: But to restate, yes [erhaps it is more meritorious not to kill animals. Check that, it IS more meritorious noto to kill aniamls or to eat their flesh if it is avoidable. but on the scale of tehw orlds's ills, it is a sub,sub issue. Is it? Have a look at the page the moderator mentioned.
The meat industry in the US consumes 33% of the raw materials consumed by American society. To feed the US on a vegetarian diet would result in the predicted consumption being a fifteenth - 2%; a vegetarian diet would be some 15 times as efficient at feeding the US, not to mention producing a higher level of average health in the population.
To produce one calorie from a soy bean, you need to expend 2 calories of fossil fuel. To produce one calorie from beef, you need to expend 78 calories. More than half of the fresh water used in the U.S. is used in the production of livestock; and the area of rainforest cleared to provide a quarter-pound of beef is 55 square foot.
: When we've smashed capitalism and replaced it with a humane society based on equality and freeodm, when we all have access to our human birthrights of food, housing, shelter, and medicine, when we've put an end to possession and privilege, maybe then we can turn to the morality of eating meat.
However, surely one of the defining claims of capitalists is that capitalism is "efficient use of resources"? If you can set up a society without the meat-eating ethic, you can grind any meat-eating capitalist system into the ground by outcompeting it on energy consumption.
One of the reasons that the Third World is starving is that they export their produce to the West; staple crops like soy and wheat are used to feed Western livestock to service Third World debt to the West. To cart all this grain from the Third World to the First is not merely depriving the Third World of it; it is also using fossil fuels to transport a foodstuff that could be more efficiently grown in the West in the first place. Think of vegetarianism as direct nutrition that cuts out the middleman (the cow).
Have a revolution, sure; but revolutions wreck the infrastructure (unless you're enacting a bloodless coup) - how are you going to feed all of the people if you're still wasting energy by eating meat?
: Biut in the meantime, between a semi-carnivorous Catholic Communist and a vegetarian who lives content in his bourgeois society, I think you know who I see as morally superior. (By the way, that wasn't meant to indict you. I'm drawing a hypothetical picture here.)
Why compare the two anyway? - it's a heirarchical approach to say that X is better than Y. I'm quite happy to work with anyone who shares enough common ground with me; but I feel it to be my brotherly duty to point out some imperfections in his thought. The meat industry is one of the dynamos that drives the capitalist system; meat and oil are the two things that our system depends upon; break either and you destabilize our current society close to breaking point.
I hope this post is accepted for what it is; I haven't thrown any invective or insults at *anyone*; please return the favour. Prove me wrong by all means, but do respond...
Farinata.
