(no subject)

[threeplusfire]

I shouldn't read the internet so soon after waking. It only pisses me off.

Fuck that vegan moral superiority bullshit. There's something delightfully evil about knowing that in order to sustain large crops of grains you end up with a lot of dead field mice. Oh, I am so going to use that line on the next self righteous vegan who tries to make me feel guilty for eating meat.

Thankfully my friends who are vegetarian/vegan/whatever who are not militant about their choices and don't feel the need to run around trying to guilt others into adopting their behaviour. I will kindly eat their share of the world's meat so they won't have to. Everyone wins!

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

You can not agree if you want, but it's just objectively true that meat was more costly than grain throughout much of history, except in areas that were really hostile to agriculture. Meat was considered a luxury, which is why, for example, Catholics often gave/give it up for Lent.

Also, I never said that for every pound of meat you raise, you could have instead x pounds of human-edible vegetable foods. What I was saying was that if you raise cattle in a way even remotely similar to how they're usually raised now, you need to harvest a lot of vegetable matter in order to feed them, a lot more vegetable matter than you'd need to harvest in order to have a good deal of grain. And that vegetable matter is not just scraps from stuff people already harvest to eat themselves- there are whole crops of corn that are grown and harvested exclusively to feed cattle, and I know this because there are different safety standards for growing feed corn and corn for human consumption (for instance, feed corn can be genetically engineered in different ways) and there have been huge recalls when corn intended for cattle feed has gotten into the human food supply, and people have actually died (mainly of allergic reactions, since that corn produces different proteins).

Cattle are almost never entirely pasture-fed - they almost always eat a huge amount of corn and hay that was harvested using mouse-killing threshing machines. And they always will, because a) this is a far more efficient way to raise cows from the pov of the cattle ranchers, and b) most cattle-raising regions have what we call a "winter" season, during which time cattle can't live on their own terribly well, and need to be fed on hay and other grains that were harvested during the summer.