I do, but very rarely these days. As many others I was brought up believing meat is essential and that it was THE factor in propelling human evolution, so until relatively recently it was something that I never questioned.

A couple of years ago I begun paying more attention to health in general (work in progress, still).. after having fasted for nearly a month a lot of my opinions regarding food changed drastically, and altough not eating meat wasn't on the radar then, something clicked when I noticed how it felt after digesting the first peace of meat after the experiment.

Until one day I just decided to try and go without meat for an undefined amount of time (this was shortly after truly realizing how fucked up refined sugar made me feel and how addictive it is), and who would've said.. I actually feel much better eating mostly veggies, fruit&nuts and some fish here and there.

The experiment goes on!

I stopped eating meat 5 years ago.

To live in a situation where I have the resources to stay healthy on an all-plant diet is a privilege.

Not so much these days

I feel good

After years of becoming more and more aware of how factory farmed and processed meat animals are treated, I initially stopped eating meat in the mid-nineties upon hearing a person in casual conversation (around the lunch table...) describing what it was like to work in a factory hog farm as a youth. The speaker wasn't animal rights person or vegetarian or trying to push any agenda, just a guy telling stories. For me, though, hearing how normalized the extreme violence had become didn't justify my love of the flavor of pork. And for me that is all it was really about, flavor. I found for a while that I'd be veggie at home, but if paying for a meal in a restaurant, it had to be meat. All about flavor. The smell of bacon still tickles my senses and ignites cravings, even as I find it disgusting! It took a couple more years for the rest of the animal species to leave my diet, all for political reasons upon learning more about how they got to my plate. If I had no other means to survive then I'd totally eat any meat source I could catch that didn't eat me first, but so far I haven't needed that option. Being vegetarian doesn't seem to have harmed me in any way - my physical strength and endurance for various sporting activities has improved despite the nearly 2 decades of aging on top of my pre-existing decades!

Good greens to you!

Peace.

I've been through many phases in my life.

Veganism turned me into a ball of anxious insanity and skinny as a stick.
Vegetarianism, same.
Pescatarianism, which is the same thing you just eat fish, was OK I did this for a few years but definitely wasn't getting enough calories still.
Then I did Iboga and after that I craved meat and lost the complex in my mind that made me think it was bad, so I eat it every day now. There is little on this planet that pleases me more than stuffing my face with delicious animal meat.

The more of it I eat the less severe my OCD and other related symptoms are, I love the stuff, I don't care how it was treated or farmed. There is far too much to worry about on this planet, and I couldn't care less. I'm just doing what feels right to me. I am going to fry up some chili chicken right now and eat it with a ton of turmeric rice in bliss.

Add a slice of bacon for me!

questioning is always a good thing.
there are a lot of papers which discuss this theory, and a lot of evidence exists which
support it.

http://berkeley.edu/news...99legacy/6-14-1999a.html
http://www.springerlink....ontent/26l8kwh2b0xalyyp/
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2744104

and a lot of evidence to the contrary

This comes up a lot but I think our evolutionary diet is irrelevant. The selection pressures that made us and our current metabolic needs are two entirely different things.

I don't think that's how evolution works.

All I gotta say is watch FOOD inc.

There are 3 companies that control the meat industry. The stereotype of a farm fresh product is a lie. The animals are knee deep in shit and have deseases because of it. The cure is technology and it far from cures it, it is actually killing people! If they would just step back and clean the cages they would get rid of the deseases! The farmers are in major dept because of the cost of the plant and upgrades, that they are in the mercy of the main companies.

The soya bean industry is at the mercy of the main seed company in the world. Farmers are not aloud to keep seeds to plant next year, they will be sued and put out of business. The farmers who didnt buy the seeds from this main company are getting sued because the pollin from the farm next door is pollinating with that soya been seed companies pollin.

Plus the fast food industry slashs prices so much that people who are low income will buy the fast food over the fresh veggies because of price. When it actaully costs a lot of money to produce animals. They are just forcing people to buy meat. The corn industry is puting corn in almost everything we eat. You cant get away from it. They use as cheap fillers.

It just goes behind the scenes and shows how everyone is stuck consuming these products. BUY ORGANIC AND BUY LOCAL!!!! we can change this corruption!! watch FOOD inc. and see for yourself! It is on netflix.

EDIT: oh another thing! The corn industry made so much corn that places like Mexico who used to be the top growers are forced to stop making corn because USA sells it cheaper. So the workers are forced to find work elsewhere. So the US companies hire them illegally. Then the country / state comes down on them and deports them, instead of coming after the company for hiring them in the first place!!! STUPID! Its all coruption!

I rarely eat meat. I started to find the concept of eating meat disgusting when I was just getting into psychedelics as a teenager. I once made the mistake of trying to eat bone-in chicken while tripping on LSD. That left an impression.

I recently read the book The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, PhD, and Thomas M. Campbell II, MD and that did it. I was surprised to see all the recent research on how eating lots of animal protein promotes cancer and other diseases, and that eating a whole foods, plant-based diet can actually "switch off" cancer. Amazing stuff.

The nice thing is, now that I've reduced my meat intake, I don't crave it anymore!



Although I'm not a big meat fan anymore, I feel the same way about the ethical motivations behind veganism/vegetarianism. All I really care about is my health and the health of my family. Ethics and morals are relative anyway. Being able to emotionally detach from all the self-righteous "causes" that people get so uptight about saves time and energy.

What do you mean? All I'm saying is that it's one thing to show that meat-eating fueled our brain development. It's another thing altogether to show that meat is an essential/irreplaceable food now.

The selection pressures that made us define what our optimal diet would look like. Not that I'm calling meat irreplaceable exactly. After all, cats are obligate carnivores, but we've figured out ways to feed our house buddies corn meal. All I'm saying is that our current metabolic needs will always be subject to our evolutionary diet, even if we find tricks to mitigate portions of it.

In social situations where it would be rude not too I will eat the minimum amount for respect/communion with others.

Myself none, vegan for 3 years, veggie for 7 before that.

My arguments:

1) killing something which clearly does not wish to die requires justification. Not killing something does not require justification. Therefore, it is generally morally incorrect to support eating animals.

2) Raping women is one of the most natural human instincts. Therefore we should all enjoy the pleasure when it seems natural to do so.

3) If it's all part of the circle of life, and we are all just one, then Charles Manson did nothing wrong.

technically, I'm vegetarian.. I only eat cows that are grass-fed.

So what you're saying is that plants want to die?

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


take 1 cell of the plant you are about to eat and throw it in some hormoe treatments.


plant aint dead no more, even if you ate most of it.

"Being able to emotionally detach from all the self-righteous "causes" that people get so uptight about saves time and energy"

This is true, but only on an individual level. The same as a logger not worrying about his/her job cutting down rainforest or anything else. Certain practices in place within the industry of factory farming at the moment do have a negative impact on the environment and if people are worried about their children they might also choose to concider their(or their grandchildrens) future if they wish for them to enjoy the same level of environmental integrity(or even better) than we have today. It is for these reasons that many people choose to concider these things and if everyone just decided to not be so "uptight" about it noone would ever do a thing about it.

This is why some people dont support factory farming or mono culture crops when possible and maybe go hunt instead or try to grow food in permaculture gardens at home.

On a collective or species level being emotionally detached to such things is sort of self destructive.

Plants appear to lack the centralized nervous system individuating an entity, for the most part. I do like Mckenna's observation of the mushroom as a good example of what a future race would modify itself into - a bottom feeder which truly essentially harms nothing.

Also, I think it's more moral to eat a silverback than a human, a dog than a silverback, a mouse than a dog, a fish than a mouse, a cricket than a fish, and plants and plankton than fish.

And of course, many many fruits, seeds, etc., DO want to be eaten, it is how they have evolved to pass on their seed

A complex question.

Love and peace