GPFontaine wrote:

If the option ever became available to eat a synthetic pill that offered all of the same things that a balanced diet does, I would stop eating meat right now and take that pill. Unfortunately that pill doesn't exist and the consumption of meat is a requirement for humans.

I wouldn't. I don't eat the foods I eat because they keep me alive; I eat them because they taste good and I enjoy eating them.

As for empathy, it is a luxury of the rich. For the rest of us, it is an excuse for failure. Don't deny yourself success and personal happiness because you're your too busy crying in your room, paralyzed by guilt over problems that have nothing to do with you.

But see, I don't have to kill to eat.

By the time the meat makes it to me, it doesn't even remotely resemble the animal it came from. So given the choice between Eggplant Parmesan and Veal Parmesan, I'm going to take the veal every time, because the veal tastes significantly better.

If I had to slaughter the calves myself, it would be a different story. For two reasons:

1) I'm not sure I could stomach it.
2) Preparing an animal for human consumption is way too much fucking work.

But since I don't have to worry about those things, I don't care. If you feel bad for cows and chicken, consider this: they only still exist because we need them. If they didn't provide us with milk, eggs, and meat, we would have murdered them into extinction long ago.

Those examples are very poor ones.

The reason we don't dump chemicals in our rivers and sewage on our streets, is because doing so makes other humans sick, not because doing so kills squirrels and fish.

And I am being very serious and very realistic when I say cows would not exist if they were not raised as livestock. Let's look at cows:

1) They have no natural defenses
2) Their natural habitat requires large spaces when they can graze

If they were not useful to humans, they would have been wiped out in the 19th century, because they take up too much fucking space, space that was required for America to fulfill its Manifest Destiny. We damn near wiped out the American Buffalo for the exact same reason. But since they were a source of meat and milk, cows were allowed to exist.

Let's say a law was passed outlawing cow milk and cow meat were. What do you think is going to happen to all those cows? Euthanasia, probably. That, or they'd all be slaughtered before the legal deadline required to do so, since American legislation never has any sense of immediacy. And then that would be the end of cows. Some might go to zoos, but let's be honest, no one wants to look at a fucking cow.

A few important points about pills:

1) In order to be effective, they must be ingested with some sort of actual food.
2) They are not as effective as getting nutrients from food due to their high potency and the rate at which they absorb into your system.
3) They do not contain any significant amount of calories, and calories are also necessary to survive.

GPFontaine wrote:

However, science has this way of moving forwards and when pills/synthetic food is possible would you avoid it out of spite?

Yes, I would. I don't like being told what I should do, especially when it's for no other reason than political correctness.

And besides that, I have seen the future. The future is Demolition Man. The future is a bunch of test tube babies eating synthetic meats and singing along with old radio commercials. No thanks.

If that's civilization, then I will be the most uncivilized person I can possibly be.

Eating meat is also cheaper.

Indeed. I'll eat pretty much anything if it tastes good. My lunch today was:

Fruit salad
Lobster salad
Ham

Unnecessary translation changes, FTW.