LEFT BRAIN / RIGHT BRAIN

Meat has never been an efficient source of nutrition for humanity. Man's digestive tract has been evolved to digest mostly plant matter - fruits, vegetables, legumes and so on. The energy we require can be gotten from legumes (vegetable protein) and from grains(carbohydrates). The minerals and vitamins needed for survival can be found in other fruits and vegetables, such a spinach, which is rich in iron, brocolli(unless you're George Bush), orange and red vegetables which have a high content of beta-carotene, and citrus fruit which are high in vitamin C.

Meat doesn't have to be in our diets. Evolutionally speaking, we are not meat eaters. Our canine teeth are not made for meat eating: they are not massive and are not a prominent feature of our dental anatomy. Our digestive systems are long and sinuous, indicating that it should be used to digest foods with a more fibrous content, i.e. plant matter. And our bodies are not built for hunting in any event; we have no claws, fangs, and walk and run upright at speeds far slower than most prey species.

We don't have to be slaves to meat. Vegetarian diets can be set up with a wide variety of foods and spices to make flavor and texture the focus rather than the afterthought. And in addition to a more varied lifestyle, vegetarian diets are considered much healthier than meat based diets, and the followers of vegetarian diets have lower rates of heart disease, colo-rectal cancer, obesity (ever see a fat vegetarian?), and they maintain better blood-cholesterol levels. Studies have even shown that vegetarians have lower levels of emotional aggression and clinical depression. So have a carrot and smile (and stop those vile thoughts about carrots looking phallic, you sicko).

Apart from this, meat is a drain on natural resources. It takes a single beef steer nearly twenty acres of good grazing a month to reach an economically feasable size for sale. Then you have chicken factories and pig farms that drain off millions of gallons of foul-smelling refuse into local waterways and create clouds of stinking residue that wreak whole communities.

And beyond all this, ranching is subsidized by the federal government with grazing and water rights on federal lands, and cheap land grants to commercial ranchers. It's true that America was built on the power of meat. Early settlers derived most of their nutrition from hunting the abundant game, and as the country expanded west, cattle came along to feed the surging populace across the great expanse all the way to California. But times change. And so do the diets of entire cultures. When a local food source becomes abundant, it's added to the diets of the local population, and when a food becomes a burden, it is discarded and replaced with something else.

Meat is unhealthy, wasteful, resource-dependent, and was never meant for human consumption - and some are beginning to see this.

Alright...put the veggie casserole down and back away...don't make us throw this hot dog at you! And get your damn paws of my burger! I don't care if you're starving.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, "The best tasting foods are the ones that gave up their lives for you." And it's true. Whose mouth didn't start drooling when that thick, juicy, porterhouse steak sizzled on the grill, and the smoke, the crackling scent of hickory with a little sasparilla root thrown on the fire for zing, rolled over you, into your nostrils and down into your soul. Then you cut the steak with your knife, and the outside was slightly charred, and the inside was a juicy pink, and you pulled it off, added a dab of A1, put a baked potato and an ear of corn on your plate, and savored every bite. You can't deny that it tasted oh-so-good!

You'll never get me to give up meat. If you take my meat away, I'll hunt you and your family and eat you all. My favorite movie was Alive!, man! Hey, if we weren't meant to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

Man is an omnivore. We eat anything!, and that's one of our evolutionary advantages. We can digest most of what we consume. And don't tell me man isn't a predator. Our eyes face foward, and you don't need stereoscopic vision for hunting down nuts and berries. Our eyes were made for tracking a moving target so that we can throw that spear or slingstone that our developed brain imagined and made our dextrous hands create. And our teeth were made to chew anything short of solid bone, and that includes meat. That we have short canines was a compromise so that we could chew other stuff, but those canines can still pierce and tear flesh. Humanity is not a herd, it's a pack, man.

Hunting is in our blood. It's in our sport - most of which require chasing a small, fast moving object the size of a rabbit or pig. Even law enforcement officers (cops, you mook) exhibit the same emotional surge present in hunting when they are involved in high speed pursuits, in a car or on foot. And at the end of such chases, there is a kind of emotional release when the suspect is captured, as there is among hunting peoples (and animals) after the prey is taken down.

We are hunters, and meat is a way of refueling ourselves for the next hunt. Yes, we risk higher cholesterol levels and obesity and other nasty by-products of our lifestyle, but if we keep it in moderation, we can enjoy our tasty animals without detrimental effects to ourselves, and with new methods of cattle farming, and other, new and exotic meats (ostrich, venison) we lessen our impact on the planet, but note this - rancing may be subsidized, but so is general agriculture, so there!

Now lets get a burger and eat it in peace.