Comments on: Juliet Dobson on eating animals

By: Richard Smith

Richard Smith — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:12:04 +0000

I couldn't kill an animal in order to eat it, so I ought morally to be a vegetarian. But I'm not.

My friend Pat Brown, a lifelong Vegan and a prominent scientist, says that the answer to eating less meat is to produce "vegetable-based mince" that is not only indistinguishable from the real thing but better. He says that that is not a hard problem but needs some investment.

By: Kirsten Patrick

Kirsten Patrick — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:22:58 +0000

“He himself is a vegetarian after years of struggling with it. Although he aspires to veganism, he says he cannot quite achieve that for now.” I do relate to that. I was a vegan for some years when I was in university, but veganism and a stressful lifestyle as a junior doctor did not go well together and I went back to eating animal protein and later some meat. I aspire to vegetarianism again because I watched a documentary about how meat is farmed and processed a year ago (http://video.google.com/videop…#). I eat far less meat than before and I make vegetarian choices where possible but it isn't always possible. I live with three males of the species who like meat and have to cook for them. But the most difficult thing for me is that when I eat vegetarian I am constantly hungry. Everyone thinks that vegetarians are healthy by default but I think that many vegetarians aren't because they end up eating too many carbs. I want to eat healthily but the price for being a healthy vegetarian is constant hunger (for me) and, hey, since I'm not a supermodel that price seems too high. All the fruit-and-carbs calories that get eaten instead of meat calories triggers an insulin response that leaves me hungry an hour after I've eaten. Much as ideologically I'd like to be a vegan I also need to be able to get through my day (which involves doing a fairly stressful job and mothering two boisterous boys) without the unwanted distraction of constant hunger. Anyone else have this problem and aable to share a solution?

By: Richard Mahony

Richard Mahony — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:57:32 +0000

"The problem with animal activists and militant vegetarians and vegans is that they push the debate to two polar extremes."

No. All debates on worthwhile topics receive a wide range of inputs. Animals rights campaigners and so-called militant vegetarians and vegan don't push the debate anywhere. Their voices simply become part of a wide ranging debate that is as old as the hills. Many followers of the Abrahamic religions have had strong views for roughly two millennia on what may or may not be eaten, how animals must be killed, how food must be prepared, when certain foods can be eaten, when food cannot be eaten and so on. And Indian and far eastern religions that predate the Abrahamic religions by some margin also have had plenty to say for aeons about what animals may or not be eaten.

I don't cook, never have. A complete waste of time and effort in my opinion. I don’t go out to restaurants either. An even bigger waste of time and money. I eat meat when it's offered to me, otherwise not. I haven't eaten a take-away in many years largely because I can't afford them. That's another much repeated urban myth - that take-way is cheaper than making your own sandwiches for example. Not here in Oz it ain't! I eat very simply, abstemiously and fairly nutritiously for about $20 a week by making my own non-meat based meals from bread I make myself complemented by small amounts of cheap cheese, yeast extract, sliced tomatoes and whatever other fruit or veg is in season and correspondingly cheap. It's not hard to do. But the great unwashed have such empty lives that salivating about food is pretty much all they have left.