happy cows frolicking. (not.)

[aamcnamara]

There is no possible way I could be vegetarian. Not ever. Certainly not at college.

But I realized yesterday--(yes, it took me a while)--that I am not eating happy animals here. Which made me really sad. I am still dwelling on this, even though I know there is no way I can eat vegetarian and not be unhealthy.

See, I am okay with the idea of people eating animals. I am even okay with raising animals to be eaten. I am much less okay with raising animals inhumanely (and how weird is it that "inhumane" is our word for that concept?) to be eaten. If you are going to not care about them, not care about people, not care about the planet, it just doesn't make sense.

Gah.

Comments

[ph-unbalanced.livejournal.com]

Just a note on fish:

Whenever possible, you should eat wild fish -- a lot of farmed fish have high levels of PCBs from the feed that they use. I expect that to get better in coming years -- we're still really figuring out aquaculture. But stay as low as possible on the food chain, to avoid mercury.

Having said that, if what you're concerned about is fishery *practices*, then you really want to stick with US fish as much as possible. We have strict fishery laws here -- a lot of other countries are engaged in the fishing equivalent of strip mining. (The Russians are especially notorious.)

The Alaska fisheries are the best managed in the world, so anything from there is guiltfree. (Of course, I worked in the Alaskan fishing industry up until a year ago, so I *am* biased.)