Some Philosophical and Moral Reasons Why Vegetarians are Better Than Everybody Else
It was almost two years ago when I decided to be better than everybody else by becoming a vegetarian.
That was when I quit eating animals of any kind, and began living on a purely vegetable diet. Finally, I could be morally superior to my friends and family, and every meal became a chance for me to remind them what terrible people they really were compared to me.
I Have Eaten Thousands of Animals.
To initiate some conversation, I usually confess during mealtime to having already eaten thousands of animals before my own glorious transformation into a vegetarian, but I then excuse myself by insisting that I never actually killed the poor creatures that I'd consumed, and that in fact I was nowhere near the horrific, bloody scene when it happened.
Since I would NOT personally enjoy killing animals, I might explain to my fellow diners that I am happy that such killing of innocent creatures is something that is done far from the dinner table, in a faraway slaughterhouse so that the whiff of death might not spoil our appetites.
Using Prettier Words
If it turns out that nobody wants to think about or discuss the distant killing of animals at the dinner table, I might tone it down, and offer pleasant substitute words which will help program more comfortable imagery. I begin by apologizing for my language, then I suggest some words better suited for mealtime-- nicer words that might ease those dreadful feelings that are liable to ruin a good meal.
Beef
“How is your burger? It’s made from a ground up cow, but I’ll be sure to call it ground ‘beef’ here at the table. What’s a cow anyway? A cow is really just a bunch of beef, wrapped in an expensive leather wrapper to keep the flies off." I might suggest to a nearby diner, qualifying the notion with my spiritually advanced laugh and a chummy, playful elbow into their ribcage:
"Raw beef squirms around a lot before it gets peeled and put in the cooler, and the sturdy leather wrapping helps to protect the meat in your delicious burger from the dirt, urine and feces that goes everywhere when these beef wraps are killed...” I always explain, emphasizing how these words like beef help to make the food seem less dead, so that everyone can try to enjoy the particular animal that they have chosen to eat, right down to the very bones.
Eating Pork and Poultry Without Guilt
I know more of these handy substitute words, and I always loudly list the nifty little word spells that make animals magically become food-- words like pork, poultry, and even venison, which is a good one; it makes deer seem more edible. While naming these popular food animals though, I always go blank when trying to remember the food word for rabbit. Little bunnies, after their soft fur is ripped off, they have a name-- it's on the tip of my tongue-- what is the word? Nobody dares remember, and we usually end up talking about Bugs Bunny around that time, to everyone’s relief. ’I want my hasenpfeffer!’
I Feel Better!
It feels good to be morally superior, and vegetarianism is a way to maintain that superiority with every meal. A skilled vegetarian can-- with a single well-placed wag of an eyebrow-- turn hearts and stomachs while describing the suffering that animals go through to become human food, and they can leave the dinner table feeling better for it.
Since becoming an active vegetarian myself nearly two years ago, my friends who still eat creatures-which-once-had-heartbeats now always get their food ’to go’, and then they go to pick bones and pull tendons in privacy, away from my neat explanations of the magical words that are used to help them to justify the mass killing, and far away from my morally-pristine eye.
Vegetarians like me are great, and when a vegetarian tells you that they feel better after changing their diet and becoming herbivores, they mean that they feel better than you if you are a still a carnivorous savage. Some expert vegetarians prefer to have meat-eaters in the world for this very reason, but I am even better than that: I would prefer that more people refrain from advocating the mass slaughter of animals so that there will be less suffering in the world. Just that one bit less suffering makes the world a better place, and I can say with a confident and arrogant puff that this improvement in the world is partly because of righteous and hyper-moral beings like me, the vegetarian.
thanks for reading along, I really am a vegetarian but this article is intended as satire and fiction, and should be seen as humor. This post in no way tries to tell anyone what to do, how to live or think, and is for entertainment purposes only. Before becoming a vegetarian, the weirdest thing I ever ate was some barbeque beaver. Tasted just like poultry. I had no part in killing that beaver, and in no way wish to promote harming beaver or anything else. I only intentionally kill fleas and mosquitos, and that's only when they attack me first.
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Vegetarianism is like a religion. When I tell them about cloned meat. How is free from antibiotics, high quality doesn't involve suffering and can be more nutritious and less deleterious than normal meat. They get morally conflicted.
Then I tell them:
It does seem like the moral issue would be missing in the case of cloned meat. Any objections to cloning might be based on an existing religious premise of some kind, beyond diet or moral stance.
Conversely, I've heard of carnism as a religion of sorts; a strong belief in consuming meat based on tradition and more belief that the practice is necessary. I stay away from telling anyone how or what to eat, since I have no food-based mythologies, only science, and my own overall health and conscience are all I have control over.
You really shouldn't speak about millions of people as if you know them all personally. It's ignorant.
Is extremely statistically unlikely that I know all these millions of people you mention but not impossible (also ignorance is not something I'm ashamed of), yet that's your interpretation. As I mentioned vegetarianism and not vegetarians per se. "them" was not necessarily vegetarians. It could be vegans or chefs. You could have asked.
Hey glad to see you back!
I don't know how you pulled this off, quite brilliant. I would think that since you were a vegetarian it would be satire to write about the wonders of eating meat, but it's almost like a satire within a satire haha!
I know what you mean, I made fun of myself in a way, but was really making fun of the whole diet paradigms of 'meat or no meat' and all of the religious-y mindsets that go with it. In the end, it looked like it was written by a carnivore who was immersed in cognitive dissonance, which may have been me at one time (probably still is, but lalalala!) It was tricky but fun to write.
I'm a vegan. I don't quite like the title. It's not exact. I know you know this. I know you chose a very provocator title. That is very courageous.
I'm vegan for more than 2 year now and I've been vegetarian for 5 years prior. I invite you to do the switch. It was a very easy one. Most who become vegan just reflect upon that choice and themselves they should have done it sooner.
Take care Paul! And I agree vegetarians and veganism are better lifestyle than the other options for obvious reasons.
Yes I wanted to show the moral wrongs about eating meat, but didn't want to take too much of a high road in doing it, so I dove into this writing thinking I'd get the message across in satire, but as a vegetarian I had a hard time myself with this funky approach as I wrote. I felt like I was trying to be funny about something that isn't really funny to me. Then writing the title, yeah I was stumped there too, like @dreemit said, it's like a satire within a satire. Thanks for the input, and I'm close to being fully vegan these days, mostly cheese is my hangup there.
Oh I realize I hadn't seen the last part of the post. I thought it was some sort of footer I had already read before.
I think some others did that too, not realizing that it was some odd satire, and I knew I'd have to explain it in the end. I'm still tempted to edit the title, maybe add (satire) so it's not so abrasive and misleading from the start.
I am making my way towards vegetarianism very slowly. I believe that if I, going to eat animals I should, to some extent, be ready and able to kill such animals. I find it dileasurable to think about and so I can't really justify eating animals that other people kill. But, if no proper nutrition was available, I know I'd be able to kill an animal, probably even a dog or cat. I've only killed fish before. I can totally live with myself and I am nothing but grateful to the fish. But I would prefer a world where we could all naturally be well nourished without having to kill our friends from not so distant species. So I'm slowly finding pleasant ways to move past meat, cooking myself sure isn't pleasant yet, maybe it will be one day. Now I usually only eat meat when others cook it or order it and we are sharing, although I still love eating raw fish.
That's how I am too, I've never been hunting, and can't even remember ever catching a fish, so having someone else kill for me felt wrong after so long.
It's always a fun time talking about lifestyle choices, especially when both sides are rigid about it. It's like talking about religion, but with food. You know that it's always going to get personal right around dessert time haha!
Me, I tired going vegan once or twice, but it didn't take. The lure of eating something that once had a beating hard was too much for me to avoid. I like knowing that in the survival of the fittest, I'm on the winning end. Makes me feel superior that way.
Haha seriously though, as much as I wanted to go full-on herbivore, it's too expensive to sustain here. It's ironic because the Philippines is supposedly an agriculture-heavy country. I do avoid pork like the plague though, and try to stick to a seafood diet.
Oh, sorry. A seefood diet. When I see food, I eat.
It really is like a religion, with little thinking and more fear-based habits and rituals. Here I tried to push buttons on both sides of the buffet= food fight!
I was definitely raised to have meat with nearly every meal, but here in the US I found that meat cost more than things like beans and rice, and I was always looking for ways to spend less, having meat only a few times a week or during good times. It was a matter of budget for a long time before I decided to go full veggie.
Oh! I used to be on an all-molecule diet, and they'd say "Paul, everything has molecules in it", and I would excitedly reply, 'I know, it's great; I can eat anything I like!'
Oh so we were on the same diet at least for a brief time in our lives. Cool! You're lucky, here people would just have beans and rice because they couldn't afford anything else. It's interesting to see the disparity in price.
I used to have a friend who was vegan. To my irritation, this person would post hideous images on Facebook of animals being mistreated and he would lord his veganism over other people. Focusing so much energy on demonizing people who ate meat, rather than focus on enlightenment and campaign for better treatment of food animals. It really came down to HOW he was using his press. It was a huge hint at the moral superiority or insecurity and ego behind it, his whole platform not really being about nutrition or even in the long run, not hurting animals.
I think you have pinpointed the type of attitude that this post was making fun of, that is exactly the character that I channelled for this satire.
If non vegetarianism is not supposed to be morally good soo why the nature( Some called it GOD too) have created the animals like lions and tigers who totally depend on the meat. So I think it is just our thoughts that make us feel guilty or morally down after earting meat. It is all that relative like we have freed the animals from this world slavery a little bit earlier and they must be feeling high after this liberation.
I seems like the lion has no option on what their diet will be, guided by instinct while their biology is designed for a nearly exclusively meat-based diet. Humans, on the other hand, can survive and do well eating only plants, and therefore the eating of meat becomes a matter of preference or convenience, but ultimately it's a chance to choose whether to cause death and suffering of animals, or to create a more harmonious world when possible. A lion is in constant survival mode, while such basic survival is often programmed into human culture. In the USA, many tons of food are thrown out every day, so survival is not really an issue for this modern society, which again separates humans from the carnivorous animal kingdoms. Carnism is practically a religion in the modern world though, and it's sometimes difficult to discuss nature and science with religious nuts!
What do you wanna say about the stem cells eat in which no animals are killed , some stem cells are taken from their body and developed into meat.
I don't see any particular moral issues with such a technique where there is no suffering, but somehow the product of that science sounds like it would cost even more than normal meat, and a lot of trouble just to have some protein. I think it's funny that sometimes vegan food is made to mimic meat, so the cloning or replication of muscle tissue for food is slightly comical to me, but whether ethical or moral I can't be sure if I don't acquire those stem cells myself, and do it without hurting anything.
It is just in the beginning phase so might be costly but soon it will capture the market like the normal meat and the suffering and pain would be minimized to a great extent.
This article made me laugh...I could just see me using these statements at MY dinner table... it would not go over well.
Yeah I like to write things like this, since I would never actually behave like this, it is funny to pretend to be this abrasive sometimes.
I know people who are vegan who actually behave in this manner, yet feign humility. It's enough to make me throw up a burger. Lol. I won't be going vegetarian unless God tells me to and I mean like in person, face to face. He gave a list of animals that are clean to eat for a reason, PLUS he made those animals taste delicious. It's a win win!
I know these personalities too. Sometimes in restaurants I find myself apologizing in advance for being vegetarian, like 'I hate to be any trouble', then they might see my plight, or presume that it's a handicap for me, but it's better for communication , aside from the pity factor.
I have wondered why there is a list of 'clean' animals, like if it means they are more healthy to consume, or if there's more to it than that. I've heard of the list, but didn't bother adhering to it when I was eating meat.
Actually yes they are healthier to consume. Those that God deemed clean, he designed their bodies in such a way that if they eat something toxic it gets flushed out thru their digestive system and never makes it to their muscle (meat) where as the unclean animals are not designed in that way and toxins make it in to their meat.
For example modern science has proven that the protein found in pork is far inferior compared to that found in beef, lamb, or venison and the toxins found in pork are off the charts compared to the clean animals. Some animals were designed to be eaten, others are designed to be the waste removal and garbage disposals of the planet. Oysters and clams are a great example. They are unclean animals, not to be eaten. They purify the water that's what they are meant for. Would you cut open a water filter and eat it after it's done filtering dirty water? Eating a clam or oyster amounts to the same thing.
That is interesting, and who knows how they knew, but maybe that's why people lived so long back then! I like the water filter analogy.
Well not eating meats contaminated with parasites and toxins will contribute to a longer life but I think the biggest contributing factor to lifespans in the hundreds of year is the water firmament that used to surround our atmosphere. I think it's pretty easy to understand how they knew, God told them. When the being who made everything you can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear tells you not to do something, you listen. I mean he made it all, I think he knows what's good for us and what isn't good for us.
@therealpaul,
I am not a vegetarian! But I am rarely eat meats! If we can balance everything they it might be the best way!
Yeah whatever you discuss here is correct! Really appreciate your effort!
Cheers~
Meat is expensive, that was one reason that I rarely used it for a long time- it was not hard to quit for me because of that.