But I like Big Mac's, doubble whoppers with cheese,  mashed potatos & gravey, steak, pork, most anything Italian,  water buffalo; did I ever mention I weight 250 lbs.; peanut butter, macaroni-cheese-tuna fish combo,....etc. with a diet pepsi and lo-cal salad.

I usually like food that's mostly protein, and high in unsaturated fats.  Dense nutrition.  Lettuce is very lame- I usually won't touch it, as it does not qualify as food to me.  If I don't have bread, though, I will use it as a wrap if it's free- to wrap *actual* food in. 

You will rarely ever see me eating anything resembling a typical salad (maybe a couple times a year, if it's free and I don't have anything else to eat).

I eat mostly nuts, seeds, and beans, good bread, and pasta (which are all actual food).  Carrots qualify as good filler, and I'll usually use them shredded, but they don't compose much of my diet.  Fruit-wise I mostly eat tomatoes and peppers.  If I'm going to eat a green vegetable, it will probably be kale, collards, or some kind of spice like basil.

One of my favourite is a tahini and tomato sandwich, with basil leaves, and crushed black pepper and salt, on sourdough bread.  Rye bread is also good, if I have rye flour on hand  (I usually bake fresh sourdough with rosemary).

Hummus is a good go-to food.  Loaded with protein and complex carbohydrates.

Very firm tofu (little to no water in it) fried with hot peppers and soy sauce, with mushrooms, kale, and ginger.

Pasta with carmelized onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, tomatoes.  Giant pots of chilli and occasional cornbread.

I frequently make lasagna and pizza, making the sauce and crust from scratch, and filling them largely with TVP (which is dense soy protein and fiber), and making a cholesterol free/low saturated fat (high in mono and polyunsaturated fat) cheese from almond meal.  I use a little shredded carrot as filler, and sometimes make a small "green" layer from dark greens like collards.

My vegan friends tend to look at me dubiously, wondering quietly if I've given them something non-vegan.  I'm widely regarded to make the "best pizza/lasagna ever" even by omnivores.

I go through maybe a liter of olive oil a month, a few pounds of almonds and other nuts and seeds, large quantities of flour/pasta, beans, and TVP, and uncanny amounts of tomato.

I'm also a pretty big fan of nutritional yeast, with regards to the nutrient content and taste for the cost; I don't always use it, though, as it's pretty specialty (needs to be bought in bulk).

I'm not big on sweets, but it's not uncommon for me to bake super-dense brownies using peanut butter, molasses, and the most cocoa powder you've ever seen used in a baked good.

I also bake cookies and cakes (usually pineapple coconut), if the need arises, but I don't do so for myself.

All in all, I cook with science and nutritional analysis of foods per cost and taste, and optimize based on that.

I spend $2 - $3 on food a day, I eat more and better than pretty much anybody I know, and I'm not fat.  I can't complain.

Sure, one misses meat and cheese for a while, but it's kind of like smoking- or religion.  The cravings go away, you stop wanting it, and eventually you don't need it anymore and it becomes apparent how irrational it is, and in many cases it's even distasteful after long enough.  One just has to make it over the hump starting off.  Taste is largely relative- don't eat much sugar, things taste sweeter, etc.  Just takes a little time to adjust.

Now I'm curious; most of the vegans I know in person are atheists- any other vegans or vegetarians on RRS?.

That was a pretty big list, and much depends on exactly how I prepare them, but variety is a non-issue- is inherent in the art.  I don't work from recipes... this isn't a particle phenomenon, but more of a wave.  I may have misled by listing, because the list itself is more of an imaginary "mean" of a body of foods that has such a variance that the mean never really occurs.  I cook in a space of flavours and chemistry, and every possible combination, so I can make anything that's viable as a food with the ingredients I have in arm's reach. 

"Pizza", for one, can vary greatly in itself- the only thing liable to be quite the same is the bread.  And stir-fry depends on the vegetables used.  I can make dozens of sauces for pizza, pasta, and whatnot, and fairly legitimately make anything I could possibly want, but I mostly focus around those I mentioned specifically because: 1. They're cheap 2. they're healthy and 3. I have found those techniques to be effective/efficient.

I mix it up quite drastically when I feel like it; it's not uncommon for me to make spring rolls, dumplings,  soup (lentil, split pea, tomato, rarely potato and onion, and anything else that happens to sound good),  and casseroles that defy simple descriptions.  I also make some things that would take paragraphs to explain, so I left those off.  The most conventional thing I make is probably popcorn when in the states or Canada (it's harder to find in China, and crazy expensive in Mexico, so I eat less of it when there), though it may be exotically spiced.  I don't really like potatoes much, but once in a blue moon I will feel like eating broiled potato wedges with olive oil and pepper- that varies little because I don't put much time into potatoes (having little interest in them); usually I just do this quickly when somebody else wants potatoes.  I also eat pineapple when it's cheap, and occasionally buy a big bag of frozen blueberries or cranberries.  And in China, I eat quite a few oranges because people keep giving them to me (free fruit is good in my book, though I will rarely buy it).  In the states I eat more apples, because people keep giving those to me (again, free fruit is good).

I've also made sushi and such, but as mentioned elsewhere I'm really not that keen on nori, and it's crazy expensive to buy some of that stuff (if I ate like that, I'd be spending something like $4 a day- Madness).  Added to that rare category are things like stuffing, twice baked potatoes, pumpkin pie, breakfast cereal (purchased, not made from scratch- though I have made granola), etc.  It's usually not something I can be bothered with spending time or money on, because I don't like it that much, but I'll make it for other people maybe once or twice a year.

I don't really like curry in general, except on popcorn, but I *could* hypothetically cook that if I felt like it.  I could also eat veggie burgers, but I don't see the point when I'd rather have something else by an order of magnitude or so.

I can't recall really *failing* at cooking anything I felt like I wanted (actually, I usually outdo whatever I was trying to make), but I'm mostly happy with the usual because I like it more than anything else.

If I feel like something else I've never made before, I can go to a grocery store, a gas station convenience store, or even just scrounge up enough things in the average kitchen to make something I want to eat, extracting the potential dish from the abstract flavour space of possibilities given what I have access to.  I'm like MacGyver when presented with a poorly stocked kitchen- give me a few random ingredients, and I can come up with something edible. 

You only have a box of corn starch, half a package of stale saltine crackers, three ketchup packets, a jar of pickle juice, and some airline peanuts?  I can work with that, and I'm not kidding when I say the results will probably be as good as what you'd find at most restaurants (which I find to generally be pretty profoundly bad, so it doesn't take much to beat).

Anyway, like I said, since I don't work from recipes, anything I mention that I've eaten or commonly eat is more of an approximation; a rough definition given to a broad and versatile category of what appears roughly to be a thing- the word is more the mean of what that thing would be, potentially, than what it ever is.  Variety is inherent, because- in fact- I tend to doubt that I have made quite the same thing twice in years.  I'm always tweaking, even drastically changing and searching for improvements.  There are things that work, and general tendencies I follow that have come about for good reason which I tend to vary less, but none-the-less variety is an inherent element in experimentation, which is an inherent element of art, which is inseparable from cooking for any self respecting chef

I'm there off and on.  At the moment I'm "chillin" in Mexico (awesome t-shirt weather), and in a month or so I'll head stateside for a bit, then probably through Canada briefly and back to China for a while.  It's tough to say.

That may sound like a new and clever joke to you, but I've heard it about a thousand times, so it's really pretty lame by now.

In the off chance that what you said isn't a fail joke, and you're really that big of an idiot (I've really only heard this argument from complete morons, but just to be safe):

1. Plants have no conscious ambitions or pain.  Don't even try to cite studies that show they feel pain; they have chemical reactions to stimuli which have direct physiological effects (much like somebody who is brain dead does due to the autonomic nervous system), but these can not be accurately described as pain because the plants aren't reactively motive (they are unable to run around avoiding pain, or seek out food in the sense of an animal), anything resembling an active intelligence and self-awareness required to execute that ego-based response is superfluous, and evolutionary baggage that would be impossible to sustain. They don't need the kind of consciousness intelligent moving animals have, so they don't have it.  The same can probably be said for sedentary animals such as sponges.  Complex avoidant behavior necessitates some sense of ego, which involves the dynamics of pleasure and pain- short that, those concepts are not applicable.

2. In the absence of legitimate ego-based drives and motivation, the only reference we have for anything we could call a plant's desires is the implicit motivation of anthropomorphized evolutionary forces.  In that respect, yes, they do like being cultivated by humans because the seeds of the plants are reserved and propagated.  Corn, for example, is one of the most successful plants on Earth in evolutionary terms, and it's because of human action.  In evolutionary terms, plants have made it very clear that they accept being eaten- in part or in whole- as the cost of procreation.  If they had their own motivations seated in ego (as animals do) with other drives and fears, we could disregard this because ego arguably overrides strict evolutionary motivation, but because they don't, that's all they have and we are doing right by them in the process.

3. If you're enough of an idiot to ignore the first and second consequential points, and really think it's bad to cultivate plants, then you should be a vegan anyway because the raising and killing of animals for food, in turn, kills far more plants than just eating plants directly by an order of magnitude.  There's no way around thermodynamics; cows are not photosynthesizing.  You kill more plants by eating meat than I ever could.

Yeah, but for any plant producing seeds is a numbers game; if enough sprout to continue the species, it's a win.  The fact that farmers reserve enough seed from the stock to plant for the next year is a guaranteed victory for the plant (planting them deliberately is at least as good as shitting them out inadvertently, if not better)... guaranteed, at least, unless people stop eating that particular kind of plant- but desirability as a food item is the definition of evolutionary fitness in the agricultural environment, so it's just a different sort of fitness they have to evolve for instead of those features that would be advantageous in the wild.

To go even further, humans are their best bet to spread to other planets- environments they never would have had access to- so being an agricultural species for humans in that sense is a distinct advantage over being a wild plant.

The same could be said for animal species *if* the moral problem of ego wasn't present.  It can be generally said, though, of pet species such as dogs and cats, even goldfish, who arguably don't have it as rough as agricultural species (so, no ego dilemma).

Are you an omnivore, Bob?

You should weigh in on one of the morality threads, i'd be interested to see how you justify yourself versus Blake's argument.

What I mean is, that by the time we get the seeds, they've already had their chance and got the short straw-- that we effectively pay the farmers to give the overwhelming number of seeds in the harvest a statistical chance of sprouting before they reach us.  We could consider the grocery store to be the social equivalent of already masticated v.s. the field as having gotten lucky and not been crushed; the loss of further chance is just at a different place, but that doesn't negate its original existence.

However, this is not always the case in genetically engineered crops, where the farmers are sometimes forbidden by patent law from sprouting any of the seeds they grow- so from the time the seed germinates, there's almost a 0% chance that any of the seeds that plant produces would ever germinate (unless something gets stuck on the bottom of the tractor and falls off).  This might actually be an ethical argument against GE patents...  now that's an interesting thought.

"GE patents are unethical because they circumvent the plant's right to have a chance at its seeds sprouting."

Wow... that might be a new argument; I've never heard that before.  It *might* even hold up in court if a farmer retained seed to grow on ethical grounds.

Thanks, I know- I just wanted to be thorough.

So do you have a way to justify your behavior within your moral system, or do you just ignore it and or or accept it as willful act of immorality?

No, but the farmer does.  So, if he or she doesn't comply on ethical or religious grounds, the court might throw out the suit against him or her.  The GE company, though, could then provide an option to use one's own seed and pay a royalty fee on the amount one used.

Eating fish, but not more intelligent animals could be consistent given a consistently applied metric of capacity for physical/emotional suffering.

However, the curiosity-driven eating of animals is a bit problematic unless he admits that the act is still immoral/that curiosity doesn't pose as a justification.  That is to say, it'd probably still be immoral for me to kill somebody, even if I did it out of curiosity.

I don't think curiosity can really reasonably be said to change the equation.  Different metrics of value scale based on propensity to suffer, etc. sure... but justifications are usually illogical rationalizations to prevent dissonance.

There is one unrelated matter I know of that *does* seem to change the equation, though, and that is eating invasive species which are damaging the local environment and causing general havoc (provided the commercial drive is actually solving the problem).  That is, if there's another legitimate moral reason to kill an animal, the matter of eating it is morally irrelevant.

See:  http://www.reef.org/lionfish

A moral vegan could arguably be consistent in eating lionfish caught in their invasive region if it were agreed that eliminating them was a moral prerogative, and if creating a commercial demand for their meat was a way to accomplish that.

http://www.reef.org/catalog/cookbook

At a certain point, though, the invasive species is either eliminated or too well established to be eliminated and it becomes part of the native environment, so one must bear in mind that the moral justification doesn't necessarily continue in that light indefinitely.

Overwhelmingly Vegetarian here!  Like 95%+! I LOVE Vegan/Vegetarian food!! It's the greatest!  Blake, that sounds FANTASTIC! Can you cook dinner for me one day? lol

I heard it's pretty difficult to get vegetarian food in China unless you go to a Buddhist temple or Buddhist restaurant.  My uncle went there and that's what he said. Is that what you've found or have you found some places that are good for vegetarians?

It must be even more difficult to get Vegan food in public in China?

Yes, that is really irritating.  I'm often correcting people on their strict adherence to recipes.  "Why are you adding that?  It's crazy expensive and you won't even taste it." "Because it says..."

V8 is a good soup base, but it's usually pretty over-priced.  If you have a juicer (or even a blender) a cheaper method is buying condensed tomato paste, some sticks of celery and carrots (which amounts to the main ingredients of V8); it can make quite a bit more for a fraction of the cost.  Maybe add a bit of onion and some spice while at it.

Off brand vegetable juice is more reasonable, though- particularly the big cans.  If those are on sale I'll snap them up pretty quickly.

Save... or damn, depending on your perspective.  It definitely does grant evolutionary success, but at a price to the individual animals involved. 

While an ecosystem may have some inherent value due to the individuals' lives it sustains (so we can argue against invasive species to prevent ecosystem crashes), biodiversity in itself does not have such a great value (it's primarily aesthetic, personal preference).  Why do we need pandas?  Well, we don't really.  We want pandas.

In that sense, lacking any other inherent value to the species itself (the information may be valuable, but we can easily store that as DNA), we have to ask which is more important- implicit evolutionary desire for success, or explicit and tangible desires and sensations of the individual.

In the case of plants, where there are no real individual desires for lack of ego, then it's a no-brainer.  It doesn't matter what conditions we sustain them in, because they don't care.

In animals, if we make the argument that implicit evolutionary success is more important than explicit suffering, then there are various uncomfortable moral conclusions we must also make about humanity-- that is, that all of humanity should be brutally enslaved to the directive of terraforming and proliferating life across other planets with no considerations beyond the optimization of pursuit of that goal.

I'm going to assume that you probably wouldn't make that argument- but if you do, then I'll admit that you're fully consistent in advocating the evolutionary goals of animals over the tangible sensory ones.

If we accept that sensory goals are more important, then in animals the issue becomes complicated by the conditions the animal suffers, or enjoys.

Only when the conditions are decidedly better along every meaningful metric than they would be in the wild does it become trivially good for the animals to sustain their populations in captivity (every meaningful metric- from stress to entertainment to longevity to even self actualization [or what have they]).  Outside of some rarely well funded zoos and pets, there are no instances of this I know of. 

Otherwise, it's arguably better to let them die off, and allow other animals to take their places (whatever ultimately ends up filling that open environment)- animals suffering or enjoying natural conditions potentially better than the captive ones; the matter of which species of animal is irrelevant to the metric of suffering.

Some vegans would make the argument that we shouldn't keep any animals at all, even if the conditions are better than in the wild.  To that I would say that if it doesn't make any difference to the animals (or if it's better), then saying it's a moral negative is saying that eliminating wild animals should be a moral prerogative (oblivion > natural level of suffering).  Inconsistency.

Anyway, this is important:

There is a profound moral difference in proper free-range meat (it isn't always, to have the label the requirements are pretty hazy) and grain-fed box-captive meat- as well as a difference in efficiency (considering the waste of grain) and the health value of the meat.

One would still be quite hard pressed to say that the conditions are better than those in the wild, though; a side-by-side analysis of all relevant metrics would have the be considered, lifespan being the most crucial of those with regards to any agricultural initiative.

Short that, it's still unethical to eat free-ranged meat, even if it saves a species-- though substantially *less* unethical than eating grain fed meat. 

Unless, of course, you go with the evolutionary prerogative, in which case it's unethical that you aren't slaving away on a diet of nutrient gruel to manifacture space probes.

You might be able to contrive a mixture of the two imperatives, although I'm not sure how that would play out in practice.  It's something to think about.

That's great

Sure, what country do you live in?  I can try to remember to message you if I'm in the neighborhood.

Vegetarian restaurants are pretty common in the big cities, but otherwise, it's difficult to order something on the menu in most restaurants (so, for people who have no ability to think outside the box, it could be a problem).  However, if you speak Chinese, or can pantomime well, it's not a problem at all.  I don't speak much Chinese (enough to get myself into trouble, but not enough to get out again), but I can draw anything, so if I have a paper and pencil I can illustrate an explanation of almost anything to anybody speaking any language; it's a useful skill.

The best place to eat out in China (as far as the average restaurant) is a hot-pot restaurant (those are quite common).  Basically, they give you a big boiling pot of broth, and you point to raw vegetables, tofu, mushrooms, noodles, etc. and they bring them to you on a plate (washed) and you can cook them yourself.  They usually give you sesame oil with cilantro and some other spices to dip in, which is nice.

I don't know what's in the broth (probably chicken), so I just get water instead- I know how to ask, but I can't write it (I'd butcher the pinyin); with distinctly bad grammar, is sounds kind of like "z-eye ruh schway woh boo yao way dow- woh yao yen [count on your finger one], schway [count on your finger two], may yo way dow [wave your hands back and fourth to gesture no]"  if you said that and pantomimed a pot they *might* understand.  Basically, asking for salt and water with no flavour.  If I spoke a bit more Chinese I could ask for the spices, but plain water instead of broth.

That said, it's entirely unnecessary to pantomime or speak any Chinese in any large city, because there will be another patron at the restaurant who will speak some English and will be happy to translate for you if you try to speak English to the waitress and seem to be having difficulty (in Shanghai it seems to take between 10 and 30 seconds of speaking English to somebody who doesn't understand for another person who does to come over and translate unless there's nobody else around- and any nicer restaurant has staff that speak some English anyway).

I'd say China is one of the best countries in the world to be vegan in, simply because they have the best vegetables and tofu of anywhere in the world (great variety, fresh, and very cheap).  Since I cook for myself most of the time, eating in public is mostly not an issue for me, though there are vendors along the street selling fresh fruit on sticks in most places.  There are only a couple things I like to eat that are hard to find in China (I can't, for example, find molasses anywhere- only brown sugar, which is generally too sweet for my tastes).

hmm, interesting.  I'll have to pay more attention next time I'm over there!

Interesting, thanks for the elaboration.

I guess my overall question though is how much value you put on your moral system being coherent...from what you've written that doesn't seem to be the case, rather you seem to use empathy based intuition, at least when it comes to food.

Do you just accept that your morality regarding animal treatment is incoherent, or is it just something you don't focus your intellect on, or have you justified it in a novel way so you don't feel as much dissonance, or something else entirely?

In my apparantly frequent discussions about this with Blake I'm always upside down in the discussion and I'm wondering how you cope, or don't cope.  Atheist Extremist seems to have views similar to yours and I hope he chimes in more some time.

Personally, over the last couple of months I went from thinking I had a somewhat coherent moral system to realizing I had no coherent moral system, to thinking a coherent moral system isn't possible, to thinking a coherent moral system isn't worth the effort it would cost.  The last opinion seems like an obvious case of rationalizing dissonance away though so I don't really trust it.  Other than that, every time I come up with some new way to look at it it gets holes shot through it, either by myself or someone else.

I can't seem to let it go, because giving up on a concept that directly applies to daily life seems to cause more dissonance than I'm able to ignore, so it pops up over and over.  Naturally, I'm fishing for someone smarter than me to justify my currently unjustified behavior in a way sufficient to set my mind at ease.

I am happy to base my moral system on maximizing well-being and personal and societal health, and minimizing harm and unnecessary distress and suffering.

The "Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you" kind of rule, is also a pretty good guide.

The empathy comes in with my 'gut reactions', my conscious moral thoughts are based on my best estimate of likely pain and suffering to the creature concerned. Two different but associated things.

Empathy drives inherent preferred responses, which would then be the starting point of the formulation of moral rules, which then entered the realm of conscious debate.

BTW, I see empathy as separate from intuition.

Life is tough and determined

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HD6JEVmVRI

My wife is entirely vegan. I get pretty close.

We just went to a great vegan restaurant today in D.C. called Cafe Green. It felt sinful. I had the cheeseburger, she had the steak and cheese. Really excellent and entirely vegan. I started being vegan in 1977. The taste of vegan food has come a long way.

http://www.javagreen.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

That is, given a moral axiom (generally founded in net experience of others), execute rationally ideal means to this end.  This is the principle from which most of my examples implicitly arise, although I have covered other ground as well to be thorough.

You might even want to read something by Peter Singer- although such writers are less likely than I am to express the complexity involved in the axioms themselves (they tend to jump right into application, taking the axioms as self evident without discussing alternatives).
 

As for me, I know of only two coherent moral sources:  Evolutionary purpose, and maximizing Ego (pain, pleasure, suffering).

In the former (evolutinary purpose), you would be prohibited from eating anything that wasn't super-efficient nutrient gruel (probably made from algae) and focusing 100% of your waking time on building probes to spread life across the universe.  This has a pretty dubious link to the word itself, but is viable due to the expression of implicit purpose in the course of evolution.

In the latter, you can actually consider yourself as a being that also experiences pleasure and pain (if you are inclined to subscribe to consequentialist approach, which is the most rational one as compared to alternatives like deontology- I'm happy to discuss that though), and you can justify having an enjoyable life without harming others. 

Depending on how you normalize the curve, this might allow you to eat things like insects, fish, and other organisms that may not experience pain as acutely as we do (they do experience pain, but it may not be as lasting, they may experience less emotional distress, and may not have as many ambitions to sabotage)-- providing you are consistent in your application.  That is, it wouldn't let you eat pigs without "eating" children; and probably would not allow you even to eat fish and lobsters without "eating" babies (brain not fully developed for several months; reactions are very rudimentary, as crustaceans). 
So, really, you'd just have to pay a bit more heed to the pain that your dietary components experienced, and be consistent in your selection of foods and other behaviors.  In that, you'd just have to stay updated on the neuroscience, and make your best, most objective estimates (not underestimating something because you want to eat it, or overestimating something because it's "cute" ) .

You would need to consider rational, Epicurean principles in practice, though, which would involve a constant state of gradual improvement until it reached a point of diminishing returns.  That is, you could be expected to taper yourself off most meats without experiencing any unpleasant withdrawal (by doing it gradually) and adjusting to a new baseline which is every bit as pleasurable as before (the crucial rational point of Epicureanism)-- or even expected to rip the bandage off quickly and suffer the brief (but quickly subsiding) pain in exchange for the long term advantages.  The end, logically, is effectively vegetarianism (or very close to it) in either case.

Of course, don't forget the options of freeganism, and eating the Lion fish as I explained a few posts above.

No.

1. I care about the pig, and other pigs also care about the pig (e.g. mothers, and other familial bonds), and in the case of cows or distinctly herd animals (like humans) they legitimately do care about each other.  Most animals we eat are social animals with empathetic bonds between themselves.  Find an animal without any empathetic bonds, and that nobody cares about, and then you'll beat this one.

2. The baby eater evidently doesn't care enough to not eat the babies- just as there are people who *do* care about pigs, there are people who don't care about that.

3. As long as the baby eater doesn't do so in public and advertise the fact, neither would most other people (out of sight, out of mind).  This is only an argument that, if you can hide it, then it's morally O.K.  You mentioned that briefly, but you didn't go into the consequences:

The same could be used to justify euthanizing vagrants, and those with no family.  Or, if a victim were going to move to another town, killing the victim (during sleep) in the victim's hotel room on the way there, and sending a letter to the new place saying that the victim decided to stay, and sending letters to the relatives saying that the victim is safe and happy.  That is, as long as nobody knows the deed was done (including the victim), it's A-O.K.

Taken to an extreme, this also makes Darth Vader morally justified in blowing up entire planets with the death-star (simultaneously killing everybody who cared about each other), provided he didn't give them much advance notice to fret over it.

What you're missing here is the variable of autonomy/self actualization entirely (hopes, fears, ambitions)- that the pig had plans for what it was going to do the next day (probably no more ambitious than the average American couch potato, but none-the-less), and you interfered with those plans.

Now, it can be argued that there are some organisms with relatively no sense of temporality, regarding future ambitions or aspirations.  Some small animals probably fall into this category (though there are notable exceptions of even thumb-nail sized spiders demonstrated to exhibit planning and ambition).  Young babies (up until around three months) do fall into this category, though- the brain is not fully developed, and while they experience pain, they have no sense of self or future.

Only if you accept all of the implications of that.  However, most animals used as food species are herd animals, so you'd have to kill the entire herd at once.  And also, the point that some humans do care about them.

While providing an even more frightening one in its place, sure

Only if one of these is the case:

1. You accept the implications of ignoring the value of self actualization.

2. You paid attention to that value, but only ate animals without any significant sense of temporality or capacity for ambition.

3. You genetically engineered or lobotomized food animals to prevent that sense of temporal consciousness and ambition (this would make them difficult to keep, since they probably wouldn't be able to walk five feet to the feed trough to eat)

4. You killed the animals only at the natural ends of their lives where they wouldn't have otherwise had any more time to exercise ambitions, or killed them at a time when they had greater dread of the future than ambition (e.g. in chronic pain from arthritis and cancer) which amounts to ethical euthanasia.

 personally I have no issues eating animals, and I have eaten a range of animals, even seafood although I have sworn off seafood due to allergic reactions so far to all of them that I have tasted (just upset stomach and pain for 3 hours and then a pukefest ). However for me, i simply view it as it is, we are predators that consume animals, fruits and vegetables, beyond that it's just human fancy to believe that animals should be beyond human consumption. I personally do not like hunting for sport, if you are hunting eat what you kill. As well unfortunately, we are over populated to run free range animals for our consumption, and to have non commercial farms to feed our growing population. However some of us are lucky enough to be able to consume free range chickens, cows and pigs that have 50 to 100 acres to roam. (my family owns a ranch in Argentina as well as a winery....hmmmm wine ) from which the meat gets sent to a butcher in toronto. But the reality is we are predators that consume animals, to believe animals are some how beyond human consumption by making up ideas of equal rights and that they are some how equal to humans I find it very funny. But i don't believe animals should be tortured either, or caged in too small pens/cages for their entire lives, there should be some respect for the animal that your going to consume. 

As well use as much of the animal as possible, I do not like personally just killing an animal for part of it, like sharks for their fins, or bears for certain parts like gall bladders, if your going to kill an animal use as much as you can, it's ok to consume as much as possible. 

Damn it I think this got wordy....still kinda in a haze from last night. Happy new year everyone.

who says I was addressing you specifically, I stated it as a general statement to those that make those silly assumption and views that animals are not to be consumed by humans because they are equal to humans, and as well as my personal views, I never addressed you directly, if i was i would have mentioned one of your posts or you directly, which I didn't. The whole animal rights o vegan culture has a wide range of folks, from those that hold religious views to those that believe animals are equal to humans or that we are not actual predators. My personal take on is that we are predators, simple as that.

Latincanuck,

Wow, I was trying to be nice and give you a chance not to be an idiot here.  You could have reviewed your argument, or did ten seconds of research or even just a bit of skimming, but you haven't.

You have no idea what the arguments for veganism actually are.  How about being passingly familiar with a subject before commenting on it?

You're still making straw men, naked assertions, and is-ought fallacies.

Let me break it down for you:

That's not an opinion, it's a fact that many humans have practiced predation, and even mentioning it in this context is a logical fallacy- the is-ought fallacy.

Humans evolved as omnivores (and so are most 'herbivores' if push comes to shove), and nobody here has claimed otherwise (and only a profoundly small number of vegans ever claim such- it is a straw-man argument to suggest that this is a vegan claim because it simply is not any significant part of any coherent vegan argument; you list it as though it's a crucial part of some triad- vegans as a whole fully acknowledge science in this respect).

Being an omnivore means the capacity to eat meat, vegetables, or a combination thereof.

Eating meat IS natural- and that's where you're making a terrible and foolish is-ought fallacy.  Just because we have eaten meat, or we can eat meat, doesn't make it appropriate in the modern era or mean that we should do so.

Do you want to know what's also perfectly natural?  F*cking RAPE. 

Rape is the evolutionary purpose of most penis forms (penises are not necessary for sexual intercourse in most cases, only for forceful sexual intercourse- they have been lost and re-evolved many times to that end).  Our closest relatives found in great apes (Chimps, and Orangutans especially [who copulate primarily by rape]) are also natural rapists.  We are naturally rapists.  You are a rapist- that's what you are, it's evolution, don't deny it!  Go forth, and rape!  If you're not raping you're just silly!

Throughout human history, men taking women and forcing themselves upon them has been condoned, and in many cultures it's perfectly normal (much like eating meat- natural, historically condoned, and still a popular pastime particularly among those with more medieval mentality ).  Only since the development of the modern social ethics in which women have finally been included (in the past couple centuries) has that begun to change, and it's due to modern morality.  It's due to thinking about the issues at hand instead of justifying actions based on tradition.

By your reasoning, you have NO room to criticize rapists without being a f*cking hypocrite... because you're a natural rapist yourself.

OR we could make the silly assumption that just because something is that way, doesn't mean it should be that way, and actually use our brains and logical argument to try to find a better way to behave beyond our base instincts.  But who would do a silly thing like that?  Apparently not you... no, you're just too smart to fall for something crazy like moral philosophy.

Straw man #2!  Nobody is saying that aside from ignorant meat-heads making straw-men arguments.

The argument is not that all species of animals are equal, but that morality involves giving consideration to others, and the line of species is arbitrary (which is supported even by people like Dawkins, who will admit it with some seeming discomfort/dissonance).  The line of species being arbitrary means we can't discount the suffering of other species- to the extent they possess the capacity to suffer- just because they aren't human anymore than we can discount the suffering of other humans just because they aren't part of our lineage.

Not biasing our moral consideration arbitrarily, or with the help of rationalizations, is not the same as claiming all animals are equal.  Even the deontological claim of inherent animal rights doesn't go that far- it just asks for equal consideration on moral grounds, without ever asserting practical equality.

The vast majority of vegans don't ever subscribe to that latter claim (which is still more than your straw man), with at least 99% of them preferring humans explicitly in any moral choice, but simply recognizing that meat is entirely unnecessary, harmful to animals, generally harmful to the environment, and probably not very healthy anyway.

You have a real propensity for making ignorant and dangerous logical fallacies.  You might consider becoming a creationist- I hear they're hiring.

That is the ONE thing you got right- a very, very small number of vegans (mostly in the middle East) hold religious views for their veganism (Jains), and a vanishingly small number of immigrants (particularly on the East coast) also do.  There are also a couple cults who endorse it, but with secular arguments (veganism is a biproduct of moral empathy, which the beliefs encourage, not the religious beliefs themselves).

Despite that you got one out of three right for at least some influence as to why some incredibly small minority are vegan, that is not in the least one of the arguments commonly posed for veganism (or that I've ever seen posed, because even those people don't make the religious arguments in public- and most of them even find the secular arguments more powerful)- at most it's only used to help some people consider the secular arguments.  The closest you'll probably ever see to a religious argument largely amounts to "Jesus must have been vegetarian because he was compassionate, and vegetarianism is compassionate, so all Christians should be"- which is still just an argument from compassion, the "Jesus" part is superfluous.

The arrogance of your post is, that in full ignorance, you make some half cocked is-ought fallacy like it's "checkmate vegans" followed by a bunch of absurd straw men arguments- as if anybody would actually believe those things.

I'll summarize the primary arguments you'll find of vegans for you:

1. Health/human welfare: Eating meat isn't particularly healthy; it contributes to obesity and various forms of cancer, as well as other chronic diseases taxing our health care system and hurting people who would likely otherwise be well on a better diet.  Since it's not necessary for health, and even harmful, we should avoid it and phase it out of our diets.

2. Suffering/morality:  Animal agriculture harms animals and causes suffering, since we don't need to cause that harm to live, we're just hurting them for pleasure, which is the essence of unnecessary cruelty- equivalent to dog fighting (also a form of hurting animals for pleasure- entertainment instead of taste).  If we want to be moral, we should reform our social habits to avoid such unnecessary cruelty and suffering and focus on less harmful alternatives.

3. Environment/human rights:  Animal agriculture is bad for the environment, and it isn't sustainable for the growing world population- the forms of factory farming we turn to just compound the problem, both environmentally and ethically (with regards to resource distribution for other people)- for the sake of humanity we shouldn't do this entirely superficial and unnecessary activity, which serves the gluttony of the rich at the expense of others.

4. Animal rights: Speciesism is an arbitrary and unsustainable line to draw.  While we are all different, and even among humans there is natural difference and inequality, modern ethical prerogative suggests consideration of others' interests in freedom despite differences; despite that they may look different, not be as strong, not be as fast or smart.  We don't need to enslave people because they're black, or dominate women because they don't have penises, and we don't need to dominate animals- using them for food is entirely unnecessary just as was slavery.  We're not all equal, but morality means treating each other with the same consideration despite any shortcomings we see in another, and granting each living being the autonomy it was born with to live his or her life as he or she sees fit.

My arguments have been more comprehensive on the second point, but since you seem unwilling to read them, I'll leave you with that.

None of what you said addressed or contradicted any of those four primary arguments (and you would need to contradict both #2 and #4 before even suggesting it might be moral to eat meat as a counter argument).  You've just asserted, roughly, that veganism is silly and presented ignorant straw-men reasons, suggesting that you're the only one being realistic on such topics as biology and history, following into perhaps the most notorious and dogmatic of logical fallacies- [u]is-ought[/i].

Anyway, off you go to engage in the raping and such, as is only natural and therefore proper in accordance with your brand of "logic".

Just a point, not that it makes any argument that we should continue to eat meat, that the ability of our ancestors to eat meat was a major factor in allowing them to evolve beyond the other primates, especially when they began to cook it.

The purely vegetarian large primates such as gorillas spend a major part of their day just chewing their food.

It seems it was the greater nutritional density of meat, and the enhanced digestibility of cooked meat, that freed our ancestors up to spend more time on other things.

And support the significant energy and other nutritional requirements of a larger brain.

Blake, this is another stupid tangent, but...

How do you justify any expenditure for personal edification beyond the basics?  As a westerner, if I do just about anything, the investment is grossly inefficient if our moral goal is, 'increase happiness and well-being, decrease suffering.

I mean, I don't see how you could justify any part of the traditional western lifestyle.  Are the only options to accept that and live with the dissonance, or revert to a state where 99% of your energy is devoted to activism or charity of some sort?

I'm pretty sure I know the answer, and the answer is, "You can't justify it".  That just sucks though.

Even in your lifestyle, how do you justify it to yourself when you, for example, take a transcontinental flight, knowing full well the energy and sheer cost of that act has the potential to decrease suffering by "X" amount if put to another use?

So I guess it boils down to: How can someone justify any inefficient act, when the range of efficient moral acts is probably starkly limited?

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This is all coming up in my mind because I'm thinking about the consequences if I were to implement moral vegetarianism or veganism.  It seems to me that if I keep running with that logic I'd rapidly be in a situation where my life choices or very limited and not a heck of a lot of fun.