Food, food, food.

[the_grynne]

It's World Vegetarian Week, and Bruce Friedrich give top 10 reasons why you should go vegetarian:
'A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." In just one example, eating

Comments

[dorukai]

Interesting points.

Looking back on some of the cooking shows, almost all chefs wax lyrical on going to farms and buying produce directly, and the freshness and quality of all foods being critically important.

I love eggs! Unfortunately they give me bowel irritation, but hey, small price to pay for something so tasty :)

Where do you sit in the debate? Enough posting contraversial links without including your thoughts ;-)

[the_grynne]

I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't think I could be convinced into going so far as to become a vegetarian, but I think they're a positive minority force in general and make some really good points, ethically and environmentally. I believe in diverse, balanced eating, and a small amount of animal produce is a part of that. I agree with a lot of the beliefs behind the slow food movement. I think fast food is a rip off, and just being in a McDonald's makes me incredibly depressed. I'm angry that family life and eating habits have become such that so many young people in particular don't know how to enjoy good food, and can't connect what they eat with the fact that it was a living animal.

[blacksquirrel]

So true! Every bit

I remember, growing up, that we lived in the city but my family went apple picking every year. When my school class went apple picking in second grade, I thought this was totally normal, but several other students were totally unaware until that day that *apples grow on trees*

Total alienation from real food.

[the_grynne]

Traditional cultures have this relationship of respect to what they eat - whether it be animals or produce. They might worship it, elevate it totemically or in art. I always think of Ted and Terry, in the writers' commentary to Pirates of the Caribbean 2, talking about how the Japanese and the American Indians thought the bear and the buffalo respectively were the gods in human form, and by killing the animal, they were releasing it from its mortal prison. By all means eat it, but understand where it came from and how it has its own separate value.

[the_grynne]

When I read that statement, I knew I had to quote it. :) Good food ought to be one of the most basic life-sustaining pleasures, and not just an afterthought.