To eat meat or to not eat meat? And if so, how?

Many of my friends and I are vegetarians (I don’t know maybe we just gravitated toward each other?). Most of them for moral reasons rather than personal health seeing as we are only 19 and 20 and most of people in our age group do not think like that.

I, personally, have been vegetarian since I was about six. It was personal decision. I just didn’t like the taste and it just didn’t feel right to me. But, I’ve never been one to judge meat eaters or preach about my eating habits.

The smell of cooking meat makes me sick to my stomach. I do however get to occasional meat/protein craving, but as soon as I remember the moral half of my choice, my craving ceases.

So, the debate began last night with our meat-eating friend who does not buy free-range, grass-fed anything. We were arguing that if you’re going to eat meat you should at least put up the money to buy meat that is healthier for you and treated better during its life. His argument for buying his meat from Costco was that he simply can’t afford anything else.

So my friend and I said, then just, don’t eat meat. Maybe that’s just easy for us to say because we are vegetarian. Maybe it’s due to our body chemistry or our blood type, who knows. Maybe his body just needs meat more than we do?

But does it even matter if the cattle or the pigs or the chickens are treated well and free to graze because the whole idea of raising them specifically for slaughter and human consumption is demeaning. It is putting them below So this leads into a conversation that we had with our other friend. He claimed that eating meat is essential to humans. It is ingrained deep inside us because we are animals ourselves. But look at us today! We are so UNanimalistic, especially when it comes to food production. So, our argument was that unless you have the balls to go out and slaughter your own animal, you don’t deserve to eat it.