I'm thinking of the cutting board right before I cooked everything up tonight and this is what I saw: a pile of shredded carrots, chopped cilantro, grated ginger, grated garlic, sliced water chesnuts, a sliced baby bok chow, some sliced green onions, leftover rice from yesterday, soy sauce, sesame oil, olive oil, vinegar, dried chilis and a chopped jalapeno. Other than the 17 shrimp bodies that really wouldn't have been to much of a problem to hunt down and tear aspart and are truly dumber than a second coat of paint, the delta between what this loathsome meat eater eats and what a vegetarian eats is pretty minimal really.

I don't have any issue with the idea that factory farms are awful things but around here you don't see that, just small farms with small herds of cattle or small scale chicken farms where the animals look pretty content. And it's not as if they'd be better off in the wild, there's no such thing as a wild cow; they'd die in the wild in no time. That is to say you don't have to be a vegetarian to be horrified at modern industrial animal husbandry. Certainly a well cared for dairy cow lives longer than the wild animal it descended from 15,000 years ago.

Anybody that's ever had to deal with the importation of wild animals knows the first thing you do is get rid of the parasites. Evey wild animal, fish and bug has them. Not so in captivity - where animals live much longer, sometimes up to 3X longer. Wild animals live on the constant edge of starvation and fear of predation. If they get sick or are wouded - they die a miserable and painful death. Starvation is without a doubt the most horrible way to die. It's long, slow and very painful.

You have to wonder if humane farms where animals are properly looked afer actually aren't less cruel than mother nature herself - it becomes a question of "would you rather live in pain and fear your whole life and die a natural and probbaly premature death most likely painfully, but free or would you rather live an easy well fed an cared for life only to be killed one day" which is a question I have no answer to.

I can see not eating higher animals on moral grounds, but given chickens can actually live without their heads for a quite a while, and how dumb fish and shrimp are I don't quite see it as being in the same league.

The notion of running down an animal, tearig it limb from limb and eating it raw is literally monsterous - it's what we expect warewolves or fledgling vampires to do. I don't see how this kind of hyperbole advances anybody's nutritional or dietary argument.

And it's not as if all vegetable food is good for the environment by a large margin. Hearts of palm for example, is harvested by guys going into the jungle, cutting down trees in a 12' radius around one palm which is then felled and a 6 inch heart of the tree is taken and that's it. 144 square feet of rainforest is destroyed. The environmental impact of, say farm raised shrimp doesn't even come close by comparison to such damage. Parts of Brazil and Peru have been devastated by this alone to say nothing of rainforest clearcuting to produce land for farming vegetable food.

I don't think any vegetarian or omnivore will ever change the others mind and it seems to me to be pointless to even try. But there are things both camps should be be concerned with namely nutrition, cookery, food safety and environmental impact and the more time, it seems to me, we're concerned with these and the less we spend castigating the "other side", the better off well all be, no? That is lets agree on where we agree and ignore the rest.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to bite the heads off a few whippets.

rjs - feb 08