why would someone who loves meat stop eating it?

[earthminor]

You may be interested to read an article I wrote explaining why a Christian would consider vegetarianism, published in an online student blogazine.
Serving the Lord at SupperIn other news I am doing a development course at work to help work out what I want from my job and how to improve my personal life and so on. It sounded a bit dumb when I first

Comments

[lordlucless]

Basically you're saying that it's their own fault they're hungry, and our response should be agitating for political change

For certain definitions of "their", yes, it is "their" fault. Not on an individual level - a starving subsistence farmer is unlikely to have many options to improve their lot - but at a national level, that changes.

Look at famines throughout history. Almost without exception, they're caused by two things: natural disaster (blight, flood, drought) and war. Natural disasters can be prepared for, to some extent, through stock-piling - unless your government is continually selling your food to fund it's own interests. And most people generally don't start wars - it's their governments that do. Wars strip people away from engaging in agriculture, they require food they don't grow to support their armies, and they divert industry into weapon manufacture.

And I don't suggest that we should consider nothing but "political agitation". I think that stopping eating ourselves because other people don't have enough to eat, while it may have symbolic power, has little practical value. If you want to help people eat, you need to "teach them to fish", not "give them a fish" - although they made need to be given food to sustain them as they learn how to produce it themselves.

They need a calm and settled political state, so all their manpower isn't pulled out to die in battles instead of bring in the harvest. They need a government either controlled by the people, or concerned for the people, so that their resources aren't stripped from them to fund the excesses of the upper class. They need access modern agricultural techniques. They need to be educated, so they can built and maintain agricultural machinery.

There's not a fixed amount of food that the world produces, and the fact that the western world consumes more doesn't mean it's stealing it out of the mouths of the "third world". Most of the world's starving nations are producing food in a very inefficient fashion, and it's that which needs correcting more than our own consumption (although our own consumption could do with adjusting for reasons other than world starvation).

Thailand exports rice (look at your packet of Jasmine rice in the cupboard) but my sponsor child is a Thai girl whose family goes without.

Which doesn't really support the notion of going vegetarian to ease starvation. It argues for supporting local product (meat or vegetable), which I'd definitely agree with - aside from anything else, the lower transportation cost makes local much more efficient. If imported is cheaper, then it's probably a result of exploitative practices in the country of origin.

It also reinforces what I was saying earlier, about some countries' upper classes lining their own pockets at the expense of their lower classes.