Ethical Eating

I have to admit I'm kind of selfish. An vain.

All I ever cared about when I was younger was to have a nice looking body. My body was not so nice. Quite flabby and pasty actually. I was envious of those guys who actually had visible muscles on their torso. I preferred that most would not notice the love handles. I too wanted that surfer look that those few men had. So, in order to fulfill my vain quest of lookin' good nekkid, I read as many health magazines and websites as I could. I watched what I ate and began to experiment with certain exercises.

I decided to try a psuedo low fat vegetarian diet. Not for the ethical reasons, just the lookin' good nekkid reasons. It didn't work out too well. I was a lot skinnier but still flabby.

It was only until I stumbled across a body building website called T-Nation that I started to have the opinion that meat wasn't that bad for you. Actually from then on I had the opinion that it was quite good for you. Very good actually. Meat was essential to health. I knew this and I still believe it quite strongly.

But that doesn't mean that it's right to eat it. You can get away with good health if you became what is called a lacto-ovo vegetarian (one who eats no meat but does eat milk and eggs). I didn't believe this before but I do now. So does this mean I now have and obligation to not eat meat any more? If I don't have to eat meat than why let the animal be born, raised and slaughtered just for my sake. I just could easily eat a potato stir fry rather than a beef stir fry. Other than their taste, they're the same. They're both filling meals. The beef does fulfill more nutritional requirements but the potato's lack of nutrients can be remedied by simply eating a diverse array of vegetarian foods. And milk and eggs.

I used to believe that carbohydrates make you fat. This was because I, and many others around me have had great success losing weight with a low carbohydrate diet. Say what you will about low carb diets but you can't deny the facts. They help you lose a lot of weight and fast. Because of my propensity to gain weight easily, I ate a lot of meat (being a no carbohydrate food and all)and very little plant foods because plant foods are mostly carbohydrate. I don't even want to think about the number of Italian sausages I have consumed in the past 5 years. It ain't a small number. I ate a lot of meat because I thought for sure that yams and bananas would make me bloat to the size of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I do just fine with carbohydrates. As I think most health people do (I still think low-carb is necessary for some people who want to lose weight and/or normalize their blood sugar).

Now that I think more about it, my opinion is that meat can be healthy and necessary sometimes, but it doesn't have to be a staple food. It could just be something to make sure I cover all my nutritional bases (Vitamin B12, essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, etc.). My staples could just be white rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and plantains. I'm moving more towards the vegetarian side of the omnivore spectrum.

All this being said, I have no naivete at the destructiveness my just being has on living creatures and the environment as a whole. Just because I'm not eating a sentient animal doesn't mean sentient animals don't suffer on my behalf. The agricultural plot of land that grows my food displaces thousands of animals. Agriculture, even vegetarian agriculture, does do damage. A lot of damage. Animals die, dams destroy underwater ecosystems, and a lot of cheap labor is exploited because of our current industrial agricultural system. So as an effort to reduce the amount of suffering I cause in the world, I will look more into where my food comes from. I will be shopping at more farmers markets and get my meat from a grass fed source. Also, I will be more involved with gardening for my own food.