author put a little more effort into forming a solid argument, as opposed to just whining about not liking people with different diets.You had me interested with the premise of the article and lost me somewhere within the poorly-written, badly-argued content.

This article if very defensive. Intelligent debates should be rooted in facts and well crafted points of view. It seems like the author has a personal vendetta against some vegans that hurt her feelings and is trying to publicly respond to that. I don’t know if that is the case, it just seems that way.People can eat whatever they want. There are many ways to be socially conscious. We can’t all do everything all the time. I say make as many good choices as you can, be good to your neighbor, and hear each other out. Peace,AR