Vegetarianism - The Debate

[Will]

It's not a necessity for you, but it is for a lot of people - I think we're all agreed on that However personal issues a side, meat is a staple part of a human's diet no matter what your personal views are. And it's jolly good for you too - well the good stuff, not that mass produced horrid battery hen stuff

[Muban]

Oh I forgot to say, Jasper mentioned someone who reaered their own food ethically. I must admit I would be only too happy to pay a premium for ethically reared meat. Where possible I try to buy meat that is reared in a more ethical way. In my opinion you get what you pay for and it is quite easy to tell the difference.

As for hunting for food, personally I wouldn't have issue with it. What I personally find odd is that some people seem to want to detach themselves from where their food comes from. Seeing people being all squeamish about it when they see it up close - how on earth did they think it got to their plate? anyway that's another subject

[Will]

Originally Posted by Muban

Oh I forgot to say, Jasper mentioned someone who reaered their own food ethically. I must admit I would be only too happy to pay a premium for ethically reared meat. Where possible I try to buy meat that is reared in a more ethical way. In my opinion you get what you pay for and it is quite easy to tell the difference.

As for hunting for food, personally I wouldn't have issue with it. What I personally find odd is that some people seem to want to detach themselves from where their food comes from. Seeing people being all squeamish about it when they see it up close - how on earth did they think it got to their plate? anyway that's another subject

Tell me about it. I hate kids/adults who go "eeeewwwwww" at meat being prepared or slaughtered. If you didn't realise where the food has come from you don't deserve to eat it I love food, and I love good quality food. I like you would happily (and I do now) pay for the better cuts of meat sourced from butchers that I trust. It does taste better, it is better for you and it's not filled with all sorts of water and crap that the mass production brings. I am anti all this cheap meat - I think that is a crime.

People need educating - hence why I hate fast food and things like that.

[Haly]

Live and let live Eat what you want, believe what you want. Just don't push it on me and I don't care what you do. Which is also my exact same opinion of religion funnily enough

That's aimed at everyone btw, before anyone takes it personally

[Roberta]

Originally Posted by malc30

Just realised i did that in my own post
My crap is not meant to mean all veggy food is crap it was just crap as in crap, my food is crap
Aaaaaaarrrggghhhhh I was trying to be all Mellow there an all.
Apologys to the Veggys

Loves ya Malc. Your ex sounds a bit like me to be honest. You should see the trouble I have killing headlice when the kids come back swarming with them! I know they're pests and I do the job but I just feel so WRONG!

I thought you were very mellow indeed!

And just as a side note to this, I was brought up in the country where we raised rabbits and goats and ate them. I feel that coming home to Debbie sandwiches may have contributed to me becoming a veggie when I left home!

[goldilocks]

Originally Posted by Will

Tell me about it. I hate kids/adults who go "eeeewwwwww" at meat being prepared or slaughtered. If you didn't realise where the food has come from you don't deserve to eat it.

on that issue, we have exactly the same opinion, if 'little timmy' has a faceless burger or sausage put in front of him - he won't know where it has come from - he won't know what goes into the manufacturing process and he won't have a choice about whether or not to eat it. if we educated everyone about food, we'd be a much healthier society

Originally Posted by Kitten

Out of interest, if you're living on the poverty line, how do you manage to have the healthiest lifestyle (as an omnivore) you can have without cheap meat? You'd be forcing people into vegetarianism, no?

Not everyone can afford the best cuts unfortunately.

i hate the concept of the £2 chicken - we don't need meat every day. if there is going to be a market for meat (which i am sure there unfortunately always will be) animals should be reared healthily, well fed, well looked after, and then sold for a reasonable price.
in living memory (my grandma talks about this a lot), meat was a 'treat' - you'd have the sunday joint, left overs from that as a cottage pie, then the occasional bit of bacon, sausage or offal from the butcher. vegetables were a more staple part of the diet
we had no childhood obesity - no crazy food scares.

if people are choosing to eat meat - imo they should at least do it responsibly

[Haly]

Heh for most of my childhood meat was a huge treat so it's a lot more recent than your grandmother
My parents often would have a chicken for Sunday roast, turn it into chicken burgers for another meal and a chicken pie for a 2 day meal.
Luckily we have more money now but meat still tends to be 3 times a week at most, simply because we've got into the habit now of using other stuff well to make a tasty meal.

[Will]

Originally Posted by Kitten

Out of interest, if you're living on the poverty line, how do you manage to have the healthiest lifestyle (as an omnivore) you can have without cheap meat? You'd be forcing people into vegetarianism, no?

Not everyone can afford the best cuts unfortunately.

That's a toughy. From a business point of view mass production is the most effective way of producing stock cheaply. You get a high yield return as a result so it makes sense. So I can't counter that.....

However - in "Will's utopia world" (tm) the cost of good quality meat would not be high. It would be available to every one and I'd love to get rid of mass production of meat and certainly get rid of processed meat. Subsidise it somehow - I don't know how though - remember this is a utopia

There is no answer to that question, it's the world we live in, unfortunately as I said it will cause this elitism which is already present and it's not fair, I think everyone should have the right to eat good quality food. I'm not going to dictate what people should and shouldn't be doing - it would be too harsh to say if you can't afford it be a vegetarian or eat something other than meat... That's not fair. As I said everyone should have the right and access to affordable GOOD quality food.

It's never going to happen in this country or in a lot of the western countries. A lot of hte places I've been, the super markets sell tins and houseware stuff, etc... but don't really sell much meat, but the butcher is "in house" and you buy your ham and so on from there - and it's cheap! It's so so much cheaper than having to pay the manufacturing costs and putting up polluting factories that you just don't need.

However in the UK, Europe in general, and other big western countries, owing to the sheer number of people and the need for supply of slices of ham for example, it's always going to be in businesses best interests to provide cheap mass produced food. I'm a hypocrite as I do buy meat from Waitrose (though not all the time) it is a convenience but I do try and make the efforts to source higher quality sources. I actually worked out that 6 slices of ham from my butcher costs as much as supermarket stuff, and it hasn't been injected with water to put the price up!

The problem is there are fewer and fewer butchers/delis around now as the supermarkets have a monopoly I wish they did it like other countries, and small businesses were supported and made available to the populous.

It's an impossible problem to beat unfortunately and you're entirely right, it would bring on a fascism which we just don't need. As I said there is already an uncessary elitism in this country, let alone the world that it just wouldn't help.

It's just galling that something as simple as meat has to be rendered into such an artificial process. Good ol' commercialism eh?!

[Will]

Originally Posted by goldilocks

on that issue, we have exactly the same opinion, if 'little timmy' has a faceless burger or sausage put in front of him - he won't know where it has come from - he won't know what goes into the manufacturing process and he won't have a choice about whether or not to eat it. if we educated everyone about food, we'd be a much healthier society



i hate the concept of the £2 chicken - we don't need meat every day. if there is going to be a market for meat (which i am sure there unfortunately always will be) animals should be reared healthily, well fed, well looked after, and then sold for a reasonable price.
in living memory (my grandma talks about this a lot), meat was a 'treat' - you'd have the sunday joint, left overs from that as a cottage pie, then the occasional bit of bacon, sausage or offal from the butcher. vegetables were a more staple part of the diet
we had no childhood obesity - no crazy food scares.

if people are choosing to eat meat - imo they should at least do it responsibly

Here we see eye to eye - well if I stoop a little

[goldilocks]

Kitten - i appreciate that there are many complex reasons why we didn't have childhood obesity and 'food scares' then - (and not all of them good reasons, as you have pointed out) what i am saying is that meat (and cheap, poorly reared, bad quality, fatty, over processed readily available meat at that) is one of the reasons why we have them now

i am in no way suggesting that they were better off, just that we could be a lot healthier by making only tiny changes to the meat industry