[limsup]

We can live perfectly healthy lives without meat. That said, I have no problem killing an animal that lived a full non-tortured life for food. I do think we owe more than buying the expensive whole foods meat. I think we should all go through the experience of killing a cow, pig, lamb, and chicken. Killing animals shouldn't be completely abstracted away from society - we need to understand what we are doing in a hands on way.

[voidlogic]

>>We can live perfectly healthy lives without meat.

Perhaps and with great care a diligence. Ask anyone who has tried to body build vegan, getting complete ammino acids takes planing. All the reverted vegans I know say they feel much better now. And being a vegan can be more unhealthy if you replaced the meat that was in your diet with carbs/sugars.

It is far more healthy to eat a diet without grain/carbs IMHO if you are choosing one thing to improve health.

Want to be in fat burning mode (ketonic)? Done. Want to cure your type II diabetes? Done. Want to lower your blood pressure? Done. Want to raise your HDL and lower your triglycerides? Done. Want to lower your cancer risk (est. 60-90% of tumors can't run off ketone bodies, but require sugars)? Done. Want to have better dental health? Done. Want to have consistent energy all day? Done.

Based on everything I have read and learned it is my strong (but open to change) opinion that the natural human diet was consistent daily consumption of vegetables/leafy greens (esp. low starch ones), occasional fruit and occasional gluttonous consumption of animal products as community members made kills.

That is to say, I think humans evolved for a ketogenic diet (< 20 grams of carbs/day) and that is why it makes so many people healthier, independent of choosing to have a caloric deficit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/

[voidlogic]

>Killing animals shouldn't be completely abstracted away from society - we need to understand what we are doing in a hands on way.

I agree, but I think its worth pointing out that in many parts of the country (esp. the non-costal areas), much of the population has shot and cleaned a deer, turkey, etc.

So to assume in modern America that this kind of intimacy with death is universally abstracted would be a mistake. After all an estimated 43.7 million Americans hunted last year [1].

1: http://www.conservationforce.org/role4.html

[SoftwareMaven]

I want to second my agreement, but expand it to all aspects of the diet. I think having gardens and chickens (mostly for eggs, but in the pot when no longer producing) would do more for the health and mental well-being of our society than just about anything else we could do. Many kids don't know what kind of fruit/veggie something is without looking at the label. My high school daughter has a friend who just had her first banana; she's never eaten spinach.

[meowface]

>That said, I have no problem killing an animal that lived a full non-tortured life for food.

How does this logic work though? If you knew perhaps that an animal would see a natural death in a few hours, then killing it and eating it before it died its natural death would be ethical. But those conditions are very rare.

So how can you possibly know if an animal lived a "full" life before killing it?

The other option is only eating animals that have died of natural causes or were euthanized during the course of a terminal illness, but obviously this is not practical for health and flavor reasons.