Veal?

I know so many these meat-eater types who say "MMM, cow! How I love eating these cow! But Sam, why for you make for the eating of the baby cow? Is wrong!"

I say "How come is no right to eat these baby cow?" I say "Eating grown-up cow with his own house and mortgage must be worse, no? He has lived a longer life! Or maybe to make life in a cage! I eat these baby cow early and save them a life of pain!"

Still they say eating baby cows is wrong. Who are these people? Are some of you these people? Eating baby cow, she must be the NOT CRAP, no? After all, is so good!

chomp!









.

crap. such fucking cruelty.

n

Learning about how veal is prepared was one of the galvanizing events to me being a college-attending vegetarian. I've since gone back to eating meat, and I am aware that it is not the most humane things we can do to cows, but I've still held on to some kind of disgust for veal. I don't even remember what it tastes like now. I know this doesn't make sense, to avoid one and happily chomp the other, but I feel a bit more, um, humane I guess about the decision.

I am a man of very few morals but I refuse to eat veal because it is baby cow. I also refuse to eat lamb but that might be because of that Simpsons' episode.

The moral spectrum of what people are willing to eat is broad. As a practical matter, I'm less interested in where people sit on this spectrum than in how consitent they are with their position. Personally, I'm comfortable in my ovo-lacto vegetarian space on the nice. As for others, someone eating a hamburger is less distasteful to me than a vegetarian prancing about in a leather coat that they bought.

As the same time, I do think that you should be morally comfortable with any step of your own food preparation. That is, if you eat meat, you should be comfortable with slaughtering that meat. You'll probably never have to, but it seems a reasonable thing to ask.

But I don't argue this point too much, to be honest. My wife likes burgers and chicken, but she freely admits to me that she could never kill one of these things. What, I'm going to be some kind of dick and yell at her about this? No.

= Justin

Oh, wait. I had a relevant comment.

It's this - it seems reasonable to me that a moral willingness to eat meat in general but not veal in particular does not equal hypocricy. The most reasonable basis for this has less to do with the age of the animal than in the pre-slaughter treatment of the animal. Calves set for veal are usually kept in extremely confined spaces and in a deliberately anemic state to produce the most popular style of meat. It seems fair to say that you object to this particular type of treatment and refrain from eating veal specifically.

This is not to say that other factory farming is some kind of picnic, but if you want to argue that with me, what's the point? Didn't I just say I was a vegetarian?

Geez,

= Justin

Well, ALL the meat that you get at the grocery store is produced from the unimaginable nightmare of factory farming. You can get organic free range shit at Whole Foods, which is better I guess...... but for all intents and purposes, if you eat meat, dairy or eggs, you are ingesting an animal's brief life of extreme suffering. The conditions that produce veal have just been better publicized.

I fucking hate sounding like a bleeding heart, a hippy, or whatever, but this is something I've been concerned with for most of my life. It's one of the few areas where I feel like there is a distinct right and wrong with no real gray area (with the possible exception of keeping a pet cow that you personally milk every morning).

fuck.

n

N.C.,

I understand your position (and I was there too at one point), but I have no real defense. It's true veal has a better pr person, but in a very real sense isn't the production of veal just a tad more reprehensible than the production of beef? On a moral sliding scale, don't we all have some element of our lives that needs justifying to someone else? With me, I can't do the right thing 100% of the time, so I pick the ones that mean the most to me and stick with those. For this reason, I'll never eat veal (and pass on Chilean sea bass until it comes off the endangered list {not that I was inhaling the stuff like a huffer at a paint store, but every little bit helps}).

Justin: pretty much summed up my feelings on veal. Pretty good for a vegetarian!

Justin from Queens wrote:The moral spectrum of what people are willing to eat is broad. As a practical matter, I'm less interested in where people sit on this spectrum than in how consitent they are with their position. Personally, I'm comfortable in my ovo-lacto vegetarian space on the nice. As for others, someone eating a hamburger is less distasteful to me than a vegetarian prancing about in a leather coat that they bought.

As the same time, I do think that you should be morally comfortable with any step of your own food preparation. That is, if you eat meat, you should be comfortable with slaughtering that meat. You'll probably never have to, but it seems a reasonable thing to ask.

But I don't argue this point too much, to be honest. My wife likes burgers and chicken, but she freely admits to me that she could never kill one of these things. What, I'm going to be some kind of dick and yell at her about this? No.

= Justin

Question for anyone : Is anyone familiar with the work of Aldo Leopold and his famous Land Ethic? Does anyone know of someone who really took this method to heart and extended the rights of just humans and animals to include all parts of the Earth including soil, plants, water etc. Has anyone actually argued for the rights of plants, such as the ethical treatment of crops?

This topic fasinates me to no end, and I was wondering if anyone could shed any light upon it.

Thanks,

- Chet