Shiner loves the veg
Vegetarians are not evil. There. I said it.
Just last year I argued otherwise in the Yale Herald, dismissing vegetarianism as the childish product of poor self-control, faddism and cultural ignorance. I was wrong. To go veggie is a noble decision in pursuit of sustainability. The data doesn’t lie: Depending on the animal, every calorie of comestible meat demands roughly 10 calories of floral input. From this perspective, vegetarianism makes sense. Although I find its moral underpinnings unpersuasive (despite the deplorable animal cruelty of industrial feedlots), to ignore...
Vegetarianism has its roots pre- the fall of Adam and Eve from the Christian/Jewish tradition and special rites were there for killing, no mass slaughter there. India has an ancient history of promoting vegetarianism especially amongst the elite priests and thoughtful persons. Codes were there for slaughter of animals like goats but cows were never eaten by anyone, unless the cow died of natural causes. There was no sanskrit word for cow eater, but words for dog eaters etc. And China was an agrarian culture largely until recently. Grandmothers today can attest that in the villages, cows were never eaten because of their agricultural value, more valuable alive than dead. So not all of us are recently from cave men stock.