Note: If you are completely set on eating meat or are stubbornly argumentative in the face of sound reasoning, you’d be best to return to whatever it was you were looking at beforehand.

Over the course of two years, I have experienced discrimination for my dietary choices. This discrimination isn’t in the popularly conceived sense of being confined to certain water fountains or sections of the bus, but it does exist. Occasionally it’s a light-hearted jab, which I can find some humour in; but other times it’s not. Like the old condescending, “… oh, that’s right, you don’t eat meat,” as if to imply that it’s me who’s out of his senses. Continued…

I know half of you are already dying to dispute this…

Homo sapiens were designed to consume nearly anything living on this planet. With the exception of various poisons and physical impossibilities, we can survive on almost everything Mother Nature has to throw at us; plants, animals, whatever. If it’s got a brain or a seed, we’ll eat it. It seems that man is a very evolved species of hunter-gatherers; so much so that we’ve gathered the ability to not actually hunt. We now have the technology to artificially grow animals purely to supplement our dwindling food supply! Mother Nature ain’t got nothing on us!

In order to speed up the process of harvesting animals – which, as you might guess, can take awhile – some companies inject the critters with all sorts of sketchy chemicals like steroids and hormones. These chemicals, as well as others present in their food and water supply, are absorbed into their bodies. Most farm feed is a combination of left-over grain, corn, and other animals. Even vegetarians aren’t safe because they’re eating the same grain and corn, which are sprayed with harmful pesticides and fertilizers. And not only that, but man and animal alike, we all share the same finite sources of water, which inadvertently keeps recycling these dangerous man-made chemicals; some of which just barely pass safety regulations! The result is a disgusting mix of various things that you otherwise would never consider eating.

So, when you think about it, you can’t be certain if anything you’re eating is chemical-free, not even if you grow it yourself. Vegetarians eat chemicals that affect plant growth. Omnivores eat those same chemicals in addition to biologically altering hormones. Bad news for everyone, huh? It seems to me that the lesser of these two evils is the herbivore diet; you’re still getting poisoned but at least it’s a smaller dose!

Our global population is growing rapidly and our food supply is being pushed to exhaustion. Because of this demand, the factory farms are going to constantly increase their production, which subsequently means more unnatural techniques will be used. And all those massive, money-hungry corporations have already shown their disregard for ethical and humane standards, so who can say that their new techniques will be any safer for us than their old techniques?

Now don’t go quoting me out of context yet. I’m not saying that omnivores are the downfall of society – not unless they also vote conservative. I’m saying that their food is more genetically tampered with than a vegetarian’s food. Personally, I think that’s sick.

Unless our government starts protecting us from literally eating ourselves to death, stop encouraging those Frankenfarms! If you buy meat, look for organic, grain-fed food.

For more information, check out the popular book Ecoholic by Adria Vasil (www.ecoholic.ca).

I was accused this past weekend of being a vegetarian. The nerve! I immediately rebuked this statement, citing as example the eggs I had just ordered to eat for the very meal we were at. Please keep in mind that I wasn’t denying the accusation out of a fear of being seen as a weak person, it was out of complete admiration and respect for true vegetarians.

I find it loathsome that there are people who insist they are vegetarian but still include things in their diet such as chicken and fish. The entire gamut of what humans can eat must either be grown or born, and these two categories are quite distinct. A true vegetarian ignores the second category completely and does not have the lissome willpower to be selective among its contents. I have no fundamental problem with what a person chooses to eat and I would never cast judgment upon them for that. The problem I have is when that person labels himself as something he most assuredly is not, and I have an even bigger problem when that person vehemently defends their incorrectly self-appointed status. As for my status, I consider myself a perfect omnivore. I will eat absolutely anything that I kill myself.

Imagine a scenario where, for the sake of argument, everybody had to raise, nurture, and kill animals themselves in order to eat. (I will preemptively avoid an impractical counter-point by saying that this fictional scenario begins tomorrow.) Do you truly believe that the average person who has been raised in a culture that encourages personal comfort would be able to kill without it being a necessity for survival? Sincerely doubtful. I admit that given a life or death situation, even I would be able to commit murder; but this is genuinely not the case. Thankfully, there are other options at my disposal that don’t burden my conscience. The collective intelligence of our society has not yet been able to give significant value to the actual ethics of our lives, and this is apparent in nearly every aspect of our culture. We still demand bigger and faster every things, we pollute with the ferocity of a coal-powered lion, and we compromise true art with excess.

The biggest reason that I have chosen to significantly decrease the amount of meat that I consume is a concern for the environment. In North America, more than 60% of the wheat, corn, and grain we grow is used to feed farmed animals; of that food, most of it goes to keep the animal alive rather than actually making it grow. Further, it takes seven times as much land and resources to raise a farmed animal than it does to make the equivalent amount of food in fruits and vegetables. Allow me to present another sadly implausible scenario: if everybody on our planet immediately became vegetarian overnight, we would have enough food to feed us all.

You may want to tell me that you have the right to eat meat. While I agree that you certainly do have the right to eat meat, you also have the ability not to.