Veganism

For the record, Laird, I do appreciate your concern for animals and animal welfare even though I strongly disagree with you on nutrition. I find it very hard, impossible actually, to argue against Weston Price's work. Seeing those indigenous people with larger arches and thus straight teeth, not to mention the lack of chronic disease, changed my mind on all of this. Clearly there are many variables involved in that situation, but since we know that every single one of them used animal products - the entire animal, in fact, wasting none of it - I believe we're reckless to think we can outsmart such a thing. I don't mean for that to come off as inflammatory, and I know that you believe we can get proper nutrition to prevent chronic disease and shrinking arches from vegan sources, but I wanted to chime in since I'd been liking posts in the thread w/o saying much or addressing you directly.

For others who haven't seen the various teeth pictures that Price took (and what human teeth used to look like), here are a few examples (along with a modern, non-Price pic). See if you can guess which ones were eating an indigenous diet and which were eating a Western diet:

weston+price.png

teeth.jpg

good-teeth.jpg

dental-deformities1.jpg
 
For the record, Laird, I do appreciate your concern for animals and animal welfare even though I strongly disagree with you on nutrition. I find it very hard, impossible actually, to argue against Weston Price's work. Seeing those indigenous people with larger arches and thus straight teeth, not to mention the lack of chronic disease, changed my mind on all of this. Clearly there are many variables involved in that situation, but since we know that every single one of them used animal products - the entire animal, in fact, wasting none of it - I believe we're reckless to think we can outsmart such a thing. I don't mean for that to come off as inflammatory, and I know that you believe we can get proper nutrition to prevent chronic disease and shrinking arches from vegan sources, but I wanted to chime in since I'd been liking posts in the thread w/o saying much or addressing you directly.

For others who haven't seen the various teeth pictures that Price took (and what human teeth used to look like), here are a few examples (along with a modern, non-Price pic). See if you can guess which ones were eating an indigenous diet and which were eating a Western diet:

weston+price.png

teeth.jpg

good-teeth.jpg

dental-deformities1.jpg

With the paleo diet becoming popular, Price's work shows that just because a culture eats native foods that they are not necessarily very healthy. The groups he focused on displayed dietary wisdom. Not only that, but it shows that grains are not evil and don't make you a fat mess :)
 
For the record, Laird, I do appreciate your concern for animals and animal welfare even though I strongly disagree with you on nutrition. I find it very hard, impossible actually, to argue against Weston Price's work. Seeing those indigenous people with larger arches and thus straight teeth, not to mention the lack of chronic disease, changed my mind on all of this. Clearly there are many variables involved in that situation, but since we know that every single one of them used animal products - the entire animal, in fact, wasting none of it - I believe we're reckless to think we can outsmart such a thing. I don't mean for that to come off as inflammatory, and I know that you believe we can get proper nutrition to prevent chronic disease and shrinking arches from vegan sources, but I wanted to chime in since I'd been liking posts in the thread w/o saying much or addressing you directly.

For others who haven't seen the various teeth pictures that Price took (and what human teeth used to look like), here are a few examples (along with a modern, non-Price pic). See if you can guess which ones were eating an indigenous diet and which were eating a Western diet:

weston+price.png

teeth.jpg

good-teeth.jpg

dental-deformities1.jpg

How do you like these teeth?

ad_178415909.jpg
 
malf, what if I ate just avocados?

(btw, I once had a girlfriend that said that avocados contain pretty much everything you need nutrient-wise, like three major food groups or some kind of thing like that - is any of that true?)

Sheesh, Ian and his ex-girlfriends... :D

They are very good for you:

http://www.nzavocado.co.nz/online/nutritional_benefits.csn

... in fact the Guinness Book of records lists the Avocado as the most nutritionally complete fruit in the world!

Everybody should eat more ;)
 
That might explain Jeremy Corbyn*:)

*For those in the USA, he's the current (Vegan) leader of the British Labour party and your typical left-wing idiot.

While I am no great lover of the man himself, I happen to believe in many of his policies.

Why do you have to call someone that you disagree with 'idiot' ? Corbyn never insults people, it is one of his strengths. It is unneccessary and only reflects badly on you and the forum.
 
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Why do you have to call someone that you disagree with 'idiot' ? Corbyn never insults people, it is one of his strengths. It is unneccessary and only reflects badly on you and the forum.
Technically, I think he quoted a belief in others - not his own opinion.

I guess politicians are always fair game for criticism, in a way that others aren't. Nigel Farrage has never complained about the criticism heaped on him by people who don't seem to have read his actual opinions, or the policies of the party he runs!

Let's try to avoid politics!

David
 
Technically, I think he quoted a belief in others - not his own opinion.

I guess politicians are always fair game for criticism, in a way that others aren't. Nigel Farrage has never complained about the criticism heaped on him by people who don't seem to have read his actual opinions, or the policies of the party he runs!

Let's try to avoid politics!

David

I'm sorry, I've obviously stumbled into an alternate reality here !!!!

Just for the record.

1/ Technically my arse!

2/ Who mentioned Farage?

3/ It wasn't about politics - it was about insults.

Are you really a moderator? :eek:
 
While I am no great lover of the man himself, I happen to believe in many of his policies.

Why do you have to call someone that you disagree with 'idiot' ? Corbyn never insults people, it is one of his strengths. It is unneccessary and only reflects badly on you and the forum.

Lighten up, my friend. He's a left-wing idiot, David Cameron's a right-wing idiot, Tim Farron's a Libdem idiot...most politicians are idiots.
 
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...1211/youre-vegetarian-have-you-lost-your-mind
"Vegetarian diets are correlated with an increase in mental health problems"

from the article:
Temporally, the adoption of a vegetarian diet, on average, tended to follow the mental health diagnosis, suggesting that the vegetarian diet was not in fact causal. I know originally the abstract of the article said the opposite, but if you read the full text, you find that the abstract was misrepresentative
 
Hi all. I've postponed several responses for too long now, so here's an all-at-once response.

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@Neil, it's you to whom my first response is due, and out of concern for space it will unfortunately be somewhat brief and perhaps a little unsatisfying. Re your post #98, I think you've hit on a very important point re the moral relevance of the capacity of beings to suffer, and I appreciate you acknowledging that after all, yes, animals are aware of death and that some even mourn. I think you're missing something though, probably simply because it didn't occur to you rather than out of deliberate exclusion: the capacity of sentient beings for positive experiences and for well-being is equally relevant morally.

In terms of the supposedly lesser consciousness of certain forms of animal life - such as mealworms - I'm less inclined to side with the implications you wish to draw from IIT and more with those from the research of both Cleve Backster, who demonstrated - and which demonstration the popular television show Mythbusters successfully replicated (a link which I've already posted) - that a plant will register emotions via a lie-detector test at the mere thought of a nearby human of harming it, and of Jagdish Chandra Bose, whose Boseian Thesis, based on careful experimentation and study, states that "there is no discontinuity between the living and the nonliving". In other words, I think we ought to be expanding our circle of ethically relevant beings rather than restricting it. For now I think that - for reasons given elsewhere - fruit by the botanical definition is the most sensible exclusion ethically from that circle of concern for the purpose of human diet: at least for those of us who still need to eat, and, unfortunately, I find myself amongst those.

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@Grorganic, re your post #99, in particular your affirmation of moral relativism being a reality over human history: I think I hinted at my position on that in my response to Neil two posts prior to yours: "Empirical uncertainty is one major reason why despite that morality is objective, our moral choices sometimes anyway require the exercise of judgement". In other words, re your example of animal sacrifice being ethical in certain cultures, this, I would expect, is because the animal is seen, in the long run, not to be harmed, because it enters the afterlife with merit for its sacrifice - or there would be a belief in some other counterveiling benefit to the harm of the sacrifice. It is not that it is a valid "culturally relative" ethic to arbitrarily harm other beings; no, the objective moral principle that avoidable harm is wrong applies always, else the culture is not truly an ethical one: all that changes is the empirical beliefs with respect to the nature and implications of the harm in question.

So, this does leave us in a troublesome situation, because I agree with you to the extent that one culture ought not to enforce its empirical/cultural beliefs upon another - at least not without seriously good evidence that the other's beliefs are definitively mistaken and that this mistake is causing avoidable harm. And on a forum such as this, it is necessary to at least countenance the possibility that afterlife consequences mitigate mortal harm, and that a group of people might have valid empirical proof of such a thing, so, yes, I am not in favour of literally and physically forcing Western-derived cultural beliefs on such cultures, and I would hope that any change which does occur does so through the activism of members of the culture in question, after those members having considered the validity of the empirical beliefs upon which their culture's various harmful practices are based.

As far, though, as any argument that culture can justify harms absent any belief in mitigating "unavoidable" factors such as post-mortal merit, then, no, we do not, as I think is already clear, see eye to eye there.

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@Reece, re your post #101, the one with all the teeth in it: I note that with respect to the malformed dentition you refer to the cause not as a "vegan" diet but as a "Western" diet. These are two entirely different things, and so I am not sure that your images have any relevance in this thread.

In earlier posts I expressed a lack of interest in advancing the healthfulness of a vegan diet, but since so much is being made of its apparent unhealthiness, I will reverse that decision and share a few resources which in my opinion more than counter this "argument from poor dental health":

  • The most famous is Dr T. Colin Campbell and son's book, The China Study, which is very well reviewed and summarised by Ernst Erb here. This book lays out a powerful case based on a lifetime of scientific research that a plant-based diet is key to the prevention and even reversal of most common diseases, especially those common in the West. Dr Campbell came from a farming family and was originally convinced that animal products were essential to health; it was the data that changed his mind.
  • The movie, Forks Over Knives, makes a similar case, and includes interviews with Dr Campbell as well as with other notable researchers.
  • Dr Michael Greger's NutritionFacts.org trawls through and summarises the latest research in nutrition so we don't have to, and finds strongly in favour of a plant-based diet. Dr Greger presents yearly talks on the benefits of a plant-based diet based on the latest research; one of my favourites is from 2012, Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death, in which he outlines the ways in which a plant-based diet prevents people from dying from most of the leading causes of death in the USA.

Here Dr Greger's 2012 talk is inline:


So, I see your dentist and I raise you several doctors. And that's just a sampling; there are plenty more sources out there.

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There has also been some talk, both in this thread and elsewhere on the forum, about the supposed invalidation of the hypothesis/es that cholesterol and/or saturated fat can easily be eaten to unhealthy excess, so here are a few resources which counter this talk:

  • In the British Medical Journal blog, Dr Neal D. Barnard and Angela Eakin argue that Yes, cholesterol matters. The key paragraphs in this blog post are these: So how did the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee arrive at its not-guilty verdict? The committee wrote that its finding of no relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol was “consistent with the conclusions of the AHA/ACC report,” citing a 2014 report by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology.

    However, the AHA/ACC report did not actually reach this conclusion. It summarized evidence published after 1998—that is, after the most recent meta-analyses were published—and called for more research, but did not suggest that there was no relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol. Of course, the issue may be largely theoretical, because most cholesterol-containing foods also contain saturated fat—and both raise LDL cholesterol concentrations.
  • The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine writes in its article, Cholesterol and Heart Disease: Two large cohort studies and one meta-analysis found that vegetarians had a much lower risk of dying from heart disease than nonvegetarians.11 A study from 2007 in the Journal of Nutrition found that a single fatty meal can cause the heart to beat harder and raise blood pressure. A high-fat, fast-food meal usually has 42 grams of fat, while a typical healthful meal would have around 1.3 grams of fat.12 One study showed that people who adopt a vegetarian diet reduce their saturated fat intake by 26 percent and significantly lower cholesterol levels in just six weeks. A more recent study revealed that when participants switched to a strict low-fat vegetarian diet for about two weeks, they lowered their total serum cholesterol and blood pressure by 11 percent and 6 percent respectively, and men lost an average of 5.5 pounds and women an average of 2.2 pounds.13 --from the section "Go Vegan to reduce your cholesterol and heart disease risk".
  • Despite the potential which we all know for bias on Wikipedia, it is worth noting that the article, Saturated fat and cardiovascular disease controversy, contains these statements in its opening section: [M]ost in the mainstream heart-health, government, and medical communities hold that saturated fat is a risk factor for CVD [...]

    Medical, scientific, heart-health, governmental and intergovernmental, and professional authorities, such as the World Health Organization,[2] the American Dietetic Association,[3] the Dietitians of Canada,[3] the British Dietetic Association,[4] American Heart Association,[5] the British Heart Foundation,[6] the World Heart Federation,[7] the British National Health Service,[8] the United States Food and Drug Administration,[9] and the European Food Safety Authority[10] advise that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), and recommend dietary limits on saturated fats as one means of reducing that risk.

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Finally, re @malf's news article, titled "Being A Vegetarian Is Actually Worse For The Environment", unfortunately he's let the skeptic side down with his willingness to post biased news reports of studies which do not reflect the actual findings of the studies in question. A quick bit of googling could have led him to the Huffington Post article, A Study Did NOT Actually Find That Vegetarianism Hurts The Planet, in which the researchers themselves, after being contacted by the HuffPo author, said that the claim that vegetarianism is more harmful to the environment than eating meat is a total mischaracterisation of what they found, and that what they actually found was that not all foods in a particular food group are created equal - a relatively benign finding. If you look at the abstract of the study itself (sorry, I'm not going to pay to download and analyse the full article), you'll see, as mentioned in the HuffPo article, that none of the diets the authors analysed were even vegetarian, let alone vegan, let alone fruitarian. They all included at least seafood and dairy.

Here are some resources which demonstrate how unenvironmentally-friendly the consumption of animal products really is, including in comparison to the vegan option:

  • The 108 or so page 2010 report by the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, part of the United Nations Environment Programme, Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production, Priority Products and Materials has this to say on page 79: "Animal products, both meat and dairy, in general require more resources and cause higher emissions than plant-based alternatives", and on page 82 (emphasis mine) "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products". You can read the Guardian's article on this study (at the time, 2010), UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet.
  • The 284 page 2006 report, Livestock's long shadow, also thanks to the United Nations, concludes: "As we have seen, the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, while in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution".
  • The 2014 film, Cowspiracy, takes up this baton and questions whether the silence from environmental organisations on the major role played by animal agriculture, particularly the farming of cattle, in climate change and environmental devastation amounts to a conspiracy.

OK, phew, that's a monster post to return to this thread with. Thanks for sticking with it if you've made it this far. Best wishes to all, and make Christmas also a celebration for the animals and plants that you don't eat. :-)
 
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Hi all. I've postponed several responses for too long now, so here's an all-at-once response.

----

@Neil, it's you to whom my first response is due, and out of concern for space it will unfortunately be somewhat brief and perhaps a little unsatisfying. Re your post #98, I think you've hit on a very important point re the moral relevance of the capacity of beings to suffer, and I appreciate you acknowledging that after all, yes, animals are aware of death and that some even mourn. I think you're missing something though, probably simply because it didn't occur to you rather than out of deliberate exclusion: the capacity of sentient beings for positive experiences and for well-being is equally relevant morally.

In terms of the supposedly lesser consciousness of certain forms of animal life - such as mealworms - I'm less inclined to side with the implications you wish to draw from IIT and more with those from the research of both Cleve Backster, who demonstrated - and which demonstration the popular television show Mythbusters successfully replicated (a link which I've already posted) - that a plant will register emotions via a lie-detector test at the mere thought of a nearby human of harming it, and of Jagdish Chandra Bose, whose Boseian Thesis, based on careful experimentation and study, states that "there is no discontinuity between the living and the nonliving". In other words, I think we ought to be expanding our circle of ethically relevant beings rather than restricting it. For now I think that - for reasons given elsewhere - fruit by the botanical definition is the most sensible exclusion ethically from that circle of concern for the purpose of human diet: at least for those of us who still need to eat, and, unfortunately, I find myself amongst those.

Thank you very much for the video link. I am surprised that I had not seen that before. I personally think that it is likely that IIT could be correct, but what may be found is that the extent to information integration goes down below nervous systems to the level of the cell itself. If single cells themselves are conscious, then an even more complex organism like a plant may be able to respond in a measurable way to psychic intent like in the Mythbusters video.

However, I think there is a distinction that needs to be made. I think that in the example of the plant, showing that a plant responds to a physical insult is quite different from saying that it suffers. I am unsure that we have any grasp on what it really means to suffer and where to draw the line, but I think in the case of the plant, we do not think that it suffers, which can drive moral judgment or lack of any moral judgment when it comes to harming a plant. I go into a bit more detail below about this, but my point is that I think there is a distinction to be made.

Laird said:
"Empirical uncertainty is one major reason why despite that morality is objective, our moral choices sometimes anyway require the exercise of judgement". In other words, re your example of animal sacrifice being ethical in certain cultures, this, I would expect, is because the animal is seen, in the long run, not to be harmed, because it enters the afterlife with merit for its sacrifice - or there would be a belief in some other counterveiling benefit to the harm of the sacrifice. It is not that it is a valid "culturally relative" ethic to arbitrarily harm other beings; no, the objective moral principle that avoidable harm is wrong applies always, else the culture is not truly an ethical one: all that changes is the empirical beliefs with respect to the nature and implications of the harm in question.

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I wanted to comment since I mentioned that the moral questions have been of interest to me recently.

From what I have been reading, I cannot support the notion of an absolute moral objectivity. Absolute moral objectivity would mean that moral standards would be the same for any species, so if we were to communicate with extraterrestrials, they are guaranteed to share the same moral judgements. Moral objectivity seems to rely on rational judgement, where any rational species would be able to use moral reasoning to arrive at the same objective moral judgements.

There are several issues with this position. I will attempt to address each issue as I see it:

Moral reasoning as a basis of moral judgement - I suggest that evidence from several fields contradicts this idea:

1. Developmental psychology - children can recognize the difference between core moral rules and conventional rules by at least the age of 2, and by the age of 3.5 moral judgement seems to be in full swing even though their reasoning abilities just aren't there yet. These children can recognize that harm-based moral rules are not dependent of authority, are generalizable to other countries, and are considered "wrong." Essentially, very young children can recognize that it is wrong to pull someone's hair whether there is a rule for it or not, or regardless of where it occurs. Autistic and mentally retarded children are also capable of core moral judgement and certainly lack decent mind-reading and reasoning abilities.

2. Psychopathology - psychopaths have deficient ability for moral behavior, yet they are usually entirely capable of rational thought and reason. Unlike what I mentioned about how young children view core harm-based moral judgements, psychopaths do not make this distinction between moral rules and conventional rules (like you are required to wear your seatbelt in a car).

3. Some areas of social psychology and experimental philosophy indicate that moral judgements are made automatically and subconsciously, and that moral reasoning is an ad hoc response in most cases, and is often unable to explain the moral judgements in question.

These areas of evidence converge to support the idea that moral judgements are automatic and subconscious, and involving affective systems in the brain. Essentially, core harm-based moral judgements are automatic judgements that do result from a very limited mind-reading capability, along with some social learning, and this interacts with the emotional systems in the brain to make automatic moral judgements.

While moral reasoning can play a role in moral judgements, it does not seem to be the way moral judgements are made. Reasoning about moral judgement, if successful, seems to be able to shift a perspective to create a new automatic affective response to the situation in question.

So would an extraterrestrial species that visited us have the same moral judgements if they developed with no affective system? It seems doubtful, as psychopaths are perfectly rational yet have defective affective systems.

However, I do think that moral relativism also has problems. While certain moral judgements may seem extremely relative, such as taking the Lord's name in vain, there are certain judgements that seem essentially universal to humans, like it is morally wrong to torture and kill a child for fun. This seems strongly linked to our affective systems and aversion to seeing another person suffering. To me, it does seem that there may be a certain core of harm-based moral judgements that is fairly universal to a particular species, or homosapians in this case. This grants a relative objectivity to certain harm-based moral judgements, but does not claim absolute objectivity in that all intelligent beings would share those same moral judgements.

So where does this leave us with moral judgements with respect to harming animals? This, to me, is a rather fascinating question. While it seems that, unfortunately, harming animals as morally wrong is not yet a universal core moral judgement in humans, it does seem that this is improving. What I mean is that abusing a chicken, for example, while morally wrong to probably most people, is certainly not regarded as universally wrong as abusing a child. This seems to be of the same affective system, but simply extended to other species. And not all species share the same status, since burning ants with a magnifying glass certainly does not share the same morally wrong status as burning a dog alive for probably the vast majority of people. Perhaps this is related to some limited mind reading capability in the sense that we feel a dog suffers more than an ant, which makes harming one more affect-backed than the other.

Perhaps through science and education we may improve this situation as we start to realize the extent to which many species do indeed suffer. This information could help to then activate the affective system needed to make moral judgements about the situation. If you don't think a chicken actually suffers, and it is just a "bird brain," then you are unlikely to have your emotional system activated when you see a chicken harmed, and because of this, unlikely to judge it as morally wrong. This does seem very important, because the activation of the affective system is what makes moral judgements more salient. If one wishes to improve animal rights, it is important to educate about the richness of the lives of animals in order for people to realize how they may suffer, which activates the affective system, which then motivates people to actually wish to stop such behavior. Without this activation, it may range from apathy to intellectually acknowledging the wrongness of the abusive behavior, yet with little motivation to actually take any action. Without this motivation, who will change their diet? Or even make an effort to find humanely-raised animal products? Simply saying it is morally wrong will not accomplish this, since moral judgements are not made in that way.

But, while this is related, I think the even more interesting question relates to moral judgement regarding the killing of animals for food. Earlier we had a pretty irreconcilable difference on the moral status of killing an animal for food. I was of the opinion that morality applied to how the animals were raised and treated, and also the method of killing, but that the killing itself was not morally wrong if it was done properly. You, of course, agreed on everything leading up to the killing part (at least insofar as agreeing that mistreating animals is morally wrong), but certainly disagreed by seeing the killing for food aspect as morally wrong.

I am unsure as to the reason for this difference, so I would love to hear your thoughts on this. As I mentioned, moral reasoning can be productive if you are able to get the other person to see a different perspective that then activat so the systems needed to make a different moral judgement. I am not attempting to change your mind here, but rather interested in recognizing this difference and attempting to discuss it to hopefully gain understanding of this question.

So for sake of conversation on this question, let me pose an "ideal" situation to discuss. I understand that this is not how animal products are consumed at any significant level, and even this ideal scenario has a low probability of occurring even in such a relatively rare scenario. So please suspend disbelief in order to isolate this single issue of killing for food.

I also understand your position is that you should avoid avoidable harm, in which case you could say that my situation is wrong simply because they could eat something else, such as fruit. Because of this, I will be interested to hear your response.

Let us imagine a family that lives in a rural area, but does have access to typical grocery stores where they can find the normal variety of foods found in modern supermarkets. Both of the adults are diabetics, and as such, based on their research, they feel that a low carbohydrate diet is good treatment and that eating meat will fill them up and help to keep their blood sugar levels stable. They are, however, concerned about the meat from the grocery store and how the animals were treated. So in order to not support such practices, the father chooses to hunt for his food since he has hunted in the past. When he goes out for a hunt, he tracks down a deer and he shoots a buck squarely in the head, and it dies instantly. He then takes this deer back, has it cleaned and butchered, and the uses this for food for the next two months.

So in this scenario, was it morally wrong to kill the deer? If so, why? If the hunter essentially snuck up on the deer and shot it from a distance, and it died instantly, what suffering could be involved? We are assuming this is a lone buck. Is killing for food itself morally wrong? And if wrong, is it because you still felt that they could have chosen to avoid animal products?
 
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Hear the screams? The cries of the carrots?? Tomorrow is harvest day, and for them it's the apocalypse. Thousands will be slaughtered.

I, for one, won't support this massacre. At least not since I learned about the great belief system known as Carnism. I'm happy to announce the establishment of the First Church of Carnism. Join the Carnitarnians today! We meet every Sunday to worship life by smoking brisket. No salad allowed.

Oh and if you really are addicted to vegetables and you're having trouble adjusting to the Carnitarian diet, we also make fake vegetables out of meat. You almost can't tell the difference!
 
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