[Muckraker]

Quote by: ruksak Only in America will people complain about how and why we have so much food.

It's not wrong for someone to question the process by which we get our great "wealth." It is also not wrong to be concerned about one group of people having an abundance of wasteful food while another group of people is dying due to lack of the food that we give to the animals we eat.

Animals are food. Period. They are food for humans. They are food for other animals. They are food for insects and even plants.

This is partially false.

1. Humans are animals and yet we are not food for ourselves and are very rarely food for other animals. In the instance we are food for other animals we make sure to let that species know not to screw with us by obliterating them summarily.
2. Numerous animals are protected from being food in the United States.
3. Different cultures have drastically different views of what animals are food.

I have a freezer full of deer meat. I only buy a minimal amount of beef.

I fully support this. Although I don't particularly see the fun in killing something for fun, I can't argue with someone that knows where meat comes from and goes out with a weapon to acquire meat at the grass roots level. It is very respectable, even if it is unnecessary.

You seem to be skipping over the part about how meat gives life and strength. Packed with amino acids, meat is essential to good health.

It does have nutritional benefit but it is also completely replaceable and a luxury item. Vegetarians are just as healthy as meat eaters. This position was stated by the American Dietetic Association very clearly. Also, there are numerous cultures in the world that do not have the luxury of meat and subsist quite successfully on a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diet.

I'm not quite getting you because I don't believe you have made your opinion clear. Are you against the harvesting of animal meat for human consumption on some moral level?

My opinion is this:

1. As food technology progresses, meat is no longer needed as a source of nutrition.
2. The process of generating meat is not a resourceful use of raw materials.
3. The process of generating meat would be extremely disturbing to many people who eat meat if they had any knowledge of what that process was.
4. "It tastes good" is not a valid position to argue from. A talented chef can make anything taste good and if you were to discover you were eating something you found disturbing it wouldn't matter how it tastes to most people. IE - I find the chef ejaculated in my alfredo sauce because he felt it gives the sauce a unique flavor. Do I really care that it tastes good? Do I really care about the nutritional value of semen?
5. If people had to be exposed to the killing process and the butchering process of their food, as the vast majority of people prior to industrialization had to, many would gain a greater respect for the animals and some would pursue alternate food sources that are also readily available.

And finally, I take a firm stand that eating is the most intimate act humans will ever participate in in their lives. Sex is considered intimate but it pales in comparison to eating. In sex, we take genitals of a known partner and combine them with our own. Unwanted sex is considered a great intrusion and can scar a person for life.

Now let's take the intimacy of food. Instead of genitals penetrating or being penetrated, we take a foreign substance and ingest it through mouth. We break the food down into its fundamental components and it makes its way through our entire body. If the food is poisoned, we die. If the food has no nutritional value, we die. If the food is too skewed in what it provides nutritionally we live for a period of time and suffer complications the food caused us later on.

With this in mind, many humans are akin to prostitutes that work for free, having sex with all that crosses their paths. We shovel anything and everything in our faces and take it on that most intimate journey through our bodies. If it looks like food, and tastes like food, we eat it.

In this most intimate act, isn't it logical to wonder what you are eating and where it came from? If you want to know where your sexual partners have been before being intimate with you, isn't it logical to wonder where your food has been before it found its way to you?