STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Teresa · Kate Spade

Reasons to go vegetarian?

pollyjean23 · Marc Jacobs

There are def some environmental reasons--the amount of water it takes to produce one burger is crazy. You'll have to look that up--don't remember the amount.

My FIL has a bunch of private land in a very rural area. The "neighbor" wanted to build a chickenhouse. He did, and it's HUGE! I can't imagine how it will be to drive by it in the heat of summer. Ugh. Then, there is the pig farm waste controversy in NC.

People go back and forth on the health reasons, but I believe it is different for everyone. What is good for you might not be good for someone else.

MissAllycat · BCBG

Check out GoVeg.com - lots of good information on there.

I know you want reasons other than animal cruelty - but I thought I'd share some of the reasons that I became a vegetarian.

And this is a good video about farm animal cruelty - http://www.chooseveg.com/animal-cruelty.asp

Here are just a few examples of the typical treatment animals receive in our factory farms to satisfy our appetite for meat.

* Up to a dozen chickens are squeezed into sixteen inch cages, stacked four or five high, in which they cannot so much as spread a wing. This is how they spend their entire miserable lives.

* These over-crowded, over-stressed conditions produce hostile behavior. To prevent chickens from plucking each other to death and thus lose profits for the factory farm industry, these poor creatures are debeaked (as are turkeys and sometimes ducks). This involves using a searing hot blade to cut through the bone, cartilage, soft tissue and nerves of the beaks of these abused birds.

* Cattle are routinely castrated, have their horns cut off and are branded with a searing hot iron, all without the use of pain killers. During auction and shipping their movement is controlled by electric prods (called hotshots) that send painful, high-voltage shocks through the cows body.

* Because of the speed with which it must be carried out, the slaughtering of cattle is not always efficient. Some are consequently still conscious when theyre dismembered.

* Dairy cows spend the bulk of their existence in crammed quarters, hooked up to a milk machine. They are impregnated each year to keep milk production going and have their young taken from them almost immediately after birth, an act that is unnatural and traumatizing to both the calf and its mother.

* Once taken from their mothers, calves are frequently kept in tiny crates in which they cannot turn around or even lay down comfortably. To produce veal, male calves are fed an unnatural diet to keep them borderline anemic. This keeps their meat white and tender. When theyre just several months old, theyre slaughtered.

* The worst victims of the factory farm industry, in my estimation, are pigs. Gene research has recently revealed that pigs are one of our closest cousins in the animal kingdom. These poor beasts are routinely castrated, have their ears and tails cut and have their teeth yanked out all without the use of any anesthesia. The shrieks of pain heard throughout these ordeals are gut wrenching (see the film Farm to Fridge - linked above).

* Pigs are customarily kept in narrow stalls that allow them to do nothing more than stare ahead their entire lives. Because pigs are extremely intelligent creatures more so than most breeds of dog they often go insane in this confinement, sometimes gnawing at their own limbs (which is why many factory farms yank out their teeth). They are pumped full of hormones to stimulate unnatural growth, and many get to the point where their legs wont support their body weight any longer. These must then be dragged to slaughter.

* Pigs are commonly packed so tightly into transportation trucks that many are crushed to death in the process. As with cattle, the slaughtering process is far from perfect, and some are yet conscious when they are scalded in boiling water to have their hair removed.

If you saw your neighbor torturing their dog the way factory farms torture pigs and other animals, you'd immediately call the police and the man would be prosecuted for cruelty to animals. If your neighbor did this to numerous animals over time, he'd eventually be locked up (despite how pathetic our laws against animal cruelty are). Yet when billions of animals are treated in this barbaric way on factory farms, we not only look the other way, we actually support it and fund it -- if, in fact, we consume the beasts these farms torture! And the only reason we do this is because we like the way they taste.

Suasoria · Chanel

Health benefits include lowering your risk of cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, kidney problems, osteoporosis, and allergies. You're not going to be consuming the hormones, antibiotics, steroids, genetically modified substances, mercury, and other chemicals that your food is stuffed with, which has to be better for you. (The earlier onset of menstruation in girls today is often attributed to their dietary exposure to massive amounts of female hormones in meat and dairy.)

Your risk of foodborne illness like salmonella will drop - no salmonella, mad cow, etc., very little risk of food poisoning.

Environmental advantages are plentiful. By not eating meat we save massive amounts of water, fossil fuels, and reduce the amount of land needed to raise livestock. We don't contribute to the water and air pollution (methane and carbon dioxide) caused by raising animals for food. We don't contribute to the destruction of the rainforest to satisfy our lust for cheap beef. And we don't contribute to ocean pollution or destruction of marine ecosystems by eating fish.

Regarding the stats on water PJ mentioned - I am more familiar with the facts about a vegan diet, versus a vegetarian diet, but they say a vegan diet is better for the planet than driving a hybrid car. A vegan diet requires 300 gallons of water a day; a Standard American Diet (SAD) needs 4200 gallons.

Here are a couple of thoughts under the "etc." column:

There are global economic and political advantages, partly because of these environmental crises and partly because of poverty and food insecurity around the world. The food yielded by the available land, water and energy is redunkulously low versus what it could be - if 90 percent of it wasn't going towards meat. (The amount of grain that feeds livestock instead of people is shameful.)

The less resources we consume individually, the more there are for others. The less meat you eat, the less someone else in the world suffers. The less suffering in the world, the more peace there will be.

Speaking personally, another advantage is spiritual. In every culture, in every language, there's a variation of the expression "you are what you eat." I don't want to be death, filth, disease, oppression, suffering, trauma and stress. What we eat affects our consciousness, and I am much more self-aware, compassionate, content, balanced, awake, clear - happier.

When an animal or human dies violently, in a state of fear, and we consume that animal's body, we are consuming that violence and fear and carrying it in our bodies. This is terrible for us energetically and consciously. In Judaism, this is the rationale behind eating kosher - and practically every religious tradition has some teachings along similar lines relating enlightenment and compassion to diet.

greendiamond · Marc Jacobs

Give the book Skinny Bitch a read. It has quite the list of reasons (it actually pushes for veganism, but even if you just read the part about the health benefits of giving up meat in the book it would give you a LOT of reasons).

Maddie · Coach

This is a really great article that was in the NYT recently about the amount of resources that go into producing meat.

-- Edited by Maddie at 13:55, 2008-03-08