The Case For Eating Meat

Vegetarian readers beware the following post may turn your tummy.

I am not a vegetarian. I tried it once, right after I discovered the kitchen counter covered in raw meat from an animal my father had recently slaughtered. I took one look at the mounds of red flesh and went running back the safety and cleanliness of my bedroom. I didn’t eat meat for six months. It was a trip to France that converted me back to carnivorous ways. Really, who can pass up pate and tartar in Paris?

I always find a vegetarian’s motives curious. There are countless reasons: Environmental, economic, moral, cultural, health, society, habit, to even the simple reason of “I don’t really like meat.” Strangely though, no one asks meat eaters why they choose not to be vegetarian. There are arguments for both sides of the issue and the same arguments to eliminate meat from your diet can be used to support keeping animal products as a part of it.

The typical arguments in favor of vegetarianism often begin with the moral issue of eating animals. They then expand to the treatment of animals, especially when it comes to the industrial farming practices and mass production of animals. This leads to the environmental issue: contamination and pollution caused by this mass production and farm upkeep. Most animals are fed grain in today’s farming industry; this is not energy efficient, as it takes not only the energy to produce the grain but also for the care of the animal. Beyond energy, it does not make economically sense as money is spent and lost along the way.

While these arguments hold true with much of the meat sold in supermarkets today, I choose not to group all meat in this industrial category. Eating meat, in my mind, is not inherently bad. Traditionally, I see it as a natural thing (cue for swelling music: Circle of Life). The idea that an animal, let’s take a cow, would eat the plants that we as humans cannot eat, converts that to energy we can consume, it leads the economical, environmental, energy, and logical sense. I certainly am aware it is difficult to eat meat of this quality, as it is extremely difficult to trace our food. So I am left less meat, rather than no meat.

Many people ask me if I am a vegetarian. Because I rarely eat meat and because I have the whole “food thing going on”, people assume it. I enjoy meat, and I respect the arguments of vegetarianism, and I agree with most of the arguments. I simply see them a different way. Rather that attribute it to the umbrella of “meat eating is bad,” I prefer to see it as the “modern meat industry is bad.”