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I have quite a "disgust-free" approach to food ethics, in that I find it very easy to distinguish between "food that I won't eat because I think it's disgusting, but that I have no problem with other people eating, if they want to", and "food that I won't eat because I think it (or, more accurately in most cases, the process of obtaining it) is morally wrong". (for instance, I can't even look at baked beans without wanting to puke, and the thought of eating them for me is about on a par with eating dogshit, but there's no way i'd consider eating them morally wrong...)
I'm very loosely vegetarian (will clarify below), but one thing that troubles me about a lot of vegetarians is that they seem to have an almost religious/superstitious/"magical" (in the sense implying irrationality) taboo about never eating certain categories of foods (without examining that beyond a non-negotiable taboo level), rather than examining for themselves the morals involved in each case (and developing an individual position on this)...
Personally i don't think eating one type of animal can really be considered fundamentally morally different from eating another type of animal (I don't see, for instance, how someone could consider it immoral to eat dog, but not to eat cow or pig), but i do think useful-but-not-absolute distinctions can be drawn... for me, for instance, it's not actually the killing of animals for food that i object to (since, well, all sorts of animals do that, and if we are not fundamentally different from other animals, i don't see how one could be a consistent vegan without also trying to "veganise" the cat and the wolf), but the idea of keeping animals in captivity, totally manipulating their whole lifestyle, and genetically/physically manipulating the animals themselves to make them less "wild" and more designed purely for eating (and the environmental impacts of this)... thus, i don't have a problem in theory with eating animals that have been hunted/trapped/fished (sustainably) from the wild, or free-range animals whose living conditions approximate those of wild animals, but due to a) my own total lack of knowledge or competence in doing so myself and b)the sheer expensiveness of game or free-range/organic meat from commercial sources I'm therefore a vegetarian by default...
The one area, of course, where i'm a *big* hypocrite is dairy products, given that, by my (tentative) ethical formulation as stated above, dairy farming is probably even more wrong than meat farming... I do buy organic milk, but don't usually buy organic cheese, simply because I eat so much cheese (it's my main source of protein) that paying twice the price for organic would simply be unaffordable for me (and there are so few types of cheese available in organic)... I do know people who are sucessfully vegan, but i don't think i could, just because i love cheese so much...
I also do feel that, even if food is what i consider to be ethically unacceptable (non-free-range meat, stuff that's farmed in very ecologically destructive ways, or products of companies such as Coca-Cola or Nestle which i try to boycott), but a) I didn't pay for it and b) the choice is between me eating it or it going into a landfill, then it's probably morally better for me to eat it... I might not actually do that with meat tho, because after about 3 years of not eating any meat (except on very rare occasions, such as when visiting my parents at Christmas and it would be simply too much fuss to insist on a vegetarian option), eating it actually does very weird things to my head and stomach (weird feelings of "heaviness", nausea and hyperactivity)... |
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