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Post by tapati on Nov 4, 2009 3:49:18 GMT -5
it's not too difficult for a healthy person to eat well as a vegetarian, but vegan can be difficult without the right knowledge. all the vegans I know look sort of.... translucent... which doesn't seem healthy to me. personally I wouldn't mind reducing the meat I eat to just the meat we get from other people's hunting trips. it tastes better than farmed food, and has a much lower environmental impact. can't give up on meat entirely though, since I tend to bouts of Iron deficiency anemia, and no amount of spinach has ever helped with that. I have known healthy vegans but they're the ones that studied carefully how to address all of their dietary needs. Floradix has helped me get my iron level to normal, it is a liquid supplement you can find in health food stores. I think hunted meat is much healthier, lower in fat, and more humane than factory farmed any day.
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Post by tapati on Nov 4, 2009 3:51:01 GMT -5
I would too but first we have to reduce our consumption as a society! Humane methods would never keep up with the current demand and meat would become very, very expensive. Our health and our planet are crying out for people to reduce the amount of meat they eat. I agree. And it would automatically reduce consumption if it became more expensive... and I'll stop now before this starts looking like the Evil Vegan Overlord Manifesto. ;D That would reduce consumption but I'd worry about people living in poverty who don't know how to go vegetarian and would try to buy meat at the higher price to the detriment of their overall food budget. I think education is the way to help people start to reduce consumption. I'd love to see school lunches as a model for this new way of eating! (Plus getting the junk food out of schools.)
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Post by grandmalou on Nov 4, 2009 7:18:19 GMT -5
Good morning, Tapati... I am really enjoying your posts on vegetarianism. As a little girl I used to hide any meat my mother or grandparents would put on my plate...once hiding it in the area around an unfinished window sill...Mom caught on when a bazillion ants came out of there...YIKES! Later on, in my teens, I figured out that if I didn't eat some meat, I would come near to passing out...way later found out I am hypoglycemic. So is Vyckie...we get really weird if our blood sugar gets too low. BLECH! This sentence, however, grabbed my attention just now: "I think hunted meat is much healthier, lower in fat, and more humane than factory farmed any day. " A few years ago, here in Nebraska, deer were found to have "Mad Cow Disease"...at least that's what the media said. I have my own theory about that...the deer eat the corn that's in our fields...all heavily sprayed with herbicides, pesticides, and any other form of genocide you can name...then they get sick. Imagine this stuff also in all our grain-fed cattle! Well, it's enough to make a person quickly decide to become vegan, for sure...plus the fact of all those little critters giving up their lives for us.
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jeb
Junior Member
Posts: 97
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Post by jeb on Nov 4, 2009 7:53:33 GMT -5
Tapati: Your post about your folks reminded me of my business partner in Mississippi in the 80's. He seemed to be mortally offended by my not eating meat. So he asked me to be the guest speaker at a dinner an association that he belonged to was giving and then he scheduled it at the Conestoga Steak House! I guess he thought that would stymie my non-meat-eating, eh? Well I had a lovely baked potato and a salad and a great piece of pie and was totally satisfied. And that made him sooooo mad . . that he got drunk! Gives me a fit of the giggles even after all these years. ;D And you're right . . . some folks just can't hardly abide any deviation from the norm . . . . . what EVER that is in that particular place and time. Anyway, enjoy your day. John
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Post by rosa on Nov 4, 2009 10:25:33 GMT -5
I've never been a vegetarian but my social & political circles include a lot of veg*ns, and I mostly learned to cook from Food Not Bombs, which is vegan. I had a roomate who called us "culturally vegetarian" because we ate kale It's not any harder to be a healthy vegan than a healthy meat eater, but some people use ethical dietary restrictions to cover up severe caloric deficit diets or eating disorders. We're up to 2 meat meals a week, sometimes 3, because they're super easy meals, but it kills my grocery budget. I guess that's the price of convenience. Having kids makes it harder, too - I hear stories online about happy vegetarian kids but all the vegetarian parents I actually know, their kids totally cheat - my goddessdaughter's parents are a mixed marriage (veg & carnivore) and when we go out for dinner, if her dad has meat on his plate she begs for it like a little bird. Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat! (she's 2). I have friends who were lifetime vegetarians but started eating meat because their son is allergic to so many things, having another limit on what they could cook made it too hard for them. Every once in a while my son, who's four, starts talking about how mean it is to kill animals, and I say "well, we could stop eating animal foods." and he thinks about it for a minute and says "no." We're getting chickens this spring I think, and we'll see if that changes his mind about eating chickens...but he's perfectly happy fishing & then eating the fish, so I kind of doubt it
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em
Full Member
Posts: 176
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Post by em on Nov 4, 2009 12:41:42 GMT -5
Tapati: Your post about your folks reminded me of my business partner in Mississippi in the 80's. He seemed to be mortally offended by my not eating meat. So he asked me to be the guest speaker at a dinner an association that he belonged to was giving and then he scheduled it at the Conestoga Steak House! I guess he thought that would stymie my non-meat-eating, eh? Well I had a lovely baked potato and a salad and a great piece of pie and was totally satisfied. And that made him sooooo mad . . that he got drunk! Gives me a fit of the giggles even after all these years. ;D And you're right . . . some folks just can't hardly abide any deviation from the norm . . . . . what EVER that is in that particular place and time. Anyway, enjoy your day. John Haha, that's hilarious, John. I just don't get it. Who gives a damn what anybody else eats or doesn't? (Unless a good friend is starving themselves or something) And PETA really had a campaign about meat making you fat? Seriously? Do they not realize veggies aren't necessarily not going to keep you skinny? (If you load them up with butter, cheese, heavy cream sauces, excess sugar they're going to make you put on weight, duh) Or that genetics play a role? Absolutely ridiculous. But why am I surprised, it's PETA. Don't get me wrong, I am all for being good and kind to animals and I think that's important, but they're just ridiculous and go about it all the wrong way. (Sorry, I have some serious issues with them and find them kind of awful. Baaaaaaaaad experience from high school.)
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Post by km on Nov 4, 2009 15:09:51 GMT -5
I've never been a vegetarian but my social & political circles include a lot of veg*ns, and I mostly learned to cook from Food Not Bombs, which is vegan. I had a roomate who called us "culturally vegetarian" because we ate kale It's not any harder to be a healthy vegan than a healthy meat eater, but some people use ethical dietary restrictions to cover up severe caloric deficit diets or eating disorders. We're up to 2 meat meals a week, sometimes 3, because they're super easy meals, but it kills my grocery budget. I guess that's the price of convenience. This is pretty much how I eat as well. Most of my friends are vegan, so I just got comfortable cooking for vegans, and I don't really think much about it anymore. As for children who are vegetarians--I think the really hard thing is to have children who are vegans. A number of my Indian friends were raised vegetarian, and they're perfectly fine, happy, and healthy individuals. I've met several vegetarians who were raised by hippies, and they seem fine too. If it's something you want to do, I don't think it's intrinsically bad for kids.
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Post by km on Nov 4, 2009 15:11:57 GMT -5
And PETA really had a campaign about meat making you fat? Seriously? Do they not realize veggies aren't necessarily not going to keep you skinny? (If you load them up with butter, cheese, heavy cream sauces, excess sugar they're going to make you put on weight, duh) Or that genetics play a role? Absolutely ridiculous. But why am I surprised, it's PETA. Don't get me wrong, I am all for being good and kind to animals and I think that's important, but they're just ridiculous and go about it all the wrong way. (Sorry, I have some serious issues with them and find them kind of awful. Baaaaaaaaad experience from high school.) Yeah, their campaigns in at least the past ten or so years that I can remember have been increasingly offensive. Not only fatphobic, but often extremely sexist or overtly racist. They're basically an animal rights organization, as far as I can tell, because they don't actually like *people* very much.
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Post by rosa on Nov 4, 2009 15:15:04 GMT -5
I don't think it's bad for kids, but it is hard - in fact, a number of my raised-vegetarian friends have asked for help cooking meat, now that they have little kids of their own, because their kids ask for it. We had a roomate whose goddaughter's parents were fierce vegans, and the little girl was vegan...except she decided she didn't believe us that marshmallows weren't vegan and she really wanted them anyway. For us, we eat a lot of whole foods, did cloth diapering at home, etc - but when my son started daycare it was just about impossible (and def. distance & cost prohibitive) to find a daycare that served healthy foods or was willing to use cloth diapers. There's a combination of social infrastructure and kids having their own wants that makes those kinds of restrictions difficult to propagate - that's part of why the extreme Christians are such advocates of homeschooling.
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Post by The Anonymouse on Nov 4, 2009 16:55:33 GMT -5
That would reduce consumption but I'd worry about people living in poverty who don't know how to go vegetarian and would try to buy meat at the higher price to the detriment of their overall food budget. I think education is the way to help people start to reduce consumption. I'd love to see school lunches as a model for this new way of eating! (Plus getting the junk food out of schools.) Absolutely, education is always the key to change. But I'm not so sure that poor people would rob the rest of their food budget just to have a hamburger - at least, not if there were tasty and affordable alternatives. If meat became too expensive, more fast food and low-mid price restaurants would start offering vegetarian analogues on their menus, and things like seitan "steaks" and tempeh would start appearing in grocery freezer cases. Or, people might start poaching cows. I don't know. I'm not precognitive nor am I that wise. I'm just a crazy old cat lady with opinions. ;D
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Post by asteli on Nov 6, 2009 1:12:47 GMT -5
The thing is, in Western diets there is often too much meat eaten per meal, and per day, when compared to more optimal diets around the world. So one doesn't even need to do meatless meals, but rather reduce the portions a bit. So maybe eggs without bacon for breakfast, fish with lunch, and a little meat in a stew for dinner--plenty of protein there. That's actually more meat than we eat most days. We eat way too many carbs & quite a bit of peanut butter. Our main meat the last few weeks is shrimp. For some reason lately I feel like we've been having pasta & sauce or shrimp casserole every night.
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