[News]: Scientists Are Sadistics, Arrogant, Cruel, Etc. - ScienceBlogs

And kicking me. For some reason these two lads on this website keep supporting me. I had intended to write them a big thanks, as they have gone out of their way to defend me in the past. I don't know if either is a member of TONMO. Does anyone know?
 
Without meaning to offend any of the more reasonable vegan-types out there, as I've been good friends with numerous examples over the decades, this is something that I've found is unfortunately typical of some of the more extreme, fierce-eyed screaming fanatics. Particularly among college students who were happily eating bacon and eggs with their parents and applying animal-tested cosmetics just the year before when in K-12. Just my jaded observation, and also, good of those two lads who have been defending you, Steve. Any attack on you is an attack on everybody here.
 
erich orser;92011 said:
Particularly among college students who were happily eating bacon and eggs with their parents and applying animal-tested cosmetics just the year before when in K-12.

I've known way too many 'oh, i only eat chicken, maybe salmon' types....
 
I had a couple of Erich's vegan friends staying with us for a couple of weeks, (along with 3 or 4 regular omnivores) and believe me, they didn't EVER eat chicken or salmon....one of them was even allergic to soy products! Boy was planning meals fun! :banghead:
 
this past year, only one of the captains and i were the only people (the chefs varied by cruise so i'm discounting them) who ate normal.... allergies, veganism, fad diets, unrational dislikes of generic food... you name it.... i felt sorry for the chefs....

i like to pride myself as an omnivore, but this captain had me beat.... any fish we caught in our free time (we keep a few rods aboard) i think he had at least tried, if not liked the roe.... but since he kept the 2nd and 4th watches, i guess i can understand the desire for something interesting for an O'dark-thirty snack... besides, he's a cool cat...
 
Man is a scavenger who augments his diet with nuts and fruits, in case we've forgotten. This is why we mostly eat dead animals, some considerable time after their death (21-28 days for US prime corn fed angus). We get our veggies by eating the animal's stomach contents, henceforth almost always vegetarians, as we can not digest greens unaided; haggis entertains this concept to this very day. Since the "invention" of fire and cooking, things became a lot more culinarily challenging :biggrin2:

Fish is a very recent addition to our diet and according to some people I've spoken to, I'm all wrong about poultry being part of the animal kingdom, after all...
 
ob;92068 said:
Man is a scavenger who augments his diet with nuts and fruits, in case we've forgotten. This is why we mostly eat dead animals, some considerable time after their death (21-28 days for US prime corn fed angus). We get our veggies by eating the animal's stomach contents, henceforth almost always vegetarians, as we can not digest greens unaided; haggis entertains this concept to this very day. Since the "invention" of fire and cooking, things became a lot more culinarily challenging :biggrin2:

Fish is a very recent addition to our diet and according to some people I've spoken to, I'm all wrong about poultry being part of the animal kingdom, after all...

Feh, our immune system and toxin tolerance is far inadequate for us to be proper scavengers. We're far more prone to food poisoning than most rodents, cats, dogs, bears, raccoons, vultures, crows, etc. And, although the "aged" meat example is real in modern usage, a lot of cultures, particularly pre-refrigeration, also but a lot of value on freshness, and we came up with all sorts of spices and preservation techniques to reduce the intrinsic distaste for meat that's been sitting around. Also, although yuppy steak dealers may push aged meat, they do it in sort of an abstract way; in supermarkets, at least in the US, people go for the red, fresh-looking meat, to the point where companies inject carbon monoxide into the meat before sealing it in plastic, so it continues to look red and bloody/fresh for longer.

We're certainly not good ruminants either, particularly in the grass digestion department but also in regards to some grains, but I don't think our ancestors were equipped to have been carrion-eaters. Our molars are good for some level of nut and grain crunching, and we seem to have a strong taste for fruits and legumes. Digestively, I don't think we have any problems with fresh meat, either, although cooking probably led to a big meat-directed shift in diet because it was able to eliminate parasites and pathogens... and it does open us up to some grains that are inedible without treatment, both from a digestion standpoint and by denaturing toxic proteins and such.

It's surprising we have more of an aversion to eating bugs than most primates. I wonder if that's a more immediate cultural factor because insects are an indicator of unhealthy storage conditions for food, more than because they're not good for us to eat.

Unfortunately, it's pretty much in the nature of being an animal that we can't live without exploiting something. I can understand the vegetarian rationale that it seems more noble to live by only exploiting things that don't have enough awareness that they'll miss being alive, though. But not enough that I eschew tasty meat.

I suspect that over the next few hundred years we can get to the point where we can make engineered "meat-fruit plants," and at that point that rationale might shift me away from meat consumption, particularly since large-scale animal farming has gotten rather cruel, irresponsible, and just full of bad practices from overcrowding, questionable overuse of antibiotics and unnatural dietary supplements, poor waste management, and selective breeding to the point where genetic diversity in livestock (and vegetable & grain stocks, for that matter) is absurdly low.

As long as I'm going off on tangents, I'll also mention that most of the arguments against GMOs also apply to things that are done in both plant and animal farming all the time: producing artificial stocks that have stupid characteristics, and eliminating the established evolved stocks from the wild. Being an overall cynic, I am frustrated that the alternative to this, organic foods, tends to be plagued by irrational ideas like "it's good to be a luddite" and "any modern farming technique is inherently bad, including sterilization, refrigeration, and sensible packaging" so I'm not too big on that... Organic farming seems to frequently take the attitude that all modern agriculture is inherently bad, even though modernization, while certainly causing some horrible problems, has also reduced the levels of foodborne illnesses dramatically since the 19th century and has allowed us to scale up food production to the point where it's much more economically feasible for modern populations. Choosing between mainstream agribusiness and organic is as bad, at least in the US, as choosing between Republicans and Democrats: they're all based on fanatical loyalty to poorly-thought-out, naive "platforms."
 
My, that was a good rant. :biggrin2: If possible, I try to get free range organic meat,eggs, etc. Partly because I don't like the idea of ingesting unnecessary hormones, antibiotics,and never thought that chemical pesticides and fertilizers were good food additives. I also think that organically grown vegies taste better, there is something about being grown in healthy soil, properly nurtured by the addition of composted vegetative wastes, instead of depleted soil that has been chemically enhanced, that brings out the best of the natural flavors. From a moral point of view, even though our supermarket meat is packaged so nicely that many people can go their entire lives and never really think about the animal the meat came from, you don't grow up in the country, and pluck and clean the chickens that were happily scratching and pecking only minutes before, without being being aware. (And I'll NEVER forget the awful smell of hot wet feathers!) But that too is something that I think about. Those chickens WERE happily scratching and pecking, and led normal chicken lives up until the the moment of their untimely deaths. They weren't crammed in cages with their beaks cut off, being bombarded with the feces of those chicken caged above them, which of course requires the addition of antibiotics to their food to keep them alive long enough to get them slaughtered and on the table........and have you ever had to routinely drive by a cattle feed lot? That stench is not just the smell of manure. With the crowding that takes place weak or sick animals collapse and get trampled. That's also the smell of rotting meat. Lovely. Factory farming causes lots of problems. The pfisteria that killed so many fish in the Chesapeake Bay (and sickened a lot of the watermen too) was probably caused by the improper containment and treatment of waste from the chicken factories on the eastern shore. The problems caused by the factory farmed pigs in Virginia and the Carolinas are notoriously well known.

I'll take organic over factory farmed any day.
 
I've heard that in reality a lot of "free range" livestock doesn't have appreciably better living conditions. Instead of living in small chicken coops, a free range chicken might live at the same disgusting population density in a large facility. The farm can still call itself free range and sell to companies like Whole Foods, which to some degree are complicit.
 

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