The question of meat morality

[Splooge]

I'm a person who has eaten meat throughout my life. Growing up it was second nature. Beef, Chicken, Pork, Turkey, and even more exotic cuisine such as lamb, oysters, elk, venision, squirrel, frog legs, alligator, and a vast array of sea food were common meals. I just considered it a valid method of gaining protein just as the food pyramid claims.

At a later point I began to experiment with veganism, a diet that changed my perspective on nutrition. I became hyper aware of the negative effects of junk food. I've experimented with many diets but today I simply avoid all GMO, most meat, all junk food and prepackaged items, and try to eat as well rounded and healthy as I can, with occasional consumption of meat. Health is my main motive for my choices and not morality.

Let's pose a question regarding the Morality of Meat. Is it immoral that we have a factory farm industry which raises generation after generation of cattle fed with the same corn feed, all butchered to serve fat americans buying instant hamburgers? If it is, then maybe we can sate humanity's apparent lust for the flesh of cows with sci-fi technology capable of providing the meat and thus sparing the cow.
In the Star Trek universe, there is a device called a replicator. It's function is decompiling inorganic matter and recompiling it into food. Basically, it can automatically create any dish you want. You can create a steak, that tastes like real steak, and is identical to a real steak on a molecular level, but did not originate from a real animal.
My question is, if you had a device like the replicator actually existed, would you use it to eat meat humanely even if yoy are currently vegan? Could this be an invention worth actually creating?

 

[Nekodaiden]

My question is, if you had a device like the replicator actually existed, would you use it to eat meat humanely even if yoy are currently vegan? Could this be an invention worth actually creating?

Nope, I wouldn't bother. Even if the replicator was free and the power to use it was free or minimal. I don't want the negative effects from animal products and the replicator meat would still have them. Saturated animal fat, cholesterol, Neu5gc, heme iron, TMAO, Bacteroides bacteria prevalence over Prevotella, constipation when eating too much, much more mucous in the mornings, bouts of angina, the smell associated with rotting flesh in the colon and lymph system...

...just to name a few.

 

[Veganite]

First off, one would have to miss meat, which I do not. So even if the replicator replicated 100 percent healthy meat, I personally would not want it. Secondly, the smell and appearance of meat is also repulsive to me. So even if it smelled like broccoli, I would still not want it. Even if it smelled and looked like broccoli, I just don't want or desire meat in the slightest bit.

Whether it is bug protein, or animal protein grown in a petri dish, or replicated, I have no desire or need for it.

Now, replicated cheese on the other hand, minus the casein of course, perhaps I could be tempted. But meat, I just don't miss it.

The fact is most meat dishes can be emulated (veganized) one way or another. Seitan (wheat meat) is not only on par, protein-wise, but it tastes amazing, when prepared properly. I have come to enjoy vegan food, and wouldn't want to change that simply because someone finds a way to produce cruelty free meat. As Nekodaiden explains, there's still the fact that meat isn't good for you.

If you need some convincing, watch this guys video recipe for vegan ribs. I love this guys youtube channel! I highly recommend you watch a few video recipes on his channel, and come back and tell us how awful his vegan food looks. It should give you some insight into why I don't miss meat.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF-ACPYNN0oXD4ihS5mbbmw

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[hopeful]

I wouldn't eat it. Even more realistic looking mock meats sketch me out. I've been vegetarian for so long (now vegan) that meat is gross to me.

 

[Sax]

I'm with hopeful...I have pretty much no interest in imitation meat and cheese, and definitely not interested in the real stuff even if it's "replicated" or lab grown.

Sign me up for a food replicator though. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot!

 

[Forest Nymph]

No, that's why we have Beyond Burgers. Seriously, we don't need a "meat replicator."

But if such a thing existed, if we had "lab grown meat" I still would not eat it because I find it grotesque to reproduce and sell parts of an animal even if it were not ...alive...per se...it still objectifies animals as things, which promotes speciesism.

Like say you had a friend who kept a robot as a slave. Sure if the robot wasn't programmed to "feel" then the robot wouldn't mind at all...the robot would just be a machine, like a vacuum cleaner or lap top computer, and yet...I would still wonder about your friend. Even if his robot didn't mind being enslaved, I would wonder about him.

Do you see what I'm saying? Like when people spend too much time playing violent video games (no I'm not saying if you play video games occasionally you're disturbed, but there's a limit) I ...wonder...about those people.

So no, no. No.

 

[Splooge]

I can definitely see the point of maintaining a certain state of health as a reason to avoid meat, even if it is cruelty free. I even feel guilty when consuming meat, and feel disgusted when seeing meat products. I can even remember once when I was a teenager my friends were hunting grouse I was handed the rifle and when I aimed at the bird I just couldn't kill it, so I missed on purpose.

But despite my reservations, I will still eat meat if I am hungry enough. There has been many times when I was deprived for food for a long time and meat was the only thing I could eat.
It's easy to avoid meat and dairy when vegan food is readily available but when there's no food and hunger starts to set in, my standards for what I put into my mouth will rapidly diminish.
Is your idealism strong enough to refrain from eating meat even when facing starvation?

A hot topic I see many vegans argue about is whether the human species possesses an anatomy that is intended to consume meat. After all, we will become sick if we digest raw meat, while other predators can digest raw meat naturally. We are forced to cook meat to even eat it without major health risk.
But when we bring up this question of whether we are naturally supposed to eat meat an objection quickly comes to mind.
If we are naturally meant to eat anything, we are meant to eat whatever we can find to provide sustenance. Generation after generation of our ancestors faced utter starvation if they did not go out and hunt wildlife, or milk a cow, eat bird eggs, or domesticate beasts.

So was it immoral for our tribalist, primitive ancestors to eat meat? If not, then where do you draw the line? If humans have the ability to survive without meat would it be immoral to continue to consume dead flesh?

 

[Forest Nymph]

I can definitely see the point of maintaining a certain state of health as a reason to avoid meat, even if it is cruelty free. I even feel guilty when consuming meat, and feel disgusted when seeing meat products. I can even remember once when I was a teenager my friends were hunting grouse I was handed the rifle and when I aimed at the bird I just couldn't kill it, so I missed on purpose.

But despite my reservations, I will still eat meat if I am hungry enough. There has been many times when I was deprived for food for a long time and meat was the only thing I could eat.
It's easy to avoid meat and dairy when vegan food is readily available but when there's no food and hunger starts to set in, my standards for what I put into my mouth will rapidly diminish.
Is your idealism strong enough to refrain from eating meat even when facing starvation?

A hot topic I see many vegans argue about is whether the human species possesses an anatomy that is intended to consume meat. After all, we will become sick if we digest raw meat, while other predators can digest raw meat naturally. We are forced to cook meat to even eat it without major health risk.
But when we bring up this question of whether we are naturally supposed to eat meat an objection quickly comes to mind.
If we are naturally meant to eat anything, we are meant to eat whatever we can find to provide sustenance. Generation after generation of our ancestors faced utter starvation if they did not go out and hunt wildlife, or milk a cow, eat bird eggs, or domesticate beasts.

So was it immoral for our tribalist, primitive ancestors to eat meat? If not, then where do you draw the line? If humans have the ability to survive without meat would it be immoral to continue to consume dead flesh?

1) Very few people who live in the developed world actually face "starvation." They might be really hungry, they might need better food or more to eat, but these questions take on the flavor of "If stranded on a deserted island and your best friend died and there was no other food would you cannibalize his dead body." People will do lots of things if they are faced with actual starvation, including eating tree bark or boiled shoe leather, but since Top Ramen is less than 50 cents per pack in any convenience store in the United States, you are very fortunate that you never ever have to eat meat, ever.
So don't give me that crap about needing to eat meat to live, unless you speak English as a second language and left your home country as a small child due to war and/or famine.

2) Omnivores can eat lots of things, including junk food, garbage, and each other (as in, cannibalize one's own) ...this doesn't mean it's their ideal diet. Pigs and bears will eat trash and sea turtles sadly eat plastic mistaking it for jellyfish, but it doesn't mean it's good for them to do so. If you actually research this topic, our ancestors actually ate very little meat. Humans are notoriously bad hunters so mostly foraged and occasionally caught an animal. Agricultural societies did domesticate animals for their milk and eggs, but strangely enough, even those primitive humans seemed to have more ethics than modern people. I say this because if read the Old Testament in the Bible there's hella instructions on how livestock is to be cared for (and even about foraging bird's nests for eggs) - those "primitive" people were better at treating animals as living beings than people in our "advanced' society. What does this tell you? It should tell you that people felt guilt for mistreating those animals, taking their young, or consuming them at all. Our natural state appears to be that of you standing with a gun and unable to shoot a grouse.

3) Obviously if humans don't need flesh to survive it's immoral to do so. I don't see how this is even a challenging question. I also again want to address these sorts of far-flung scenarios you're propping up as ostensibly "thoughtful"...our ancestors also needed to kill each other to protect their tribe, their land, and their food supplies when faced with a more violent tribe that ransacked their village, but since we don't live that way war has become an instrument of greed and power rather than an instrument of necessity, and eating meat is similar.