Are Vegetarians Healthier?

Vegetarianism is a psychological symptom of unsustainable civilization

Fear of death influences our relationship with food. A primary way this occurs is by projecting our fear of death onto animals.

== Killing animals ==

Killing is the only way in which most modern humans acquire food. Scavenging isn't too popular these days. Objections to killing animals have led many to adopt vegetarian diets. Some folks are even trying to figure out how to grow meat in vats.

As an aside, I'm not against vegetarianism, veganism, fruitarianism, or any other crazy-ass diet. If you want to eat some way, eat that way. It does not have to be justified. I think the justifications given for vegetarianism are wrong though. To quickly address justifications not related to killing:

* Animal Cruelty - Eating animals is not synonymous with eating factory farmed meat. I personally avoid factory farmed meat for nutritional reasons and because it's production is unnecessarily cruel. Chucking a spear into a dear or buffalo is not unnecessarily cruel. Nature is no better [1] (and there are reasons for it [2]).
* Nutrition - Historically and anatomically speaking, humans are adapted to eat animals[3]. It's obviously not necessary, but ideal nutrition includes eating animals.
* Sustainability - Eating meat is not sustainable? 6 billion people is not sustainable. Our single species is using 14-26% of the total photosynthetic production of the planet[4]. If everybody eats beans and rice in a state of near-famine, we can support an even larger population. Is that a worthwhile goal?

Most people that consume meat do not kill their own meat. Most people who eat meat have not even seen someone else kill an animal for food. If I were to invite friends over and feed them braised rabbit, most would eat it and (I hope) enjoy it. Were I to mention that before they came over, I took a rabbit, whacked its head with a brick to stun it, cut its jugular, then gutted and skinned it, I would receive shocked looks. The modern food production system has abstracted us away from the concrete experience of killing an animal. Meat does not grow pre-cut in plastic-wrapped styrofoam containers, waiting to be harvested and labeled for sale by Wal-Mart.

One result of this abstraction away from killing is that many people now frown upon hunting. It's ridiculous. Other species hunt. Paleolithic humans and earlier homonids lived as hunter-gatherers. That should be enough to justify hunting as a legitimate part of the human experience. Instead, people sneer at "redneck" hunters as "uncivilized" and then go celebrate "progress" by spending huge portions of their lives at work to earn money to buy hormone-laden, tasteless, nutritionally deficient meat products (not meat, meat products). Just grab some friends, sharpen some sticks, and go kill the damn thing yourself.

Another result of abstraction away from killing is that vegetarianism and veganism have become popular in the last few decades. When killing is not understood to be a part of life, all life—not just human, then one can begin to explore the idea that it is normal to forgo it entirely. There have always been those that eschewed meat for religious reasons, but they were consciously trying to leave everyday experience of the world in search of the "divine". People spurn other forms of religious ascetism because they recognize how neurotic it is. The religious view is just as fucked up in this case.

Speaking of religion, through schooling and everyday experience of the modern world we are inculcated with the idea that humans are somehow different than the rest of the living world. This idea originated in religious traditions—go read Genesis. Our species is the one made in god's image? What hubris. Darwinian evolution is rejected by the Catholic church to this day because it implies that humans are just another animal. What's funny is that even the secular world has adopted it, witness the soccer-moms gossiping about how horrible hunting is. Those who object to meat consumption often brush off other animals doing so stating that it is the carnivore's nature or that it cannot consciously choose, while we can. What arrogance! Perhaps the animals simply eat what works best instead of restricting their diet and then getting their rocks off on a sense of superiority over the rest of existence.

== Killing plants ==

People seem to be very into arbitrary divisions. Humans vs. non-conscious life (Michael Pollan has a good 20 min. talk on this [5]). Plants vs. animals. Many people say I should eat plants and not animals. It's interesting that people believe that plants do not suffer when dying. Perhaps we're just too biologically distant to have our empathy triggered or to project our own fears of death onto an ear of corn or a tomato. Aspargus doesn't scream when you cut off its roots. An blog post worth reading entitled Plants are People, Too[6] at Anthropik discusses biological markers of stress in plants:

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