Poll: I love steak...am I a terrible person

[Emperor Nat]

No, further anyone who wants to critisize you for your diet choice IS a bad person.

Why is it that my entire opinion is always summarised by the first post in the thread?

Yeah, this. It's a cow, and it's dead - it doesn't care that you're eating it, and it probably didn't have enough intelligence to care when it was alive in the first place. We're omnivores, we eat animals.

MEAT. EAT IT.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Obviously you aren't a bad person.

But as a vegetarian, my diet is enviromentally and (arguably) ethically superior to yours.

So screw you guys! *walks away with middle finger held out*

(yeah I'm filling the stereotype of the smug vegetarian...but damn does it feel good!)

Considering how many animals die for the growing of the food for a vegetarian diet, you really don't have a superior leg to stand on.

Whoah whoah whoah.

What animals die becasue of my diet?

If this is true it would be pretty bad for me, but somehow I'm doubting that you are correct.

Lots of small animals die in the process of farming the plants (pests, small mammals that just get crushed by farm machinery, etcetera), but a vegetarian diet still kills less animals, for a bunch of reasons. A vegan diet would be better still.

http://measureofdoubt.com/2011/06/22/why-a-vegetarian-might-kill-more-animals-than-an-omnivore/

I know it's a blog, but he researched the data rather well, and it would take forever to track everything down again. It may be that vegetarians kill more than meat-eaters.

 

[Esotera]

Eating meat is not the same as eating a sausage. Sausages are shit they're barely meat.

If someone tells me they ate chicken, and they meant "I ate 'chicken' nuggets." I'd call them on it. So it's not pedantism because we're on a forum, it's pedantism because I'm neurotic.

Anyway, eating beef specifically 5 times a week is fine. It's not great, but no one I know eats that much beef. I tend to eat that much, but I particularly like beef, and I can't afford to eat roo, fish, and chicken all the time.
Also, most people eat too much of almost everything in the west. Getting into the nutritional stupidity of Australians (I don't know enough about other countries) is something I'd love to do via a non-text medium, but it's a little bit of a hassle to type it out if I'm only having a discussion.

We feed them chaff though. Corn's not that easy/popular to grow in some parts of Australia if I recall correctly. Chaff is a by-product of making food for humans, we can't eat it, and it is actually better for the animal to eat chaff, grass, and wheat than to feed them purely grain. Grasses are the best, they're just the hardest to organise.

You're right about the roo. It tastes amazing, but it's too gamey for some people and if you cook it too much it is literally impossible to eat. I fucking love roo though, we even get roo mince, it's delicious.

Well ok, forget meat, let's just boil this argument down to consuming animal products - the amount of resources required to produce a chicken is far higher than a couple of vegetables. And eating excessive amounts of red meat in particular can be quite bad for youhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat#Potential_Health_risks. Obviously just growing corn and eating products of that would be a really stupid idea (although it hasn't stopped america), but my point is that producing possibly about 1/2 to 3/4 of the meat would increase the amount of people we could feed by quite a margin. Obviously there are areas where the only thing that can be farmed is livestock.

As a total aside, I now really want to try kangaroo meat in some form, I get the feeling it'll be quite hard to find in the UK unfortunately.

 

[PureChaos]

no. I, too, LOVE steak. great stuff

 

[Froggy Slayer]

Well, I certainly have an answer now. But, what if I modified the question, and said that I shall roam the land with a baseball bat, bashing cows brains out and tearing the delicious meat from them with my bare hands in front of their weeping calves...actually, I think that I'll feed the calves their parents, and then eat them! HAHAHAHA

 

[galaktar]

A caveman porterhouse is the only true argument against any other kind of food.

 

[TheNamlessGuy]

DELETED

 

[smithy_2045]

I'd say you'd be a bad person if you didn't like stake.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

I really, really love steak, and I'm wondering if I'm a terrible person for taking great joy in ingesting dead cow.

You're only a bad person if you're cooking it beyond medium rare. Or buying an expensive cut of steak and drowning it in discount supermarket sauce.

 

[EXos]

Thick juicy and preferably still bleeding. mmmhhh Steak... mmmmmh.

 

[EXos]

Well ok, forget meat, let's just boil this argument down to consuming animal products - the amount of resources required to produce a chicken is far higher than a couple of vegetables. And eating excessive amounts of red meat in particular can be quite bad for youhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat#Potential_Health_risks. Obviously just growing corn and eating products of that would be a really stupid idea (although it hasn't stopped america), but my point is that producing possibly about 1/2 to 3/4 of the meat would increase the amount of people we could feed by quite a margin. Obviously there are areas where the only thing that can be farmed is livestock.

As a total aside, I now really want to try kangaroo meat in some form, I get the feeling it'll be quite hard to find in the UK unfortunately.

The uses more resources to make argument falls a bit thin when you think about it... Example: Making wine takes up more resources than just eating the grapes.
Granted you don't take wine as a source of sustenance but for me that falls in the same category as a steak.
I don't eat meat everyday but once in a while I want to enjoy a nice big slab of bleeding dead cow, like a good glass of wine if you will.

 

[Evil Smurf]

Yes, yes you are terrible.

The more steak you and other people eat means less steak for me and I loves me some steak.

I love steak more then you both!

 

[Esotera]

The uses more resources to make argument falls a bit thin when you think about it... Example: Making wine takes up more resources than just eating the grapes.
Granted you don't take wine as a source of sustenance but for me that falls in the same category as a steak.
I don't eat meat everyday but once in a while I want to enjoy a nice big slab of bleeding dead cow, like a good glass of wine if you will.

It doesn't really fall apart, I'm just pointing out that it's pretty stupid to produce it as what is essentially a dietary staple. It's cool to produce it and things like wine for (bi)weekly occasions, but if the only reason for you eating it pretty much every day is you like the taste, that doesn't hold up for me.

 

[lunavixen]

you are not a bad person for eating steak, I love a good piece of steak either well done or medium well. If loving steak is wrong, i don't want to be right.

Besides, the cow is already dead when it gets to me.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Cows are ugly, stupid creatures. We are doing them a favor by eating them. I'll take mine medium with caramelized onions and a side of mashed potatoes.

 

[manic_depressive13]

http://measureofdoubt.com/2011/06/22/why-a-vegetarian-might-kill-more-animals-than-an-omnivore/

I know it's a blog, but he researched the data rather well, and it would take forever to track everything down again. It may be that vegetarians kill more than meat-eaters.

This presumes that vegetarians eat more eggs and cheeses than omnivores. Animal products are not the only source of protein. Most vegetarians subsidise their diets with soy, nuts and beans.

Secondly, vegetarians are more likely to be conscious about the source of their eggs. I buy from a local farm whose chickens I have seen roaming around and living in comfortable conditions. A meat eater is generally less likely to care about the horrible factory conditions outlined in that blog.

So yes, vegetarian diets do result in a fair amount of death and suffering. Yes, you probably could cause more death as a vegetarian who eats lots of the wrong things than an omnivore who tries to eat ethically. But the average vegetarian is aware of the circumstances and does their best to minimise suffering. The writer of that blog even admits that factors such as overall suffering and environmental damage hasn't been taken into account.

If you don't want to be a vegetarian that's fine but try and refrain from posting skewed stastics and general misinformation. Just get over it and stop pretending your selfishness is morally justified.