Vegitarian

I am vegan.
Anyone else?

Well, yes, if you wish to know: I am a vegetarian, and have been one for a little over four years now.

Victor,

Do you believe this is the result or the cause of your obsession with violence as a means of survival? :wink:
http://gamingphilosopher.blogspot.com/2008/07/violence-in-my-games.html

My obsession (at least in my game design!) is with violence, not necessarily with violence as a means of survival–it’s just that that’s the kind of violence that is easiest to understand, easiest to buy into, and easiest to have the players commit.

Is there a link? Well, certainly, though it is not a strictly logical connection. Violence against humans is a bizarre phenomenon that we need to understand in order to diminish it, which is where my games come in. Violence against animals is a bizarre phenomenon that we don’t even need to understand in order to diminish it: we can just stop doing it. That’s where my vegetarianism comes in.

Another herbivore reporting in here.

I’m almost vegan, and probably would be if I knew how to maintain my body’s protein & calcium levels without cheese.

Been a vege all my 41 years, and I’ve encountered an extraordinary fact: being a vegetarian draws more criticism than being God fearing. 9_9

I love meat, eggs, cheese, milk and all the rest.

I don’t love our society’s unsustainable dependence on high volumes of said products.

I’m a carnivore. Take away my barbecue and I’ll shoot you :mrgreen:

On a scale from green to red, I’d be more on the green side. I don’t care that much for beef and a plain meat and bread diet.

That reminds me of that bumper sticker: “Red meat isn’t bad for you. Green, fuzzy meat is bad for you.”

I get pretty close to eating green fuzzy meat sometimes. Well, not actually, but I do love a well-aged steak or an appetizer of raw hamburger marinated in sauerkraut for a couple of days.

By the way, watch out when calling yourself a carnivore. There are people who really do eat nothing but meat. If you eat any grains, fruit or vegetables, you’re not really a carnivore.

I tried being vegetarian for about 10 years. I never quite succeeded, because the less meat I ate, the hungrier and sicker and more depressed I got.

For me, the violence involved in obtaining food to eat has been an inspiration to start writing again.

Well, just meat gets boring, that’s true. I enjoy salads and lots of fruit. I guess it’s my subconscious telling me to “healthen-up” as I get older. Cholesterol and high blood pressure is looming in the horizon :laughing:

That reminds me, we once decapitated a rooster at my grandparents’ farm to cook for dinner. I guess it’s because the guilt lasted only about a day or so that I refer to myself as a carnivore.

Also, my cat seems to like bread. But cats are still referred to as being carnivores.

For some people, I suppose! :laughing:

That’s a funny thing. I thought I was getting older (at 27!). For me, the “healthen-up” message came as cravings for fatty, juicy beef. By the time I reached 33, I had given in and suddenly I looked and felt ten years younger. Now my cholesterol is 375, but it’s all good cholesterol. My triglycerides are rock bottom.

That’s true - the designations aren’t as clear-cut as you might think. Cows eat meat sometimes, too!

youtube.com/watch?v=R9vxHN8_jSE

I support veganism and vegetarianism on ethical grounds, but sadly don’t practice it myself. It’s all a bit weird, come to think of it.

My view of cats is a bit different. With six of them currently ruling the house, I think it comes with the territory. If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s this: the measure of a cat is in its weirdness.

Any cat should be comfortably weird and luckily, ours are. From a strange craving for plastic bags (tasty tasty. om nom. oh god, gotta hurl) to a male cat convinced he’s a 3-week old kitten and oblivious to his body weight of 7 kilo pure muscle, we are safe in the knowledge that life in this apartment is often surprising, occasionally life-threatening, but never boring.

I support people doing what they believe is morally right. For me, the question of what is morally right to eat does not have such a simple answer.

True, ethical questions rarely are that simple. I would add the qualifier that I’m not judging anyone here; I simply regret (on a personal level) that I’ve yet to break what I see as tacit support for a practise I loathe, i.e. the meat industry.

It’s true, the “meat industry” in the sense of concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is pretty horrific. If that’s where you’re getting your meat, then I think you’re right to have regrets. But that’s not the only way to get meat.

In my view, the “meat industry” is really just a part of the “food industry,” and all of it is deeply questionable.

I for one never mix ethics with dinner. Although I minimize the amount of red meat I eat, it’s for health reasons. Maybe once in six months I’ll have something, because it’s full of iron, but that’s about it. Too much red meat makes me prone to anger for some reason.

But I eat chicken, salmon, and tuna pretty regularly. Chicken is ubiquitous, and in Seattle so is salmon. Tuna is lower on the food chain so it collects less pollutants like mercury. I think an episode of the Simpsons mentioned religious unity in the context of peace and chicken. (It being the meat all(?) major religions allow.)

Otherwise, yeah, I hit the veggies pretty hard. The veggie sandwich at the local Subway (a sandwich restaurant) I practically classify as preventative medicine. I’m also in my mid-thirties; I was more of a carnivore when younger and growing up in the american midwest.

The same thing happened to me, except it was too much wheat. I had to give up all grains and dairy, but my mood improved a lot after that. I also got less clumsy, would you believe.

I would. I do yoga in the evening, and my diet that day dramatically affects my abilities. I once had a big spaghetti dinner about a half hour before class, and I basically exploded in sweat, was shaky, kept losing my balance, etc. Instructor says carbs (and protein) take a lot of water to digest, and a lot of the body’s energy, leaving very little left over for the voluntary muscles. Wheat is obviously nearly pure carbs, and the only thing that has more protein in it than dairy is meat. Combine that with a bit of the natural dehydration that results from a lifestyle that tends toward caffeine, or (for men) just from mornings, and you’ve a perfect storm of mess-you-up. Veggies & fruit both tend to have a lot of water in them, as a general rule.

I think it is dehydration that sets off my anger. I know I can’t have caffeine in the morning unless I’ve had three full glasses of water, or one of those big Gatorades that won’t fit in a car’s cup holder. Likewise with dairy: even though milk has no caffeine in it, since it’s high protein, I must have a lot of water in the morning before drinking it or else I will murder my coworkers.

Dehydration could be a factor, but I know that’s not all it was for me. I didn’t go low-carb right away after giving up wheat. Initially I replaced wheat with rice and potatoes - but they didn’t make me clumsy. It was the gluten, the protein in wheat, that was causing the problem. Another reason I know it wasn’t only dehydration was that the effect lasts for weeks. If I get “glutened,” it takes about two weeks for the symptoms to go away again. It became much more obvious when I stopped regularly exposing myself to it.

Gluten and casein (a protein found in milk) both have components called opioid peptides that can cross the blood-brain barrier and have a morphine-like effect. I’ve been told that spinach has something like that too. (!) Someone with a healthy digestive system shouldn’t experience any problems because the proteins are supposed to be broken down in the gut, but in someone who has a “leaky gut,” they can escape through the intestinal lining intact and enter the bloodstream. In some people, the opioid peptides in gluten can cause clumsiness, a condition they call “gluten ataxia.” Advanced stages of gluten ataxia can involve brain damage, blindness, and death.

Oh wow, then yeah. Sorry, I assumed you were normal! :stuck_out_tongue: I have a friend who must have a gluten-free diet same way. I’d never heard of gluten before meeting her, now I see gluten-free labels on packaging everywhere. And a friend’s wife is lactose intolerant, making our periodic pizza parties logistically interesting.

But yeah, long story short: diet can do things for you, or do things to you.