SC - Not eating cute furry animals

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Gyric wrote:
>I want to know where the hell these people get their criteria...

Often the ones using the "cute" criterion use their emotions rather 
than their brains.

Some folks don't eat things for other reasons, which i can respect. 
"Because they're cute" is not, to me, a rational reason.

>Cow? big, stupid, willingly walk into the slaughterhouse...eat em.

Been there, ate that.

Indonesian cows can be awfully cute. They are much smaller than 
American cows, colored like a buckskin horse (beige/dun with dark 
noses and lower legs), have huge sweet eyes, and a peaceful 
temperament.

>Bunny? Small, cute, soft, wiggly nose...no way, can't eat that.

Been there, ate that, but not one that was somebody's pet.

My ex-husband's people, the Batak of North Sumatra, keep dogs as 
family pets. But when the dogs get old and feeble, they eat them. I 
didn't, although i once had the opportunity. Good thing, too, as my 
husband got very sick from the dish. Probably wasn't the dog, per se, 
but in Indonesia most typical restaurants have no refrigeration and 
neither do the butchers. Probably the meat wasn't exactly "fresh"...

>I don't think there should ever be a cute factor in what you eat.

I agree, i do think, however, that an animal being one's friend is an 
acceptable reason. Different than cute, although still emotional.

>Depending how long you have to spend, you can always whip the Bible on them.
>(that always freaks them out...grin) because in there it says, paraphrased,
>and Man shall have Lordship and Dominion over all the lesser beasts, to do
>with them as he needs. (give or take, if some one knows the quote, let me
>know...grin)

There's a real serious off-topic argument here, but i won't go there.

>Also, I don't think that Vegans get it. Carnivores eat Herbivores. We, as a
>race, are more carnivorous than omnivorous,

Uh, i will go here.

This is absolutely not true. We as a species are not more carnivorous 
than omnivorous. We lack the internal processing systems and plumbing 
of both true carnivores and true herbivores, yet have features of 
each.

If all we choose to eat purely from vegetable sources, we can live in 
good health, although the lack of B12 could become a problem...

But if all we ever ate was meat, meat, meat, (without the bun, the 
pickle, and the special sauce :-) we'd soon be in not very good 
health. Other than iron and some B vitamins, we wouldn't be getting 
sufficient vitamins or minerals from a pure meat diet - which is what 
carnivores eat. And the actual human *need* for animal protein, as 
opposed for some folks' desire to eat animal protein, is very small. 
Fewer than a couple ounces per day is more than sufficient for good 
health.

There are a small number of proteins humans need that we cannot 
synthesize from the food we eat in order for us to obtain what is 
called complete protein (the need for specific protein compounds 
varies from species to species). These proteins are found together in 
meat. No single plant food, not even soy, contains all of them. BUT 
if we eat a certain range of plant proteins in one meal or one day, 
we can get complete protein from plant sources, for example, such 
common cultural combos as corn and beans, or rice and soy products, 
and there are others. We cannot, however, get vitamin B12 reliably 
from non-meat sources (and it isn't found in dairy). So humans do 
actually need a *small* amount of meat if they aren't taking vitamin 
supplements.

Many hunter-gatherer groups live primarily on plant foods. They get 
some small game (insects, rodentia, birds), but not necessarily 
daily, while the big game (4 legged herbivores) may be only weekly or 
even less often. Their diet is healthy. The hairy big game hunting 
primitive man as the primary food provider is a myth. The primary 
food providers in hunter-gatherer groups tend to be the women with 
the assistance of the children. In groups practicing slash-and-burn 
and other semi-migratory agriculture forms also live primarily on 
vegetables, which are augmented with some small game and the 
occasional pig at communal feasts. Once humans get to settled 
agriculture and animal husbandry, they have more reliable food 
sources of both types. Even then, the animals are not generally 
killed and eaten on a daily basis in most parts of the world. The 
American system is anomalous.

In some regions, such as the far north when frozen over, there are 
obviously no plants available. "So," you might say," those folks 
don't eat any plants. They're carnivores!" Well, they frequently eat 
the contents of the stomachs of the herbivores they kill - which is 
how they get their plant food.

As far as i can tell from my historical and anthropological reading, 
most people in most cultures didn't eat meat in nearly every meal on 
a daily basis like so many Americans do until rather recently (i mean 
in terms of centuries, not years). And in most of the world even 
today, most people still don't eat meat on a daily basis. The wealthy 
might, but the average poor working person, who represents the vast 
majority of people in the world don't - outside the US and, i guess, 
Europe, and i'm guessing again, Australia - these are the people who 
live in Asia and Africa, and from what i can tell, much of South 
America. These people, who are members of the same race as we are, 
regardless of skin color, hair texture, etc., are far, far, far from 
carnivorous, and are lucky when they get to be omnivorous.

It's true that many surviving Medieval feast menus feature lots of 
meat. This to me suggests that it is NOT the way they typically ate. 
And of course, the surviving cookbooks tend to represent the foods of 
the well-to-do. I assume that the well-to-do ate a more varied diet 
then the poor, although i need to do more reading.

I think Americans are often blinded by their material culture and 
geographical isolation, into thinking that our way is the typical way 
of the world. This is called ethnocentrism. It's common to all 
cultures. But we have information available to us so that we don't 
have to be so ethnocentric. Besides access to information about the 
entire world, we have most kinds of people right in our own country 
if we bother to look at them and interact with them openly.

So, no we are not, as a species, more carnivorous than omnivorous. 
This is blatantly and patently false. We as a species are healthier 
eating a mixed diet.

I have been an omnivore, i have been an ovo-lacto-vegetarian, so far 
not an anthropophage. I think people can eat what they want (as long 
as i am not planned as the cooked meat course), as long as they don't 
*force* their preferences on me.

However, my chief concern in any discussion with people following a 
more limited diet is health: are the people following restrictive 
diets getting all the nutrients they need? Are they following their 
diet from an informed position, rather than one that is purely 
emotional?

Some teenage girls are damaging their health because they don't want 
to eat "cute" animals, but unfortunately they are often not eating an 
otherwise healthy diet. I recently had a discussion with a man whose 
teen-aged daughter had become a "vegan" (i put it in quotes for a 
reason) and she has done severe damage to her bones - there are 
vegetable sources of calcium, but one has to study nutrition a little 
and read labels, and this girl obviously didn't. She is receiving 
medical treatment. Veganism isn't a priori bad or dangerous, but it 
really helps if one understands the nutritional needs of the human 
body and gets those needs fulfilled.

I have been on some limited diets myself - i was Macrobiotic for a 
while and ovo-lacto-vegetarian for longer - and that was when i began 
reading about nutrition, choosing a range of resources, from fringe 
to mainstream, so i had - or tried to have - a balanced perspective.

We humans as a species are physically constructed to be omnivores. We 
can survive well as vegetarians, especially as ovo-lacto-vegetarians, 
but not very well as pure carnivores (animal flesh only, no other 
foods). I suspect that when Gyric called himself a carnivore, he 
meant an omnivore who likes meat, since he has suggested in various 
posts that in addition to meat he actually eats things like bread, 
lettuce, cheese, and ketsup, which weren't meat last time i looked :-)

Anahita