Mar 9, 2012 -- 4:04PM, Erey wrote:

If it were seriously dangerous I would be dead by now because I ate scads of school lunches in my day. 

Food when you think about it can be disgusting.  But somehow I still love it.  I have renewed my love of raw oysters recently to the horror of my family.  Can you believe nobody will even try one?

Yes, food really can be "disgusting"!  Or, rather, eating in general can be.  Some years ago I was sitting and having a lunch of baked chicken at a Boston Market.  And as I sat there rending the meat and flesh and sinews from the haunch of chicken bone with my teeth and the grease from it stained my mouth and fingers I had this sudden flash of revelation of "eyooooo!"  But it did not slow me down!  That was a tasty piece of chicken!  I have reflected on that experience often, and I think the source of it is a kind of squeamishness which we have about being animal.  Eating, of course, is a very animal process - there is nothing particularly refined and lofty and poetically noble about macerating and swallowing once living organisms and subjecting them to further indignities of the digestive and alimentary processes (as Marge Simpson exclaimed  while changing Maggie's diaper, "Eyooo!  How did you turn cinammon apple sauce into that!").  I find it interesting that we shroud our most basic animal behaviors in rituals to try and mask their crude animality.  The messiness of eating is cleaned up by table manners (and having others far away take care of the nasty, messy business of butchering and cleaning meat).  The alimentary process is done in private, perfumed rooms where the evidence of the crime is hastily flushed away (the hilarious denial of animality here is perfectly captured by my sainted mother's exiting a recently used bathroom which had an "air freshener" and saying, 'apparently somebody sh*t a pine tree.') And the messy (but really so very pleasant) business of sex is also done in private and heavily veiled in secrecy (though granted less nowadays than ever before!).   I am not advocating abandoning our standard social proprieties - I just think it is interesting to reflect i what they mean - and I think a lot of their meaning has to with our squeamishness about being animals ourselves.  It would hurt us not at all to be less squeamish about that because for all its messiness, biological life is a very good thing!

P.S.  Erey, I liked your work playing Purdey in The New Avengers very much when I was a teenager.  You were wonderful.

Mar 11, 2012 -- 5:10AM, arielg wrote:

Don't let them discourage you, Solfeggio,....

Asinine personal attacks deleted.

We're only trying to discourage you from lying to us. Leave out the mythinformation, the hyperbole, and the personal attacks, and people might start to take you more seriously. Now you just come off as a holier than thou preacher.

Mar 11, 2012 -- 9:34AM, PosingAsMe wrote:

I like a little meat in my diet, and I enjoy the occasional "meat indulgence," but I long ago gave up the not uncommon American practice of having a big slab of meat on my plate as a dinner staple.  I find that just a half pound of meat works splendidly to "spice" a blend of mostly veggies and rice and makes a quite tasty meal that lasts me for 4-5 dinners.

I had a small steak for dinner last night. I haven't had a slab of red meat like that in a meal for about 4 months. I try to stick with chicken and then not much of that. But, you're right, a huge chunk of meat at every meal is not a healthy diet.

Compare what we eat today with what they ate just a hundred years or so ago. The average working man would have meat and potatoes at breakfast, lunch and dinner. But then they worked it all off during the day. With the lifestyles we have today, we just cannot eat like that. More veggies and less meat is the way to go.

Mar 11, 2012 -- 4:28PM, arielg wrote:

I don't know any vegetarian who considers what they eat to be the right thing...

Then you ought to read the posts here by vegetarians; they continuously preach about them doing the right thing and believing themselves to be above all others. Their preaching gets in the way of their message.

....but is trying to cut down their consumption of apples or grains and considers an achievement to eat less of them.

That sentence fragment makes no sense. That's probably because you are misrepresenting what the non vegetarians here have said.

Is there a "Vegan" Equivalent Substance, i.e., "Green Slime" ... ??? "Pond Scum" ... ???