I usually eat vegetarian, but get rundown without any meat in my diet now that I am in my 50's. So I get a ham slice from the best source I can and it lasts for a week, adding just enough flavor and protein to keep me going. And, a tomato sandwich is barren without a slice or two of bacon!

I just went on a farm tour last month (WNC) and there were several farms with free-range pigs, happily nesting under big weedy shrubs with a passel of piglets. Maybe meat is too expensive to eat every day, and unhealthy in excess, but there are more and more family farms offering ethically-raised animals for those who appreciate them.

Does anyone else find it ironic that just days after featuring a book lampooning the self-congratulatory habits of left-leaning upper-middle-class white people, Salon launched a whole week dedicated to assuring left-leaning upper-middle-class white people that they are somehow doing a good thing by paying more for their dead pig flesh?

Sorry, kids. There is no such thing as "ethical" or "humane" meat. Some farms may be less inhumane than others, but in the end, we don't need meat to live, so how can it be considered ethical in any way to choose to violently take the life of another conscious being simply because you want to eat her body? It's really just that simple -- just because you want to do something doesn't make it morally justifiable, even if it's legal.

I hope that the National Pork Council (or whomever was underwriting this whole godforsaken enterprise) got their money's worth. As for me, if it weren't for Glenn Greenwald, I'm not sure I would still even be visiting Salon at all anymore.

P.S. -- If you don't want to hear this kind of thing, then don't provoke it by running a whole week of unbalanced "Hey, it's great to kill pigs!" stories. It's unreasonable to expect that compassionate people are going to just shut up and ignore that anymore.

Woof, woof! Yum, yum!

"Harvesting an animal is not a pretty thing. But it's a necessary thing"

Thats debatable.

Another article that confirms that most people's so-called "appreciation" of farm animals goes no further than their stomachs. Have you ever interacted with a pig in any way other than to chew and swallow their flesh? Try it sometime. Pigs are wonderful and magical, as you might find if you spent five minutes with one. Wouldn't interacting with the living creature make for "a more meaningful connection to the food we eat," or is this just a trendy, utterly insincere catchphrase that meat-eaters like to use to soothe themselves into a serene, guiltless vision of delicious, expensive, "ethical" meats, going so far as to use words like "peaceful" and "reverent" to describe the slaughtering of the pigs. Wow, who are you fooling? Thousands of people who'd rather buy into a bunch of feel-good mumbo jumbo than even explore vegetarianism, sure, but not the pigs.

If you want to cover Real pig-appreciation, take a look at Farm Sanctuary's recent rescue of pigs from the midwestern floods. http://www.farmsanctuary.org/mediacenter/2008/pr_pig_rescue_end08.html

You write that "There is no such thing as "ethical" or "humane" meat." Just because something is not necessary to survival doesn't mean that doing it is unethical. We don't need indoor plumbing either, but using indoor plumbing is not unethical. I argue quite the opposite - there's no such thing as "unethical" when it comes to eating meat. There is indeed such a thing as "inhumane" treatment of animals, but that comes from our ability to understand suffering and death, not something innate in the animal. Pigs evolved as a food species long before humans started eating them. Pigs are low on the food chain; humans are high on the food chain. We are natural hunters; they are natural prey. They have not evolved the ability to contemplate their existence; we have. So choosing vegetarianism is just that - a choice. It is not a moral or evolutionary imperative. We are the only predatory species that has evolved the ability to domesticate its prey, so along with that we have a responsibility to minimize suffering. Eating meat is not immoral, its amoral. Every argument I have seen for ethical vegetarianism includes something along the line of "if you've witnessed the horrors of industrial slaughterhouses, you would never eat meat again." Most of the meat eaters who have responded here are in full agreement that industrial slaughterhouses, and in fact industrial animal husbandry in general, have become inhumane. That doesn't make the actual act of killing and eating an animal inhumane. The death of an animal for food is part of the food web in the world in which we live. As rational humans, we have much more of an ability to minimize suffering than does a wolf or a bear. But it doens't mean we aren't like a wolf or a bear. We have still evolved physically to eat meat. To say that a human doesn't need to eat meat is only to acknowledge that we have figured out scientificly how to replace nutrients in meat with a variety of sources from the plant world. We could also replace much of our consumption of plant matter with nutrient pills and bulk fiber and carbs, thus saving vast tracts of land from industrial farming. But it would make for a poor existence indeed. Better to attempt to improve our farming techniques to reduce our impact. Many of the arguments pro and con are simply red herrings in the debate (what about eating dogs? What about all those helpless bacteria you kill every time you shower? Isn't mankind aging genocide against viruses, mosquitoes, etc.? What about your leather shoes and wallet?) These arguments are really just distractions and don't do justice to those who decide to eat or not eat meat. Attitudes of superiority on either side are really as ridiculous as the Christian and Muslim who argue about which religion is superior.