Are vegetarians the moral, peace-loving, cruelty-free enemies of the meat-eater? Or a bunch of kooks living in la-la land?

How about neither? Some of us are simply people who don't eat meat. Why does everything have to be a crusade?

To address a previous comment:

Although the ultimate privilege would be having sufficient arable land and time to harvest one's own food source, I would suggest that being a vegetarian is attainable only by those rich enough to afford a diet of fresh fruits, vegetables and soy products

I'm gonna have to call BS on this one. I'm a vegetarian - have been all my life - and I've worked minimum wage jobs just like most other folk have, at least when I was younger.

Vegetarian does not imply "natural, health food junkie, organic, bran filled," type food. It simply means food without meat. It means that instead of eating a McDonalds burger, you have a Taco Bell burrito instead. Or when you go to Subway, you get a meatless sub (cheaper in the 12" than some of the meaty 6" versions). Its easy to eat vegetarian on a very limited budget.

Hell, for that matter if you're truly poor, flour rice and beans cost almost nothing. You're not aiming to get the bulk of your calories from asparagus after all.

I only eat meat prepared by immigrants...ie a lower life form degrades themselves by the destruction of sentient life for my pleasure.

I've seen it go both ways. My girlfriend's family gave her a needlessly hard time for quietly opting to eat side dishes at Thanksgiving, and I've gotten unbelievable and unsolicited lectures from vegetarian coworkers.

To me, it seems like people under a certain age accept vegetarians without question, so I always assume that older vegetarians have had to put up with a bunch of bullshit in their lives.

But it's no excuse for getting sanctimonious with me. What makes pushy vegetarians even worse than pushy carnivores is that they equate their diet with some kind of moral quality, whereas the carnivores are more often puzzled by the drive to deny oneself something good and sustaining.

Those are both shallow beliefs, but the veggie one really knocks it out of the park in terms of obnoxiousness. If the eating of animals is really immoral, then there's no reason to differentiate between human-animal consumption and animal-animal consumption. We need to airlift kibble to the Sahara!

But if it's an aesthetic issue (albeit one with global economic and ecological implications), then lay off me. And my cultural heritage, if that'll do the trick.

If we're not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

Only I allow women to touch my meat as well.

First of all, It is obvious that many of the people here have no real knowledge of agriculture, other than what they have learned from pop culture. I grew up on a hog farm. Yes, its what some might call and industrial farm, our hogs never touch the dirt. However, in countries that have outlawed pig slats, the pork industry has died. It is economicly impossible to free range pigs in todays world. Average wholesale prices for most agricultural commodities have not risen since the 70's! I don't mean that they have just kept up with inflation, I mean that they haven't risen much at all! This while costs have gone up a great deal.

I have several friends who are vegitarians, my roomate was once a vegan, but too much of this debate is without a real understanding of the realities of rural life. This is why we on the left are charectured as out of touch city-slickers in rural areas, especially by educated rural Americans.

Vagitarian

The most absurd vegan arguments always come back to some version of Jainist morality--that killing is immoral etc. This vertebrae-centric view of life and the soul troubles me. Does a cow have a hierarchically determined better soul than a thousand-year old Redwood? Does celery know of its imminent demise when it is cracked away from the stalk? These are religious questions and vegan moralists are being arrogant puritans when they insist they know the answer. Sounds like fundamentalist horsecrap and I have always found hanging out with the Bible freaks and the Tofu purists to be remarkably similar...and annoying.

To live is to kill--that is all there is whether it is a carrot or a fish. We can do whatever we can to try to be humble about this affliction called life, but to be ethically pure is impossible and creates people with unresolvable contradictions. No to impersonal farming but equally no to the food righteous.

As a 10 year vegetarian, lifelong poor, rurally raised person, I have to tell you that choosing a meat-free lifestyle isn't about being sanctimonious, or rich, or a "city slicker", it's about a personal consideration and a personal response to the various practicies of the meat industry. It is common that when people find out I'm a vegetarian, they get on the defensive and start attacking vegetarianism, despite the fact that I keep my choice to myself and am careful to avoid rhetoric when I explain why I choose to live without meat and animal products. Why is that?

This has been my experience with some of the more militant vegetarians.

Now I pay more attention to the story of Cain and Abel. The world's first vegetarian was also the world's first murderer.

Cain and Abel has a whole new significance for me now. I get it! Vegetarians get cranky, boy do they get cranky!

In this article on the history of vegetarianism, Ms. Miller included this quote: 'One of Cheyne's more celebrated patients was the publisher Samuel Richardson, who would later go on to write "Pamela," the first novel in the English language.'

Mr. Richardson's novel was published in 1740. Daniel Defoe published 'Moll Flanders' almost 20 years earlier. I would submit that Mr Defoe's work is considered by most to be 'the first novel in the English language'.

FWIW, I eat meat & think humans are designed to eat meat as part of their diet. I do despair over how these poor animals are treated as they are slaughtered. When I eat vegtables (which is every day), I try to only eat fresh ones (canned anything has very high sodium levels).

If in some future time we are able to create honest-to-God meat that is fit for human consumption, without having to kill any animals, I think that would be a great ethical leap forward.